requiem:refrain

m2 is like..... blinks

2008-02-15T19:54:00.000-08:00

OMG. i haven't updated in like, aeons? :P (okay, maybe a slight exaggeration there. a couple of millenia at least, then :D) haven't even popped by to see if this derelict old thing is still floating in limbo out in hyperspace (i think tt's what they called internet before it had all the cool applications and networking)... guess i just couldn't be bothered to maintain something that nobody reads! (besides my pair of eyeballs) ^_^ reminds me of that old adage on how one should do good things when no one is doing, and contemplate the folly of the bad deeds one would've done in the absence of others in the full view of others. does that make any sense? lolx gotta ask ma cherie to give me free english remedial... the standard of my english is knee-bendingly, towkowingly deplorable. haha :P i'm inspired to type a few words here thanks to my brother, who blogs ceaselessly (and totally chao-tah-ed his CPU power supply in the process) :D his english isn't perfect, but i guess he can find solace in knowing that it's better than some of his peers (in age and academic levels) whom i've met :D and if it's any consolation at all, nothing beats the english of those quirky china food manufacturers, who annotate their packaging with completely intelligible collections of english nouns, verbs and adjectives in random order.

haiyar exams coming up. cindy and regina perfected the look of DISBELIEF :D when i told them i was having exams YET AGAIN in 2 weeks. the classical "you're having exams everytime i ask you!" ejaculation is particularly endearing on these 2 :D haha. guess that's inevitably part of the package when i signed on the line for the bond haha :P so noooooooooooooooooooooooo complaints, people! (okay, me.) hard to salvage feelings of burning glowing passion when all that's left now is spitting charcoal embers :D heh. but it's pretty tragic for a year 2 to feel jaded! lolx. not that tragedies don't happen... regretable as they may be. constant VIGILANCE! lolx. gotta guard against the feelings of complacency and disgruntlement at my abundant lot in life :P

wish i could bake brownies right about now! but noooooooooooooooo.... it's char beehoon time and on to EBM mugging! muggery muggery.... depilatory misery :P haha.

sweeney todd rocks.... ^_^

2007-12-23T02:28:00.001-08:00

just came back from bangkok!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! sawasdee ka!!!!!!

pretty turbulent, the days before leaving for this fanstastically familiar foreign place. a flurry of discharge SOPs, trying to locate the very elusive paeds dr, getting used to not having the sedative effects of pethidine to aid me in sleeping at night... getting queer twinges of half-itch-half-pain-half burning sensations at 4am in the morning. 4 days of unbearable insomnia! staring at the shadow marred ceiling swirl and whorl obsidiously across the dimmed nightscape, quelling my fears of the dark by getting to know sleepless nights as a friend... pretty interesting lot of hours spent during that period, learning to readjust back to life at home, life as a normal person, life with 4 holes in my tummy. my mum used to laugh at me (with a crying heart) about the smiley face on my tummy - now there's 2 more new cuts above the umbilicus (in addition to 2 more deeper holes higher and lower respectively), making it a very surprised :O face :D haha. i'm pretty amused - my parents're just disgusted :D i love the looks on their faces when they pretend to hide their faces, yet peek for curiosity's sake and then contort/grimace in horror. actually it isn't that bad - when the catheter drain was still inside things looked much worse... now only 1 bleeds. the rest've more or less cleared up :D thank God for the speedy healing despite my adamant refusal to eat only vegetables or weird funky healthfood crap. i even sneaked some squid into my greedy little tummy. haha! i LUUUURRRRRRVVVEEE grilled squid. anyone who's been to bangkok but not tried it - you're a deep fried chicken wing! :P just kidding. it's seriously good with the special chili. come to think of it, thailand has a mind boggling array of chili sauces to go with virtually any dish you'd care to mention. pad thai has one, khao has one, gai has one, squid (now, i honestly have no idea what squid is in thai) has its own, too. and if you'd care to ask me, SQUID CHILI is the best! it's got this tangy overtone that doesn't try to muscle the authority out of the spicy chili, so what you get is a smooth kick that's surprisingly refreshing and appetizing. ah man, talking of food... i gained 4kg!!!!! in 6 days!!!!!!!! how on earth is that possible!!!! (actually, the answer to that question is pretty self-evident - i'm just in denial) oh well. there's 2 more weeks to school reopening, so i shall try to go swim a bit more to kill, kiIL, KILL off those extra pounds and fit into the pretty tops and bottoms i've bought in the trip!
and serena my darling wife, thank you for that call!! i really really love how u rmb me :D and i think our love is so strong it blew out the circuits! haha :D till now we still can't figure out WHICH appliance tripped the fuse... must have been you. yOU. tsktsk ^_^

kong qi shi se? really?

2007-11-07T23:09:00.000-08:00

is it really true that we are to live with nothing before we can be happy?

are those who give up their things, with grief and sadness and longing, trying to repress their emotions and deny themselves their feelings, truly happy in the end?

or is it rationalizing on a foolish mortal belief that self denial is a noble act that warrants happiness as an end in itself?

does it really mean that jesus had to strip himself bare and naked for all the barren and poor in the streets?

and why didn't He do that?

yao4 si3 wor1~~~~~~~~!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2007-10-26T07:58:00.001-07:00

translated, literally, as "wanna die wor!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

exam formats:
1) COFM - 5/11/07, 4MEQs of linked subquestions (answer part a wrong and you can balik kampung alr)
2) Virology and immunology - 7/11/07, 30 true-false questions with 5 stems each, negative marking within a question but no cross-negative marks. dunno what the hell talking me but anyway the minimum marks is 0. like, duh.
3) Neuroscience - 23/11/07, 2 MEQs, everything baokaliao tested, siao liao, plus drug pharmaco. *blubblubblubblub - can u see my air supply getting exhausted from e drowning???*
4) Pathology - 26/11/07, 60 MCQs with 5 choose 1. like 4 choose 1 not hard enough, now they find a new way to make me die faster, more painfully, and with high-class squeaks.
5) Pharmaco - 26/11/07, 20 true-false questions given 40mins (i highly suspect, at each question being alloted 2mins, they're going to give us very, very, very complicated henderson-hasselbachs, log graphs and God knows what PDC shift interpretations) AND 2 MEQs

the dean's office is out to commit mass homicide!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

feeling like stagnant mint

2007-10-25T04:18:00.000-07:00

being a bit boliao as usual. just watched qian1ji1bian4 with bro, quite a good show, to my surprise. yes. astonishment, really. i'd usually grit my teeth til they emit sparks and bear through HK films cos they're totally absurd, with strange dialogue and character developments and really quirky appearances by non-essential characters at all the wrong timings. haha :D but yes, as usual i'm sweeping the entire river kwai worth of boats asunder with my statement, so allow me to apologise for stereotyping.
i need to go the the manicurist and redeem the remaining 5 treatments before they expire! why, oh why, did i succumb to the halcyon calls of vanity???
foot's looking better after a day of not moving around too much (basically mulching like compost in bed). need to start mugging and finish COFM today but somehow i just have no more energy left in me after the incredibly stufing pizza dinner (sorry deardear, more piggy princess for you to love) and the movie...
can't wait for exams to be over really soon, then i can go out and enjoy being with my prince like what princesses and princes do :D quite a few friends have congrats-stuffed me after i changed the profile on facebook WITHOUT KNOWING they actually send out notifications to the entire world just for that tiny innocuous change in status. i was really laughing out loud at jess' baffled and bug-eyed email about not being told... well now that facebook has done the dirty job for me... i guess i won't have to hide it anymore. no point... :) need to study la... also need to go and swim/jog/cycle/diet but then again... it's all a balance of priorities...
today i set up a new system of prayer requests tracking. haha the wonderful guest reverend from sabah REALLY changed me! he's given me much inspiration to face some issues in my life as well as fresh ideas to deal with the nitty gritties of my spiritual walk and growth. i truly pray that this change will persevere and will be preserved together with this newfound spirit of yearning and seeking for Jesus! i really enjoyed the QT i had today with God, just me and Him sitting together in a quiet place talking and listening and leaning on His support.
well it's 2mins to 7.30... i've got to mug til 12.30 and then chiong my pbl til 1am. haha :D of course wc'll murder me in 4 different ways with catchup and spring onions, but well. cofm is 4 meqs!!!!!!!! that probably means it's going to be killer level. (and we're NOT even going into neuroscience, ok!)
okies better run... (figuratively...) slummi get well soon! :D

blowing off the dust of tomorrow

2007-10-24T06:38:00.000-07:00

it's been a long while since i entered this little cybervirtual crypt all my own, redolent with the smells all my own, the stashes of mental tidbits and nuggets of stuff left unremembered, perhaps discoiled from memory on purpose or without true intention - nobody knows. certainly i don't. but all this is getting too zennish for me... after all, it's just a week to CAs and everyone's mugging. it really struck me (while i'm msning my brother who's sitting less than 5cm away from me using the home com) that i ought to be slowing down, slowing really down and out and prostrated-like, you know, letting all the epithelial cells of my body really smear onto the floor. cos i'm really tired of being a person, so i want to be a jellyfish for once. a nice, respectable, dignified and WHO-accredited jellyfish of the numero uno grade. i mean, if a self-respecting jellyfish can't even take time out to really have fun, just chill and let all the musculoskeletal joints loose with family, what kind of jellyfish is that? no better than a can of catfood with cucumber, i say. that was what i told muamua last night when she absurdly declared herself a piece of "scum" :D i haven't had anyone vaguely humanoid challenge my trophy for that one in a long time, and man, am i a wasabi if i'm gonna give it up to her so darn easily! so i told her i was catfood enriched with vitamin c and e if she were scum. which brings us both one step closer to the yawning crevasse called insanity, but who cares about a bit of jelly good fun with friends :D
anyway, back to that incendiary brother-sister msn. so we're both having loads of fun playing msn reversi with each other... i think it's a form of self-righteous self-reflection. u know, when a person runs right out of useful things to do, one resorts to labelling brainless games as kinship-building material :D
things have been on my mind recently, and i can't admit i'm not more than a bit bothered by them. in a sense they're things that happen exogenously, not really any of my business at all, but somehow or rather the nana antennae picks it up with jolly fervour and processes it into a bit of endoplasmic crap. which percolates around my system and gives me grief from time to time. like now... i haven't been liberated from my thoughts on myself since i escaped from the asylum called hospital (again, yes, ad nauseum and all that. now comes with a puke bag courtesy of singapore airlines, which is celebrating their acquisition of a plane with 2 storeys and can take many people. woohoo. break one out for humanity won't you) ah i disgress (again, blahblahblah) so where was i? yeah. feeling in the dumps today and making a splash literally... first cos of how i felt touched by ben's sharing and prayers in morning worship (YOLLER OUT TO BEN: THX) and then again letting myself venture (so unwisely) into a realm marked by darkness. of course, anyone could readily argue that such lines of thought are little more than sadistic, masochistic chases in a self-oriented world, where i attempt to rub salt (or hypochlorite - james) with renewed vigour each time i revisit the sore wound. it's borne of self-loathing... i guess mingled with complex and yet strangely addictive mixtures of self-flagellation and self-doubt. it's reinforced with what i do know for facts but let's face it - facts remain facts until you let them sink in, then they become tenderhooks in your flesh for many to grip you and twist you and gore you and eviscerate for joy and laughter in the middle of the night. so there it is. facts that i face day in and day out, yet don't incite me to take a knife or a flask of sulphur or something equally self-hating and drastic and unwise (note: if anyone reading this is feeling depressed or was looking for ways to harm yourself - STOP. talk to someone and get help, seriously.) to myself suddenly turn around like a nasty draught of afterthought and permeate my thoughts. just for a moment in my life, suddenly, inexplicably, the lights go out and i dull down. and i think inwards and downwards, then then things start spirally out of hand a little and i cry.
so that was what happened today. i was looking at my hands and i was crying, then i closed my eyes and cried even harder cos all i could see was my imperfection even as a flawed human and how the oppressive feeling of being surrounded by outstanding human love and concern on all 4 sides made me feel like yellling for them to go away and love someone else cos i'm not worthy of it. it was so, so painfully (sorry for the cliche, but you know, it really does cause a bit of retrosternal pain. or maybe it was the arrythmia from being overtly excited) reminiscent of my many arguments with God. how i'd kneel or sit or lie down and sulk and cry and refuse to listen even as He cajoles and commands and debates His words of encouragement and assurance and hope into my head. it's like installing a virus filter which admits all the viruses cos you set the preferences to the opposite end on twanky days. after all, i'm still a child. after all, i'm but a baby. am i going to allow myself to be one forever? of course not. i've been trying to grow, struggling and being aided on all sides by spankingly great brothers and sisters, to become a more mature Christian. but i do fail sometimes... i do want to recede into a little cocoon and be stubborn and throw tantrums and be spoilt and demand to be nursed and coaxed and pampered back out. who doesn't? in the very depths of your hearts, ask yourself if you'd really think u could survive your entire life being left high and dry in the desertplace with endless philistines coming at you and no refuge. i'm not trying to equate myself to the noble biblicans of note... but occasionally, i just allow myself the sinful indulgence of being a little girl who refuses to hear logic despite understanding it, who insists on being self-flagellatory and mouths rejections of concern but (not even deep) in her heart she craves and yearns and shouts for love and concern. she just wants a pair of huge huggy hands enveloping her and holding her and saying it's all alright.
i believed i could feel entirely satisfied with a bf... i thank God for him but now i realise it's not the case. i still need Jesus.

i know.

2007-07-26T21:02:00.000-07:00

i know it's hard.

i know it's hard when you stand alone, sit alone, lie down on your bed all alone, waiting for the screen of your handphone to be illuminated, to illuminate your heart and your downcast eyes, but you fall asleep waiting for an sms that never comes.

i know it's hard, to stand in a crowd of people so joyous and feeling so unsupported, so unnoticed. i know it's hard when the year rolls by and the day comes around again, and it's all deja vu and downhill from there as you feel desperate, grasping at any available straws to prove to everyone, to prove to someone, to prove to YOURSELF that you're wanted, that you're needed, that you're someone's someone, that you can be important too.

i know it's hard. i know it hurts.

my dearest darlings, thank you for sharing. thank God for sharing. and thank God for healing.

i've been through it all myself, too. how many times has it been when i've gone all out, flinging caution to the wind, throwing all sensibility out the window, and so very nearly catching the feathers of my stumbling wings on the traps of the wiondows of life? how many times has it been when i've pawned all my dignity, all my self-esteem, all my rationality, in a wild bid for love and acceptance, only to find that the very thing or person that i've placed the entire soul and shell of my persona on is a bankruptcy cheque waiting to bounce in my face. how many times have i faced the pillow at night, saltily and vengefully asking myself why i'm so bloody worthless and useless. how many times have i banked my entire self-worth on something so fragile, so transient, so visceral, so mortal, so doomed-to-failure, so doomed-to-die?

were they worth it? no, they weren't. was i convinced that i really, really, really could get happiness by clinging on to what the world tells me is the key to happiness? deep down, no. my heart, with each disappointment, turned sour and cynical. distrustful and vengeful. spiteful. wanted to get back at my failures by commoditizing. by compartmentalizing. by returning conscience to my heartbroken Father.

i didn't know. i knew it hurt, i knew it was wrong, i knew it was wretchedly dastardly.
i didn't know that Jesus was holding out His bleeding heart to me, while i flung myself like a cabin-fevered bird against the steel bars of the cage i've built around myself. i've set a dungeon for my hopes, and cast my soul into despair. meanwhile, meanwhile, i turn a blind eye to a love that is faithful and patient, a love that is tortured and in pain, a love that loves me and is not returned, while i lament the lack of return on my own feeble attempts to show love.

how much do you love me?
i love you as much as i would take time out to be with you (but thinking of the many other things i could have done otherwise).
i love you as much as i am faithful to you (but in my heart, i see you as just another girl who can pass away neatly out of my life when another better one comes along).
i love you as much as i am willing to go out with you, even with my friends (as a prize, a trophy, to show off that i am capable of having a girlfriend).
i love you as much as it takes for you to stop asking me how much i love you (so long as you don't come intruding into the privacy of my life, my thoughts and my choices).
i love you, viscerally, physically, transiently.
i love you, with conditions, with inhibitions, with private secrets.
i love you with judgment, with reservations, with embarrassment (when you're dumb, stupid, untrendy, ugly, fat, lazy or otherwise laughable by my peers or family).
i love you til the day we break, and then i'd hate you, i'd forget you, i'd ignore you, i'd say you're emo, you're drama, you're unworthy.

Jesus.
how much does He love us?
He loved us just enough to be torn apart from His Father in heaven.
He loved us just enough to be born as man to a mortal woman.
He loved us just enough to be ridiculed, insulted, doubted.
He loved us just enough to to persecuted, to be dragged away by Judas' lies to a lonely, wretched, accursed place with two other tainted characters, without a fight, struggle or arguments.
He loved us just enough to be filled with sadness to be separated from us, even though we accused him of things He did not do, and we killed Him with our own nails, thorns and hands, for His love.
He loved us just enough to conquer death and sin for us, and to prepare an eternal seat of glory at His right hand for us.
He loved us just enough to be with us every single moment of our lives, standing beside us in every single thing we do, giving us moral support that doesn't quaver with fatigue or end when the EPL matches start, giving us strength that doesn't run away in cowardice or with mortal limitations, giving us a hope that never fades, a warmth that is as close as a heartbeat away.
He loved me enough to stand by me in my darkness, by planting souls so bright and kind and loving that they redefined the darkness into a place lit by love.

i wouldn't even consider giving up this love. nothing on earth could ever exceed it, or even approach it in a tenth of its magnitude. i'd be a fool to think that i could carve my own happiness by bending others' wills to mine.

oh God, forgive me for my transgressions against Your will. i submit with a joyful heart, a willing heart, an eager heart, to what You have in store for me. i know that in Your own timing, You will bring the right person into my life. in my own timing, in my own plans, i have tried so, so, so hard to do what You did not want me to, and felt so, so, so tired and destroyed by all of it. thank You for showing to me Your love. thank You for standing there to guide me gently onto Your path. thank You for taking away all the pain and frsutrations that i have heaped upon myself so foolishly in the past. thank You for taking my burden, my stripes, my shame upon Yourself and casting them to eternal damnation with Satan. thank You, Lord, for washing away my tears and soothing my heart with Your words, with Your tender love. i never want to leave You, and i never want to be away from being blessed with Your grace and mercies. so Lord, wouldn't You shield my dear friends, wouldn't you show them the very same love that You have shown to me so kindly. Lord i pray that even right now, You are speaking with them, and You are being heavy in their hearts. That Your presence is so strong in their lives, that they cannot but be compelled to fall to their knees to praise You, to thank You, to seek You. and Lord, You will just be so strong for them, in their weakness, and You will manifest Your will so firmly in their lives, that their eyes and hearts and minds will be astonished by how perfect Your will is for them, and they will never again seek to be anywhere but next to You. in Jesus' name, Amen.

2007-07-24T21:18:00.000-07:00

it's been very, very long since i came in here. to expunge memories and things that i tread in, on and about... mundane things that anchor me to the reality of life.

i've already faded where i was in bangkok, so anand ivan and guys, do forgive me for a less than complete trilogy of my very very transient, very very passionate expenditure of life there.

i promise, i will complete it. one of these days, before school reopens and i'm tossed back into the numbing routine of schoolwork, i will.

because, as the past few weeks have shown me, life is, really, quite underrated.

there're people who wish to relinquish their hold on life at this very moment. it's almost as if a tendril of their dark, maroon-tainted-black thoughts travels across continents and time to reach me, because i've feel feeling so acutely the loss of life over the past few days. no, i'm not being morbid... it's rather indescribable. nothing faintly creepy about it at all, either, just a heightened sense of how tangible, physical and visceral life can be. as opposed to what we so-oft take it for - granted. besides the cliche about the beating of the heart and all that, i can also feel my brain and its cohabiting vessels pounding, thudding, being alive. i can spend an hour watching the little polygonal shapes making up my skin and the little hairs poking their heads up like a toddler learning to stand between the polygons. i examine my eye in the mirror, looking at (and past) the little lines on the brown iris. i lie on my bed and feel the various systems housed neatly inside the mesenchymal derivatives (bones and flesh, my dears) operating, pulsating perhaps, along with arterial spurts. it's almost like i've taken to reading myself, savoring every word, like an anatomy textbook. which is really queer, considering that i've never truly liked anatomy for its tedium and onerous memorizations.

and of course, with life comes death. and funnily enough, the concept of death seems to exert itself in a different form in the past few days as well. just last night i had a protracted dream where i was part of a team. i couldn't tell you, in all honesty, if it was a clean, sanitized version of the reception room at the FOC campsite (which had a fridge just like the one in the dream) or an impression from Fast Food Nation's sterile workrooms. anyway it was mostly white, with many fridges. it was a place that was at once familiar and yet a stranger, something like deja vu but not as explicit. i found myself in the midst of many people, whom i know, and yet didn't. i couldn't tell their names, for example. i knew i knew them, but who were they? we were all being held in a very small room. and now i really am rather convinced that it was the SU campsite, because what happened after that was that even though the air conditioning was kept on, people began to suffocate from the placement of airtight sheets over the airvents on the door. and the story zoomed forward after that (i assume) because then suddenly i was again surrounded by a flurry of animated people, many of whom were in pairs, lugging bodies between them. the bodies were, strangely enough, all wrapped in sheets, not exposed. it was a massive case of unidentified bodies, bodies without identities, and mass graves spring to mind. i was roped in to help as a medic, which i insinuated from the next task that i was given: to triage a young caucasian male whose body was horribly curled upon itself and twisted grotesquely from the cold. someone had opened a fridge and gasped, finding him inside. in fact, there was a very certain knowledge that most, if not all, the dead were found in fridges. this one was wedged in the sidedoor, and i recall clearly how i wondered a person of his size could fit into the sidedoor where the bottles are usually kept vertically, leaving a dented and swinging holder. his limbs were not pure white or cyanosed, as would be expected of hypothermia, but retained a beige-ish tinge. he was hairy. but apparently, he was considered to be alive, and i went about measuring his blood pressure with a funny little digital contraption that i have never perceived before in my life. totally not your usual heavy, bombastic, old fashioned sphyggie. i didn't get a chance to see the reading, cos he began to twitch and that evolved rapidly into a full blown fit or generalised spasms; i couldn't tell which. (they're overlapping concepts; spasms account for the characterisitc presentation of fits) and the dream ended there, i think, and my brain began to recount the events that happened yesterday, starting with desmond's meeting.

what a strange... lot of concepts and thoughts to grapple with. i've never thought myself any more sophisticated a dream-interpreter or a philosopher than the average man on the street, but this certainly calls for a lot more ruminating. not voluntary; a compulsion.

i've taken to reading the classics. austen, bronte, dostoyevsky (or dostoevsky, as some may know him by)... in a frantic attempt to reacquaint myself with the english language. i do feel rather ashamed of the deplorable-ness of my grasp of vocabulary, ah, but what can i do but try to read more? many small things that clutter my life must be taken out of perspective for me to regain any semblence of control over myself.

school, alas, draws near.

the 2nd episode

2007-06-26T06:50:00.000-07:00

fuzzzzzzzzzzy. and a cockerel.

i haven't gone stark raving nuts and applied for membership in the time-honored portals of mental institutions worldwide, but i thought i was pretty much heading that direction when i opened my sleep-encrusted eyes the morning of the 14th, day 2. everything was fuzzy, my back felt pretty much like it just had 50 Communist Army officers tramping all over it with spiked boots, and there was a definite buzzing around my head. and no, i was pretty sure i wasn't out clubbing the night before. or was i? my brain wasn't being very cooperative either, threatening to overspill and trickle gelatinously out of my ears when i tried to rationalize the fact that i was very uncomfortable and there was a dastardly crowing going on incessantly in the background. so i settled for sitting up to survery my surroundings, and the events of the past 24hrs came flooding back into my consciousness like a nasty deluge of Ganges river floodwaters down a Karachi street.

welcome to Noh Bo Academy, Day 2. land of the no water supply, crazy flies and superb human spirit.

as most of us haven't managed to adjust to the startling biological schedules in the place, we were a little late on the morning cleansing routine, ending up with a harried breakfast (fried rice, vegetables and egg!) and all warmly welcoming the proposition by Ps Tang to shift devotionals to eveningtime. what we omitted to consider, as Ps Tang subsequently pointed out, was that we as mission workers should begin our day right with God, aligning our eyes towards His purpose and asking for His guidance and protection over the course of the day. it also resolved this niggling little enquiry i had in my heart (apparently my heart, as we know it, has many more chambers than the usually advertised 4, and it's up to me to surrender them all to God, one by one, even if it's shameful or painful, but yes, i digress, again.) about whether there was anything fundamentally wrong with doing QT at the end of the day, since there was a greater likelihood that i could have thanksgivings on hand to mention over quiet time. i now realise that it's better to begin fresh before God, presenting our petitions before Him, and then, as He goes about implementing His will in our lives, we give thanksgiving as blessings come along. or rather, that's the mindset i'm currently adopting. knowing how prone my mind is to travel, especially to the more temperate Mediterranean, i'd not wager any money on this concept being a permanent resident.

and thus we launched project WalkThrough, which covers the Old Testament from Genesis all the way to the birth of Christ. first speaker - yours truly. it was a pretty surreal experience, standing before a seemingly legion-istic congregation of tanned faces, all so impossibly youthful and many even downright childlike, and lecturing on the more carnal of human behavior for Creation (eliciting not a few giggles amongst the crowd and the translator, Christone) and Fall. i almost felt that i was doing a vulgar disservice to the obviously underaged audience, but i knew that i was doing what was right in God's eyes, and that gave me comfort and calmed my thumping heart to go on and finish off my aeons-long speech till Noah and his family finally disembarked from the choppy boattrip to nowhere. (didn't know that StarCruise already had its claws deep into biblical tours, albeit the passengers were, admittedly, under duress) Min darling launched a brilliant prizes-included quiz about my segment, which was a good idea to reinforce learning (and i suspect, rote learning, cos the pace was a little brisk for the students to grasp the full nuances of our messages; and this was true even for the entire teaching course), followed by a robust and lunatic period of aerobics where min pranced around trying to educate the students on the various landmarks in their classroom such as the persian gulf. in truth, she would make a very admirable teacher, cos she has this knack for imparting flavor and personal touches into her lesson to make it come alive with relevance for the students. so for all those a*star cronies hunched over your polished teakwood desks playing with your gold pen holders, here's a burgeoning star ready for harvest for biomedical research :D after min's repartee, it was simon's turn. it was really a story-telling time full of revelry and fun as he went full blast through ancient biblical history, to the point of no return - actually, it was more like a point 6 keywords too far down the list, but we could tell simon the sacho was truly in his form and so thoroughly engrossed in disgorging nuggets of biblical knowledge to the students that he forgot what it was that he was meant to teach. haha :D now that's what i call on fire (for God, and perhaps even a little self-immolative too), man! :D

then it was breaktime for the kids, as we gathered for a time of peer feedback and devotionals, where Ps Tang shared about Lazarus and the Rich Man, and imparted to us the value of holding Godly qualities above mortal possessions. it's very true that we do get caught up in the midst of all the excitement for material status and fame; humans degenerate faster than a block of blue cheese left in the incubator when faced with the prospect of fame and wealth. ask anyone, rich or poor, if they consider themselves being too happy at the moment or having too much wealth, and chances are, if you get an answer in the affirmative, you've stumbled across the 2nd coming and are looking at Christ in the face, so congratulations and let's bring out the jolly shandy. it's a fact of life - a dastardly characteristic lovingly indoctrinated by Satan into our wretched genes since the Fall. cos he couldn't get at God, he decided to erect his own throne, and defined wealth, riches, mortal fame, popularity and all things that eventually come to pass or fade away as his royal scepter and crown. it's a powerful message, and perhaps in the midst of squalor and biting suffering, it struck home in more than a few hearts in our team as we contemplated our beautiful ending - we get to travel home and be with our beautiful families in a habbohotel alter-reality after 7 days, but these kids that we've come to share the Gospel with haven't got anything to travel to but their dreams. and we have the burden of sharing God's dreams for them with them, to break through their hardened hearts and despondency and general laissez-faire about their ill lot in life. it is a burden easily carried by the flippant, but one that weighs down on the chordae tendiniae (heartstrings for the protesting laymen) when one attempts to grasp the full extent of what was required of us at that very place. in a sense, it was back to the drawing block for me - same situation as the scenario when i'm faced with terminal patients left, right and centre, and i possess not even a smidgen of the intellect required to save just one. but this time, i am empowered to make a difference. in this place, at the very moment, i could do things. i could choose to reach out and reach deep, or i could leave the lessons there as it was and consider my job done. the latter requires so much less effort, and imparts such a nice warm afterglow of satisfaction and self-back-patting, but that would be tantamount to complete absence, in my own opinion. i was there for 3 days, and i fully intended to make full use of that 3 days. i don't want to waste a single monent of it, and i was akin to a kamikaze pilot running on low fuel when he finally understands his mission. so i gassed up by throwing myself into the people, and blast me with a crab's pincers if they weren't completely welcoming, compliant and heartbreakingly convivial. it was as though God was nodding His head in Heaven and blessing our little team as everyone all suddenly got hit by Zeus' lightning bolt of diligence and a sense of mission - the singspiration was a roaring success, thanks to the great kicking off led by Dot. i've never seen, heard or felt such tempest in songs of praise, and i know in my heart that even the biggest congregation in singapore couldn't rival this little bunch of people on fire - because their songs came from their hearts, and they truly wanted to sing and dance. if anything, singaporean worships are a little mechanical and detached, and if it were a photograph it'd have jaded edges and sepia tone.

then we broke for games, which was a madcap tag where little dots of colorful rice zoomed imperceptibly across a yawning chasm between 2 ends of a field, chased by colorful little geriatric-speed rice (our team) who also, in colorful language, expressed aloud our disbelief that humans were capable of such rapid translocation without the help of chemical boosters such as fireworks in the butt. it must be the 2,3 bisphosphoglycerate (known fondly as 2,3 BPG to meddies) covalently bound to the Hb, and the polycythemia associated with poor oxygenation at high altitudes. i only managed to tag a girl, the last standing female member of the karen team, and was awfully proud of myself for such a glowing accomplishment. (attributed to a greater scale to the fact that she probably lost her wits to fear and shock at seeing attila the hun hot on her heels than the fact that i outran her)

dinnertime! i was getting increasingly perplexed by the fact that we had a seemingly endless supply of eggs and meat despite the apparent destitution of the village, but eventually this whodunit was resolved by Ps Tang's revelation that we were paying them obscene amounts of money they probably have never seen before to buy ingredients for the amount of "luxury" food that they probably have never had the chance to taste or even see before. so that solves it - another poor village infringed by meat-hungry foreigners with pockets full of cash, even when they have no seeming need for cash at this far-removed place cos everything they need, they pluck/collect/gather/hunt/grow, and who knows what they actually do with the useless pieces of paper with the sovereign's head on it when we offer it to them. in a place with minimalist currency trade and primarily subsistence farming, it's almost a joke to wield cash for what we purchase - kinda like giving a jovial family friend a top-of-the-line, high-tech, voice-controlled hairdryer when he's completely bald.

after dinner, it was the first night rally. being the initial exposure to expectant hearts pliant to the Gospel, i'm sure many amongst us were teetering with anxiety and a keen urge to rpove our mettle. but God's providence far overrides any humanly attempts at securing a willing audience, and truly when we fell back on His grace, everything was well. the testimony sharing and the message by Nick was very inspiring and truly touched me, and though altar call was less than expected, the short exposure would be my main explanation for it. it wasn't that they didn't like the message, in fact, i'm sure many were simply too reticent to approach the altar publicly. nonetheless, the individual prayer offer was taken up by many, and i was heartened to see a firm foundation being laid for subsequent sessions of the rally. furthermore, as paw htee doh later told me, most of the students attend evening service at the church from 7pm onwards, which coincides with our rally timing, so it was really a choice of 2 good things. and we all know, i'm sure, the feeling of wanting both the double oreo oreo cheesecake, and the sinful deluxe double chocolate with chocolate mousse cake. it's one same God, so i know He makes His will in His own way :D

and so we ended our very eventful first day, which was, in all manners of speech, a success. i was immensely proud of being part of the team and even the icicle-inducing shower afterwards did nothing to drench my passion for the next day's activities. and so we fell into sleeping ugly sleep to soothe the jagged nerves of our bodies, and the rest of the tale will follow at the next post!

liberated and empowered, and i'm not crapping you

2007-06-22T21:10:00.000-07:00

i'm back from the trip. have been back for 4 days, to be honest, but the hectic whirlpool of city life tends to suck my lifeforce away like a man who's just stumbled out of the Saharan desert to find an ice cold bottle of Coke sitting right at his feet, replete with a wedge of lemon and a straw. in this situation, if he doesn't suck at the coke with all the mighty power of a titan, spartan and the hulk added together, then he's more than likely catatonic from dehydration. but i digress.

the trip was a mighty, mighty time of ministry. usually, i would choose to describe ministry as being a source of comfort. a time of introspection and genuflection. a moment of repentance and covenance with God. but this time, this time, i'm brought to my knees and more. it was a titanic wave of might that burst into my life like a supernova and illuminated previously darkened innermost desires and insitinctive needs. it was a healer and a tutor, a judge and a shelter. personification is but one means by which i can attempt to describe how i was so touched by my experiences, but never will these feeble allusions be adequate. nevermind - a day's experience transcends a thousands scrolls, anyway. (and kudos to the chinese sage/scholar/proverb man who said du2 wan4 juan3 shu1 bu4 ru2 xing2 wan4 li3 lu4 - reading 10,000 books is lesser than travelling 10,000li)

i entered the trip with a heart filled brimful with apprehension and anticipation. apprehension, because i know that i had been through a dark spot of spiritual parlaying with the devil even a week prior to embarkment, and in my opinion, i worried about being a liability and weak link in the team. thank God for dorothy, who opened her heart and shared about her own concerns and fears, that i found yet another beacon of light in those times of despair and gloom. thank God for His love and His masterful plans for me, and the innumerous blessings of friends who surrounded me with their love. thus i commenced the week long journey with 20 others to northern thailand, starting with the seemingly innocuous budget flight that nearly threatened to remove the loose screws of my head during descent to Suvarabhumi Airport in BKK- poor pressurization equipment, i say, is a menace to public health. anyway, i'm jumping all over the place, so do forgive me for my mad hatter thoughts. i'll try to keep this soliloquy to its proper chronological order, but i assure you, with the rainbow spangled pile of experiences, it's going to be an uphill task. so hang on, bear with me, and try to enjoy the ride.

i woke at 3am on the morning of the 13th, tense right down to the miniature-est muscle fibre bundles of my toes, complete with frizzy hair - anxiety and excitement brings out the best of non-caffeinated highs in people. washed, brushed, dressed and breakfasted with a hearty bowl of banana nut crunch cereal before setting off for the airport, as i (rightly) anticipated an arduous course of starvation later on in the day due to the breakneck speed of commuting. Dad was a good sport and gave me a lift to changi, despite the fact that he really needed his sleep (sorry dad) and it was my responsibility to get there myself, but anyway he slipped me an extra 50 bucks too, on the way there. i remember androitly informing him in a droll voice that i wouldn't need the extra money and lugging a 0.000001g note around was going to make me feel very stressed for the next 7 days, but i think God (whom, i postulate, created the saying: Father knows best) was in a particularly humorous mood that day and decided to show me just how much i was going to thank my father for the 50 bucks in the next 6 days. perhaps it's the lack of judgment in a female, but then again, i now am of the persuasion that fathers do know best, right alongside the irrefutable lifestyle facts that guys do in fact make decisions faster and drive better. 5 minutes away from changi airport, as i glimpsed my first sight of the control tower, i began breaking into a gregorian chant litany of "oh my gosh i can't believe i'm going to fly to thailand, like, right now", repeated at 2 second intervals for approximately 60mil times. it was a miracle (or the effects of sheer exhaustion) that my father didn't reach over from his driver's seat and bonk me forcefully on my head to shut my gab, but anyway i was making a nuisance of myself and he didn't try to stop me much, besides the one time he asked me irritably: so do you want to turn back and not go? of course i said no. and of course, i continued my chanting till we pulled up outside the imposing glass doors of T1. right after i stepped out of the car, i met min darling, whose parents also escorted her to the airport to see her off. unfortunately, in the excitement of the moment and the abjectly frightening realization that i was now committed to a one-way-no-turning-back path, i forgot to kiss my dad before he drove away. which was one of the bigger regrets in my heart then, but i trust in God to bless all my family even as i abscond to the ends of the earth.

in the chillingly cryogenic environment of the airport, i was reconciled with the team of mission troopers - there was nicole, wanting, min dear, dani, dot, jo, and me for the gals' side; anand, sam, simon, weiyi, aric, ryan, josh, garry, daniel, ps tang, jon choo, jon tang, ivan and nick to make up the full strength of the team with their masculinity. it was almost surreal to see 21 very very psyched up youngsters prance around the airport with freaking big bags, oblivious to the unearthly hour (5am) and the more than irked glances from fellow budget passengers trying to get themselves checked in at the queue made eternal by our entourage. it was the very first time i've left the country without the company of my family - even at the ripe old age of 19. goes to show how much of a greenhouse flower i am, but i thank God for the opportunity.

the flight itself took no more than 2.5hrs, and was rather uneventful save for the disturbing fact that anand was seated next to me (just kidding! :D) and the crazy pressurization upon descent. after we passed customs, it was a straight, no-nonsense rush for the 2 minivans, hired for the entire duration of the trip to convey us comfortably from BKK to noh bo and back. our collection of luggages and personal effects would have put imelda marcos to great shame, but then again, we hail from bright, sunny and kiasu singapore, so there wasn't much to be said in self-defence. the vans were fitted out with state-of-the-art entertainment systems and full blast airconditioning, which ensured that most of us could get the sleep, rest and relaxation we wanted for the 12hr ride across the countryside up to the myanmese-thai border. unfortunately, even as i artfully doled out cinnarizine to my fellow mission troopers to ward off motion sickness, my self-assuredness kicked me hard in the butt - i believe i was the only one of 2 people physically ill on the upwards trip out of the entire bus' capacity of 11 passengers (driver not counted!) and thus had to suffer the humiliation of trying valiantly (and failing) to find a rubbish bin to dispose of the bag of puke over at mae sot, our last pitstop for dinner before noh bo proper. dinner was a grand affair, though marred slightly by the ominous warnings akin to armeggeddon prophesies by ps tang, who more than gravely informed us that it would be our "last meal" that looked half decent and was actually half edible until we complete the mission trip from noh bo in 4 days' time. that was probably not a very wise announcement to make, considering the fact that garry had, by then, acquired a state of semi-lunacy and was still serving as our treasurer. upon the go-ahead, he went all out nuts and ordered a full meal for himself, permitted us to order a large deluxe pizza for 6 people to share, and even had a chicken cordon bleu as the 2nd helping for himself again even as most of the team had lumbered off to semi-consciousness following supremely good food of thunderously sinful proportions. the quality of the food surprised even a cynic as myself - the decor of the place was, arguably, equivalent to the better haunted places of singapore, replete with spectacular displays of spiderwebs and knobbly wooden furniture and dingy lighting, but the food, wow. you wouldn't believe the fact that they managed to give authentic french/italian names to the dishes proffered on the menu, let along be able to serve up every single thing listed on the 20plus page long bound catalogue AND still not compromise on quantity or quality. i think they deserve 3 more michelin stars than those fools who grill half a tomato with sea salt over in the posh corners of the world - they've conquered the limitations of space, time and supply to overwhelm our tastebuds with a gastronomic feast fit for an upmarket restaurant in milan. but anyway, we chalked up a combined bill of 2000+ baht, equivalent to 100 plus singapore bucks, and probably more than what the proprietors could count for the entire night after we left their place in stunning shambles and emptied their stores of all wheat, flour and oil. in the course of dinner, our party was graced by the presence of rev yee, who was the dean of the anglican ministry in noh bo, as well as a few other very prominent missionaries on their way back to BKK.

dinner done, we hauled ass and moved onwards to noh bo academy. that was another 2.5hrs and honestly, just as i was about to seriously consider relinquishing my weak stomach's grip on the wonderful dinner thanks to the bumpy ride, we arrived at a pitch dark place, where all we could see was a wizened old man's face (the schoolteacher) lit by a single light bulb suspended in midair. it was drizzling lightly, heralding our arrival as missionaries and youth workers with more than a little dampness and chill. after 30 arduous minutes of luggage passing along a human chain (no porters, steep stairs, pitch black = logistic disaster) we managed to settle in, get ourselves showered with ice cold water (i was amazed not to find icicles forming on my hair after i rained a bucketful of the noxious stuff down my head) and tucked in for the night. and that was just how we spent our first night in noh bo - in accompaniment with many exotic bugs, beetles, flies, insects of unknown species and origin, candlelight, the stink of insect coils and a curiously hard and scratchy hand-woven tatami.

i'll tell about the 2nd day's adventures in the next post! :D

war, half undone, but i've awakened.

2007-06-08T03:39:00.000-07:00

i'm fighting this.

never knew myself to have such an assertive, pain in the ass alter ego.
self hatred burns oneself up just as much as hatred for another.
self hatred burns more. cos i know i'm doing it, i know i shouldn't be, and my thoughts run away with the concept of self-worthlessness faster than i can catch up with it.
it's like my normal psyche self runs as fast as my physical self does. which doesn't count for much if i want to win.

i can feel love.
i'm standing on the outside looking in desperately at the evil one demolishing my esteem and self, and i can feel love.
love from God, love from my family, love from my friends.

one of these days, love will kill the devil.
one of these days, i will kill the devil with love.
i renounce hatred. it is the tool of the devil. i renounce self-pity, it is the tool of the devil. i renounce hopelessness, for it lies in the deepest realm of the devil's lair.

so God help me.

my fight.

2007-06-06T22:12:00.000-07:00

when all else fails
the tears drown,
and dry.

i've never known i could fall
so deeply into myself
the poison consumes
it burns and exhumes whatever piteous little
i had
the facade
it crumbles, but does so shrieking
like a kitten cooked over a fire

it's dark, in here.
it's a vast expanse of darkness, but claustrophobia
reigns gaily
bacause everywhere i turn
there's no way out
there's just more of the thick
smothering poison
taken in gasping gulps
because nobody forced me to

my heart aches.
it hurts so badly, i can almost hear the tears of blood
squeezed out by the choking stronghold
this darkness has on it.

this darkness, can i fight it?
this darkness, will i win it?

when i'm aided only by a maudy crusader's sword
split into splinters of blunt metal
when i'm aided only by the stink
of my own fear
when the pain becomes too much to bear

let the healing begin.

food diary keeping makes me depressed.

2007-05-31T08:05:00.001-07:00

stuffed full of food. let's test my temporal lobe and see if it's still functioning :D

breakfast: a cup of milk in the green tupperware cup that i like a lot. one of those funky stale dry flaky uber sweet lotus seed filling gardenia buns that my dad "koped" from camp.
lunch: din tai fung delicacies. golden short grain rice cooked to springy, chewy perfection, coated individually with a thin cloak of egg, and seasoned generously with pepper and salt. garnished with jade coils of spring onion (or what the westerners call shallots) and topped with 6 succulent strips of fried pork chop. beautifully wrapped thin-skinned wantons in a piquant soup, each jealously guarding a pregnant load of chives, minced meat and spring onions behind the fragile walls of flour. a round of their signature xiaolongbaos. another round of their super signature and uber chaoji super incredibly tasty xiefen xiaolongbaos (meaning it comes with savoury, juicy crab roe that gives an explosion of the taste of the sea with each bite). -oh goodness. just describing it gives me such a high! :D- and 2 funny baos that had thick, chewy, almost obnoxious, skin, and very juicy fillings of meat and more meat. handmade noodles with beef stew. the meat and tendons MELTED in my mouth - i practically made no use of my lateral and medial pterygoids... the intense cooking did all the work of mastication for me. yam filled xiaolongbaos. hot, astringent chinese tea. brief discourse for shopping, after which i had a mouthful of oh-ah mee-sua, lots of fried chicken cutlet strips, and fried tempura (taiwan style). i STILL haven't figured out why they call it tempura, since i see no batter, no filling, and the very delicious thing that's masquerading as a tempura tastes more like molten konnyaku jelly in a flour coating and covered head to toe in paprika powder and salt.
dinner: beef fried rice, a piece of KFC chicken left over from yesterday's party, a few popcorn chicken bits, and 5 tutu kueh.

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh mannnnnnnnnnnn.

i am SO going swimming at 7am tml.

mannnnnnnn.

be very happy when u read this!

2007-05-30T02:29:00.000-07:00

honestly. if you're feeling low, shitty, generally lethargic or found that you had great difficulty in bowel movements in the past 10 millenia, please do not do this test.

otherwise, quick! type in your name and laugh yourself sick :D

Ten Top Trivia Tips about Serene!

All swans in England belong to serene!
Serene can turn her stomach inside out.
Some birds use serene to orientate themselves during migration.
Serene is often used in place of milk in food photography, because milk goes soggy more quickly than serene.
Japan provides over thirty percent of the world's serene supply!
Apples are covered with a thin layer of serene!
The water in oceans is four times less salty than the water in serene.
Serene can sleep with one eye open.
Serene is the only one of the original Seven Wonders of the World that still survives!
Serene has often been found swimming miles from shore in the Indian Ocean.

back from the dead!

2007-05-29T20:00:00.000-07:00

boos. nana was KO-ed for the past 2 days with weird, downright weird, symptoms. which included being in a state of suspended limbo (wrt brain) and complete marrionette-mimicry (wrt body). i guess the most fascinating part was on Monday, when i discovered what it feels like to be completely, utterly, shittifiedly drunk out of one's mind - i managed to get an elbow's grasp out of the yawning chasm called comatose-like sleep in the afternoon and was fully intent on getting a drink of water from my desk before going back to sleep. the amazing thing was, despite the very sullen fact that my water bottle was sitting demurely on the desk approximately 5m from my bed, i was unable to reach it. by that i didn't mean i was trying valiantly, albeit stupidly, to grasp it while still sitting on my bed. no no no... *wags finger for good measure* nana is a very rational person who knows her hand will never be long enough to reach the table from the bed no matter how many bowls of elastin-and-collagen-packed-ramen she wolves down, so nana got up from bed to get to the desk.
to be honest, i feel that "got up from bed" is quite a stretch from the real thing. reality: TRIED to get up from bed, but realised after about 1 minute later that my knees were perpetually bent and wobbly and my feet were flopping ineffectually in all directions on the floor. it's the world's strangest sensation, really. one bit of my brain was still stuck somewhere in loolabyland, in some funky white mist, and a furry little bit that was actually conscious was struggling in vain to wrench control of my limbs. and thereafter i suppose it gave up, because the next thing i noticed was that my entire body was in contact with the floor, and my darned feet were still flopping ineffectually, though they've changed their location somewhat to draw lazy circles in the air. which added a whole new dimension of fear in my limited consciousness cos at that juncture in time, it'd take a seriously out of it person to not realise that i was in a fair bit of trouble. i didn't know what i was doing, i didn't know how to stop doing whatever it was that i'm doing, and worst of all i didn't quite know where i was, either. i guess i was in clinical disorientation. having a body that felt as though it was filled to the brim with molten rubber and some iron was no joke, especially when one is thirsty, tired, sleepy, dazed and a little confused. ok, very confused. so basically there i lay in the gap between my bed and cabinet, flopping like a lethargic fish that hasn't been paid in weeks, and trying to enunciate some form of verbal plea for help but my brain didn't quite understand what it wanted to do, so that carried on for some time (honestly i have no idea how much time elapsed while i was doing that stupid thing) until i managed to get my elbow onto the bed's rim and somehow mustered enough energy to push one side of my body up. so at least that was something. so i tried to stand again, and back down i went, and at that point in time i guess enough fear had kicked in for me to realise i was in seriously deep shit so i used the last bit of energy left in my iron-filled bones to propel my body in a horizontal flip back into bed, and then everything went black.
by the time i next woke up, it was pitch dark, the family's gone to loolabyland, and i realised, to my horror, that i've given myself quite a few nice bruises that hurt like mad all over my body when i was doing that fishy imitation. actually it didn't hurt at all when i was actually physically on the floor doing the invertebrate hiphop dance... i guess some form of defense system is in place to block pain receptors when a person is clinging on to the very last fine shreds of consciousness. but the fortunate thing was that i've regained control of my accursed limbs, even if the control, so to speak, was still incredibly wobbly and brought on dizzy spells when i tried to play around with my newfound mobility by visiting the loo.
i'm glad to say that i'm already much better now... which is exactly why u see me online typing this. haha :D i couldn't even look straight at anything for the past 2 days without feeling like i was going to throw up or collapse. haha. all that's left to remind me of the excitement of the past 2 days is a heck of a headache, bodyaches, some dizziness here and there and some GIT discomfort. oh well :D haha. i think it's really been a surreal experience... usually people either black out or don't, so i must say that being undecided about the state of consciousness for such a protracted period of time is entirely new to me. haha. and the doctor was saying it looks like dengue, so if i don't get better by today i'd have to go for blood tests! so yayness. and thank God i don't have funny petechaie, though the really ridiculously big bruises are starting to turn a funky yellow-purple and that sucks, too. but most of all i would totally ABHOR the idea of not being able to go batam this weekend! haha. and if i estimate the number of hourse i've been sleeping for the past 2 days, it'd be close to 19hrs per day. meaning i've spent 79.17% of the past 48hrs asleep. wow. now that's what i call a record, man.
haha. and i'm tired already! well i'm lagging behind terribly on a lot of admin stuff to settle for foc and matric and mission trip, so i'd better preserve my limited energy and finish up my work..... so that i can sleep (again)!!!!!!! :P

mugging capacity = <0.0000005%

2007-05-25T06:49:00.000-07:00

been less than focussed on my work recently... tend to find lazy reasons not to sit down for a good chapter of germs, brain or drugs. managed to pry myself from the google box just now for an hour of self-enrichment in neuroscience... i think you guys can guess the outcome. oh well at least i know about 5 pages of neuroscience more than, maybe, 2 people in med fac??? *shrilly* aaargh. intense frustration at my ineptitude, not because i wasn't given the opportunity or chance to, not because i lack the resources to, but because i'm a stumbling block to my own progress! sigh. have to paste reading resolutions list on my forehead and walk around blowing a shard of scrap paper before me. haha :D anyway. i think i'm just particularly inertia-rich when it comes to topics i deem bland or tedious... it's quite apparent, actually. i mean, see. i'm at chapter 2 of pharmaco and chapter 6 of microb... and page 5 of freaking neuroscience. haha. there's DEFINITELY a direct correlation between my perception of a subject and my conscientiousness towards it. ah, the fallibility of humans... is discrimination and bias the root of failure? nah... that's simplifying things beyond their base forms. sorta like telling a man that why he's a down-and-out wino, stranded on the cold streets and left to shame in public, is cos he's short, or bald, or whatever. not that any of these physical characteristics are derogatory to a person's character in any way... in fact, i think a bald pate heralds an astonishingly high IQ in the bearer. haha. refer to previous posts about my surgeon and doctor for this claim... :D oh well. and i'm a typical female, deemed to be fickle-minded and flighty by virtue of the double X in my haplotype - i virtually bounced around my patho book looking for nice little disease states that i could identify with or am familiar with. haha.
tomorrow marks the start of a fresh attempt at brushing up my acedemic performace! i think it'd be a real shame if i didn't make good use of this holidays to work hard, cos i'm not gifted or talented unlike so many in med fac... i will fail miserably if i were to study a week before any exams! haha :D i'm the kind who needs a month at least to prepare, so there's no reason at all why i should indulge myself this hols and let my brain vegetate completely... actually it's been rotting for a long time now, just that i adamantly refuse to acknowledge that fact haha :D oh well. i'll preserve whatever i can and salvage whatever is left, and whatever is irretrievably, irrevocably gone, i sell as bio-friendly manure :D good source of income, considering the sheer amount i have of it, and that i can't do any botany without sending some poor plant to its untimely death.
was just daydreaming just now. actually i'm more than a bit apprehensive about the upcoming mission trip, not least because i feel that God is trying to tell me something by planting someone close to me. i know He hears my prayers, but whether this is His answer to me, i don't know. i can only continue to pray and seek His will. but being the daydreamy little girl that i'm wont to be (when i'm not preoccupied with being attila the hun) i abandoned by cerebral thoughts and sought refuge in the encapsulating comfort of fantasies.

scene: in a park, on a wooden bench, facing the verdant stretch of grass still wet with morning dew beneath their feet and the still, obsidian waters of the mini pond in the park. boy turns to face girl, who has a small clump of little red flowers in her hands, the type we used to pull off the bushes to suck their sap when we were young.

boy: i've fallen for you.
girl: oh... *looks shyly at her feet*
boy: do you... do you like me?
- in his heart, he's dying of anxiety and anticipation, fear of rejection and embarrassment. more than anything, he's wondering why he's worked up the guts to say such a thing, and he wants desperately for her to answer, but she wouldn't. -
a silent moment passes. it's starting to get a little awkward, with the girl blushing and pointedly refusing to answer his question, and the boy feigning nonchalence when his very soul is quivering inside.
without warning, she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. it was less than 2 seconds, but the warm, dry, chaste and shy kiss seems engraved permanently on the boy, who finds himself dumb, both literally and figuratively, by the move.
girl: actually... i've fallen for you a long time ago...

haha. i wrote it in chinese and pasted it on my daiso cork board... it sounds more poetic in chinese. i'm a sucker for day to day romanticism... not valentine's day 99 roses and all. it's little moments like these that are etched in my heart and remain as memories that i carry of my past relationships... and moments like these that i yearn for in my future relationships.

God, if you read my blog, please please please answer me with this mission trip... :)

psyche and a bit of necropsy

2007-05-22T10:02:00.000-07:00

Your Psyche is Yellow

You have a ton of energy - both physical and mental endurance.

You are rational and logical, and you can help almost anyone think clearly.

Optimistic and bright, you also have a secret side that's a little darker.

When you are too yellow: You will do anything to get your way, and no one will be the wiser

When you don't have enough yellow: you lack confidence, drive, and humor

What Color Is Your Psyche?

haha i don't like yellow! ever since my mum told me i looked like a roll of lard in my bright yellow swimsuit back in... pri school. haha. can't fault her on that! i really did look like one... even without the yellow swimsuit :D

You Are Duck

Exotic and unusual, you are a bit of a rare bird - literally.

You're known for being soft and succulent, though at times you can be a bit greasy.

What Kind of Meat Are You?

hahahahahahahahaha~~~~~~~~~~ nothing to say!

Your Pride Quotient: 27%

You're a little prideful, but nothing out of the norm.

Like everyone, you enjoy attention. But you're also good at sharing the spotlight!

How Much Pride Do You Have?

ha! and i thought with such a stubborn mule character as mine, i'd be more conscious of my "face" than anything else... maybe the questions weren't specific enough haha :P

The Part of You That No One Sees

You are balanced, peaceful, and sincere.

You're the type of person who goes along to get along.

And you're definitely afraid of rocking the boat.

Underneath it all, you fear your world falling apart.

You'll put up with a situation that you don't like in fear of changing it.

Disruptive and forceful people intimidate you - and sometimes exploit you.

What's the Part of You That No One Sees?

TRUE!!!! TRUE!!!!!!!! :D haha. enough self-revelations for tonight!

being single? here's a crap reason why...

2007-05-20T07:08:00.000-07:00

You Don't Have a Boyfriend Because You are Too Forward

No doubt that you've got game

Just a little too much game for some guys

Maybe it's just that some men like a challenge

Or they think they're not challenging enough for you!

Why Don't You Have a Boyfriend?

hmmm... can't complain. comes with a type A and ESTJ personality i guess :) right, sociology-nuts??? :D

pizza face~

2007-05-20T07:07:00.000-07:00

Pepperoni Pizza

Robust and dominant.

When you go for something, you go full force.

You tend to take control of situations easily.

And in return, you get a ton of respect.

What's Your Pizza Personality?

apprehension and tension. good for constipation.

2007-05-20T06:17:00.001-07:00

am waiting for a call from my churchmate. it's time, once again, for the weekly prayer chain.

was greatly ministered to by the message at sermon today. God answers me so blaringly and clearly that i still wonder in drop-jawed amazement at how some people can't feel Him in their lives. i guess it's just not the right time, so God shrouds Himself in a cloak of secrecy till He's sure the person doesn't drop dead from an AMI when He reveals Himself suddenly, say, from the water pipe in the toilet when the said person is... using the toilet. yes.

am still chuckling in amusement when slummi says he feels and talks to God best when he's in the toilet. oh well. whatever works, man!

had a spat of disagreement with my mum 2 days ago, regarding my finances. i agree that i am partly to blame, but i was... very broken by the things she said and how she viewed me far below her money. it was almost as if she didn't want me, but 6000 dollars instead. i cried for a long, long time after i apologised with a faux cheery facade to her.

can't really remember the last time i felt so broken. so... hurt and dejected. i guess i'm thick-skinned by nature and reinforced by cultivation, so it takes quite a bit to break me down. i guess that was the point when i couldn't hold it together anymore... i remember i was lost in a thick red haze of anger and hatred the next day. planning how to draw up lists of evidence to prove myself right and to throw it in her face insultingly.

but God reined in my anger. despite the tight head and sore eyes, despite the broiling anger fanned gleefully by Satan, God sent my father to speak to me about forgiveness. He prompted me to think about what it means to be His child through my father's advice.

at 2.10pm that day, i gave her pastries bought from a quaint traditional bakery in holland village and enclosed a letter, carefully worded, of explanation.

unfortunately, she rejected both on the spot. i didn't want to spark another argument, so i went to ask for a job interview and left the things behind.

she placed the pastries in the fridge at night when she came home. my first thought was: uh-oh. she's rejected it.
my second thought was: well not really. if she's still REALLY mad she'd have thrown it away. so i checked the plastic bag - the letter was gone. didn't know if it was a good or bad thing. prayed for God to interceed.

silly me... He already had.

the relationship between us has been fully repaired today. even though it hurts so badly and stings like heck to bow and say i'm wrong, even though it's still a humiliation to a mortal like me to have to pander to the demands of an unreasonable person, i fall to my knees and praise God with all my soul.

He has shown me what it is to love. love is not only in fair weather. love is not only when there's something to be gained. love does not need reciprocation. these are all mortal love... Godly love is so much purer, so much more joyous, so much more comforting and fulfilling.

i languished in pain on thursday night, was fretful and angry on friday, was slowly soothed and given new direction and motivation by prayer on saturday, and entirely renewed and rejuvenated today.

i shall dig out my nice beautiful poster on the beatitudes and remind myself daily of the love-filled promise God has made me. imperfect as i am, i know He is just standing there and waiting for me with His arms outstretched, just like a delighted parent holds his hands out firmly, ready to catch and comfort and praise the child who's taking the first step towards him. i could never have made such a breakthrough a year ago... i'd have stewed merrily in anger and self-pity, not knowing that the fiery grudges that burn in my heart are fuel for Satan's eternal fire.

and even now, as i comprehend the many repercussions of my sprendthrifty ways of the past 2 years, i realise that God has put me through this trial to test my faith. i'm so glad to have the support and love from the brothers and sisters in Christ who have stood steadfastly beside me to give me encouragement in verses and advice... and He had meant, right from the start, to teach me to love, to build my faith, to build my dependence on Him, and to correct me on my wayward habits of spending at will without proper thought. i really thank my mum for instilling in me once again the virtue of spending no more than 50% of what i get or earn... and i thank my dad for allowing me to take allowance from him during this period as i kickstart my "quitting" cycle to rid myself of this sin. with proper plannng, i know that i'll be able to get back my mum's trust in me for financial management... and i'll have a fresh foundation to build my adulthood lifestyle on. it's really quite valuable to engrave the lesson of saving for tomorrow into my heart, especially in today's hedonistic world. but most of all, i thank God for giving my this opportunity to learn, and i thank Him for his being by my side all through this. i know that it hurts Him as much as it hurts me to endure such painful lessons, but i'm grateful to Him that He has brought me through safely and unscathed, wiser and with a brand new testimony that'll one day rock the life of a person He wants me to meet... and that will be a brand new chapter of a person's new life in Christ.

i'm really looking forward to life now :)

i'm full of anticipation, anxiety and a bit of anal-retention about the upcoming trip to thailand! please pray for my team as we prepare for it, that we will be able to bring forth powerful testimonies and truly shake the foundations of faith for His glory in that land... and that we will know the right words to say and right things to do, by the grace of the Holy Spirit's prompting. and of course, please pray for health and harmony between each and every member of the team, that we will indeed emerge from this experience bonded fiercely by the blood of Christ, and that we will use this experience to testify powerfully for Him in days to come.

gotta go plan the things to pack... unofficial medic of the team :) am wondering how ironic it'd be if i didn't prepare adequately! so i'd better :D

ham sandwich!!!!!!!!!

2007-05-18T05:48:00.000-07:00

You Are a Ham Sandwich

You are quiet, understated, and a great comfort to all of your friends.

Over time, you have proven yourself as loyal and steadfast.

And you are by no means boring. You do well in any situation - from fancy to laid back.

Your best friend: The Turkey Sandwich

Your mortal enemy: The Grilled Cheese Sandwich

What Kind of Sandwich Are You?

i can't believe i've outphiled dr phil, whoever he is...

2007-05-18T05:40:00.000-07:00

Your EQ is 153

50 or less: Thanks for answering honestly. Now get yourself a shrink, quick!

51-70: When it comes to understanding human emotions, you'd have better luck understanding Chinese.

71-90: You've got more emotional intelligence than the average frat boy. Barely.

91-110: You're average. It's easy to predict how you'll react to things. But anyone could have guessed that.

111-130: You usually have it going on emotionally, but roadblocks tend to land you on your butt.

131-150: You are remarkable when it comes to relating with others. Only the biggest losers get under your skin.

150+: Two possibilities - you've either out "Dr. Phil-ed" Dr. Phil... or you're a dirty liar.

What's Your EQ (Emotional Intelligence Quotient)?

thank God~and please be with us now

2007-05-11T04:06:00.000-07:00

ah. what crap. can't the blogger people fix this darned wrong posting format? :P it's really quite a nuisance to see this totally distorted, fractured, a little tortured frame. not sure i can really write when i see formerly familiar settings twisted gruesomely :P
anyway. results are out... first year of medical school, concluded with A-, B, and B+. incredibly amazing if you ask me... keeping in mind that i was admitted with an acedemic score half of my counterparts' :D but honestly, i'd like to thank God for this. i couldn't possibly have done it... and i know He did it to tell me that i haven't been giving Him enough trust, faith and credit... and it's true! haha :D i'm not ashamed to tell anyone that i have been less than completely trusting in Him, even though He has never failed to be with me every time i ask for Him to. it's a human fallibility i guess. our faith is frail and our resolve is weak, because we trust in our physical capabilities more than something intangible and (sometimes) imperceptible. we need concrete evidence. we need to "see to believe"... and God knows. so that's why He, even though i can already imagine Him sighing heavily in heaven as He senses the portion of unyielding heart in me, is so determined to prove me wrong by bestowing results way, way, way beyond my expectations. He brings me back to the place when i first fell to my knees and confessed that He is my Saviour, time and again He fulfils me and grants me reprieve from my worries.
i cannot imagine not having Him in my life. and yet, as any blemished human will tell you, i turn complacent in times of prosperity.
oh God i can only pray that You will not deign to suffer upon me the trials that You brought upon those who refused You... that You will have mercy and guide me to You by means of gentle ways. i've just read dante's inferno... God's wrath is something i wouldn't want to mess around with :P
gotta drill into my head what Jesus said to Thomas, on the night He returned to His disciples: "because you have seen, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed." -- John 20:29
to my darling muamua... don't be discouraged. it's easy to feel disgruntled and let dispair overcome you, but i'll always pray for our Heavenly Father to be with you every step of the way even as you gear up for this final fight. you can and you will do it, and i believe that at the end of it all, you will rise up a stronger Christian, with a powerful testimony that will shatter many embittered and hardened hearts for God's glory. and i'll be with you any single moment you call for me to be there... even though i must say that my repertoire of knowledge is far from satisfactory. but i just want to be physically and emotionally there for you, a pillar and a pillow... and i want you to sms me whe u're down k? :D there're many others who love you as much and even more than i do, and we're all here to help you past this barrier. they'll let you tap on their brains and i'll be your inflatable soft toy! :D

the blogger board doesn't work but i'm still high on worship

2007-05-06T10:21:00.000-07:00

in the secret, in the quiet place
in the stillness You are there
in the secret, in the quiet hour i wait
only for You
cos i want to know You more

i want to know You
i want to hear Your voice
i want to know You more

i want to touch You
i want to see Your face
i want to know You more

i am reaching for the highest goal
that i might receive the prize
pressing onwards, pushing every hindrance aside
out of my way
cos i want to know You more

i want to know You
i want to hear Your voice
i want to know You more

i want to touch You
i want to see Your face
i want to know You more

any more plaintive, any more true, any more beautiful, and i will shatter into shards of glass.

hallelujah, Jesus.

a bit of here. faraway, there.

2007-04-29T18:59:00.000-07:00

i like whimsical stuff.

that's not to say i live with my head in the clouds and my feet floating somewhere 5000m above sea level. (LEH does, though. go ask her how much her serum GH is :D) i like to ESCAPE into little bits of fantasies sometimes to ESCAPE from the ugliness of life which is in itself an ESCAPE, cos i'm turning a blind eye to the much more starkly both-exhilarating-yet-morbidly-fascinating-and-turns-you-off-like-a-twitching-roach-in-the-middle-of-a-squishy-pus-like-egg-tart reality.

there's reality, and then there's reality. reality when we discuss how much work we have to do to maintain our standard of living. and yet i still bitch at my father for not being able to pay for my uni education when i should be kissing his feet for subjecting himself to physical and mental torment 6 days a week in the army, putting up with the narcissistic fools who look barely old enough to be his sons and their ridiculously demeaning, derogatory, persecuting, discriminatory and worst of all SUPERCILIOUS commands, to give us this comfortable 5 room flat. my mother commands us to suck him dry. the training i had since young to suffer the eccentricities of my parents have taught me to do otherwise. but thankfully now, at least i don't cry anymore.
reality when i flush the 200 bucks i've just earned, with much bitching and complaining, into the drain with a grandoise flourish for the 2 little rodents currently cohabiting with me.
reality, because i am lonely and i'm so loser that i talk to rodents.

there's reality, and it hurts so much. but once we adapt to its constant oppression, the lacrimal glands get suppressed and we're more or less oblivious to the initial pain.

there's also reality. it comes in the form of people whose bank acounts have quite a bit of moolah and they deliberate for 3 hrs in a LV flagstore on which of the pureskin bags to buy. their sharp eyes and stunningly clear peripheral vision for branded goods fail to capture the obese lady in flowery sleeveless shirt sitting forlornly outside the store on the sidewalk across the road, touting a mat of vegetables that look as withered as she does. of course, such hoi polloi is NEVER allowed near the privileged stratosphere of the debutantes and taitais, so the fact that she's sitting SO FAR AWAY ought to be sufficient justification for them to be blessedly ignorant of the ugliness of life.

i think i'm raised on the fear of losing all that i have.
i think i will die with the fear of losing all that i have.
perhaps, on the day i die, my fear will be realised.

i don't really care.
i have so many friends, acquaintances, people whom i've come into contact with. if i were to pile guilt onto myself each time i come across a weepy case, i'd be committed to woodbridge faster than you can say SIAO AH. i read that the profile of such persons tend towards depressive-manic. (makes sense) they also fall into the high risk group for addiction to depressants (benzodiazepines, morphine and its analogs etc). ESCAPISM.

it features a lot in our lives. the arty farty group, too. so many, escaping into the cocoon of ignorance and pretense. ruining themselves inside out by putting a black blind over their eyes and bashing their hearts against a poisoned bar.

thank God for chantilly and dominique. but i think dominique is a trifle too flighty to be truly receptive to what i have to say to him - scampering up my arm at the speed of light seems to be what he does best. he shies away from receiving treats, too. he's rather pick up the sunflower seeds after i drop them, preferring to sniff daintily at those i hold in my hand than pick them up. perhaps he's gay. perhaps he's acting out the rich-poor divide just to amuse my philosophical mind. chantilly's another thing altogether. she's averse to being left alone - climbing up the bars and imitating spiderman is what she does when i bring dominique out of the cage. and she squeaks. and she's so horny that dominique squeals when she approaches him from behind. i believe this young lady has a long way to go from celibacy, so i hold firm to my stand that this pair shall soon be parents to a great big litter of babies. if any of you would like hamsters for pets, come look for me. i have a membership to the pet lover's centre franchise chain, and of course, in due time, i shall have the hamsters as well. i promise that if you prove a competent and responsible owner, i shall give the babies to you FOC :D

i'm due to go out to meet quite a number of people today, but first and foremost - my 5min rock hard cookies need to be churned out for the gastronomical benefit of prof, who is a trifle annoyed with me for emailing him NON STOP about my attachments. haha. i apologise and offer penance on the form of sugar loaded treats. i'm also returning to the lab to work for a month or so, depending on the work allocation come 7th may. there is something else of interest to me in the lab. knw knows... haha :D it's too early to speculate, but i sincerely wish something fruitful comes out of my next stint there - be it academic or otherwise.

chalet details: stayover on the night of 7th july, sat. cos the chalet's booked from 7-9th jul, and i have to be at FOC camp bright and early on the 9th (hello? i'm part of the comm, so yeah.) so the only feasible date for stayover is 7th. meaning a free-for-all potluck-BBQ-whatever night of socialising, partying and general wasting in the chalet on the 7th for all my friends. (i'll limit the alcohol allowed - i don't really appreciate cleaning puke off the sofa, table, bowls, toilet, sink... on my birthday.) but there'll be some -OH around, so don't worry. it won't be some idiotic baby food party with mashed peas :D will have a theme. not something elaborate of course. but it should be fun. will disseminate an email to everyone by means of invitation, when i decide on the theme.

righto. gotta plunk the blasted cookies into the oven and go bathe. lots of things to do today and too little time, i'm afraid :P

ahhh! before i forget. important - CONGRATULATIONS to LEH on the completion of your exams. and KNW and PAMMIE: jiayou! it's really gonna end really really soon! hang in there! :D

mosslike

2007-04-26T17:55:00.000-07:00

am sitting quaintly in a quiet little corner of the med lib 2nd floor computer console area. pecking away at my black noisy clackettyclack keyboard with 2 fingers. the index fingers on both hands... *high 5 to ian tatt* i've attended typing courses but i've never really learned the elusive skill of semi-flexion of the proximal interphalangeal and flexion of the metacarpophalangeal joints at all ten upper limb digits simultaneously... it just doesn't happen. i presume that i've lost 80% of the neural circuitry required for such highly sophisticated digital manipulation, haha. which isn't surprising in and of itself, seeing that i'm going around with an IQ equivalent to a plate of jelly that's just been bombed to bits.

what's with males, testosterone, and little black dresses? i can't tell you how disturbing it is to have a guy keep staring at you from the other bench just because you have a little black dress on. ok. let me clarify. it's not a "come-oogle-all-you-want-i'm-pretending-to-be-a-cheap-come-on" dress. it's knee length for goodness' sakes! and i have a cardigan on. so for whatever hellish reasons I'm attracting his attention for, I don't know. it's just deeply disconcerting to find yourself the object of intense scrutiny from a fellow med sch student. (reminds me of our anat hall sessions, except that i'm not covered in formaldehyde and i'm not lying in a body bag) perhaps i had a particularly interesting fungiform tumor on my butt or something. ah wells. i've already done my part in covering myself up demurely, so all i can say to this is, ad nauseum: go away... haha.

ah. it's about 30mins away from the estimated time of arrival for my little protege... please pray for all those who, unfortunately, got vivas. let's cheer them on as they tackle this round of exams and hope they pass comfortably to enjoy the rets of the hols! :D

so much for vegging out~

2007-04-24T20:03:00.000-07:00

haiz. am sloughed!

before you condemn me for the illegal use of such an abrasive word on something that is, theoretically, unslough-able, let me assure you that it is possible. it's humanly possible to have so many minutiae to tend to that one gets obliviously sloughed and discovers it only later. i'm probably not making very much sense here. haha. oh wells. that's my trademark, isn't it? going off on some inconsequential antiparallel tangent and creating entropy in all of my readers' minds.

speaking of which, most of my dedicated audience should, at this very moment, be sitting for an exam paper, or studying like heck for their next paper. failing which, i declare a charge of academic negligence and OFF TO THE JAILS with you!

mucho things have occurred in the past week of idle life (not). i've realised that human life is an extremely tedious process that tends to add a lot of unnecesary stress. things like deciding what to do first on a to do list that spans 3 toilet rolls in length. realizing that translocation on public transport never fails to deliver one to the intended destination AFTER the estimated arrival time. NEVER. there's a higher chance that you'll strike top prizes for both 4D and toto just by wearing your undies on your head and decorating it with cuckoo feathers and coffee beans than reaching a place you want to go to on time. i swear that living out life in all its exhausting and painstaking details can be just as carcinogenic, teratogenic and whatevernot-genic as consuming a plateful of jellyfish soaked in 100x sodium sorbate and irradiated for 10years next to the leaky nuclear reactor of pyongyang. (of course, children are advised not to try this at home)

it's frankly exhausting, i tell you.

2 friends down recently. if you guys know jiaxin, please pray for her. she went cycling at ECP on monday with my og kakis, fell near the jetty, sustained a small abrasion, and thought nothing of it (like anyone else). unfortunately, her hand swelled up yesterday and she's got some apparent cutaneous sensory loss over the thenar eminence of the affected hand (laymen's translation: hand numb la) so her gp toddled her off to A&E. tried smsing her but hasn't replied - must be tired and caught up in the wonderfully efficient hospital admissions processes. hope it's nothing serious and praying that she recovers soon! (can't help but remember the recent case of that old man who got necrotizing fasciitis but it wasn't the burkholderia pseudomallei the TTSH guy told us about last time. but she wasn't running a fever so that was a very reassuring sign, or rather, lack thereof)
also if you guys know alvin as in the bermuda triangle alvin tan, please pray for his speedy recovery too! he's gone down and out with a viral gastritis (sounds like it to me - note to alvin: food poisoning usually presents afebrile, 12-24hrs onset, double-ended evacuation. viral GE on the other hand usually presents febrile, sudden onset, lasts a week, and can be either end limited or both ends, in which case you'd be just about as dehydrated as a slice of bakkwa and you'd be admitted already.) but anyway he's on the mend now (read: not hugging the toilet bowl) and he's trying to hold down his fluids, so if anyone has a good suggestion for poor old nauseous alvin go sms him :D i was sorely tempted to tell him to not drink at all if he's still puking, but then i remembered that i could afford to do that cos i had a drip then. if he did that in his current state i'd be liable for culpable homicide :P he must be looking as white a a vampire, which probably matches his vampire-ish hair very well but it's bad form to poke fun at sick people :D haha sorry pal.

ah wells. see? decadent lifestyle of liberated medical students - see what freedom does to us. perhaps we'll all really be better off, less whiny and healthier thriving under the constant stresses of committing snell into our heads :D

bets of luck to all my exam-ing friends! and shoo if you're still reading this! :D go study!!

gloamy. not gloomy. gloam.

2007-04-21T09:29:00.000-07:00

my cbox is not working. boos~ am gloamy.

next week's itinerary:
monday - veg out day. fasting for prayer mtg tml.
tuesday - to school! results. find korneh. buy butterflies. 2.30pm meet slummi monkey. to jeryl's house to rock the foundations of our faith to a higher level.
wednesday - hacienda.
thursday to friday - serene and sarah and jess for shopping, pigout, book shopping.
saturday and sunday - tuition

riveted by the moon just now on the car-ride home.

the sliver of cold sterile
moon
sliced down
into the tangibly
fudgy
pliantly
homogeneously
quietly but squishily, and holey yet confoundedly, compactedlybreathinglyconchordantly
night sky.

it wasn't pulsatile
nor did it remind one of a serial killer's accomplice
stalking and skulking
keen and eager
panting, leering and spewing spittle
ready to draw
lifeblood from innocents -
no.
it was passive and unobtrusive
just sitting there quietly
not really doing anything. but it was poised like a devil's feline
i could measure its aeon-distance from me
but oh
it could, it could
lean down just a fraction

and suck me into its essence
it was so close.
i would be here just one moment
and
gone.

i can feel my soul
trying to huddle a little closer into the seat
perhaps it could meld into the staticky dusty fibres
and escape the naughty moon's gloating stare.

so there it hung on the thin but chowdery sky
gazing at me by the glint of its
wicked little knife eye
the rim of intent cuts through me
and makes me shiver

somewhere
i think i hear its cackle-

i quite like this. instead of typing it into my hard disk, i've decided to make this public property so that you guys can share (hopefully) the momentary panic i felt of the moon slicing me into half. haha. so this won't go into my Great Big Ambitious Planned Anthology of Poetry. haha :D

liberation

2007-04-19T00:04:00.000-07:00

i thought liberation would be sweet!

now i know it tastes astringent and not nice at all. a little gloomy, a little frustrating, very very exhausting, very brainless.

suddenly remembering what mr melv said: when a person uses cliches, s/he stops thinking.

haha i think i've reached another zenith in achieving the status of brainlessness.

had a dreamless slumber last night for the first time in weeks. nobody chased me in my sleep, i didn't see any broken limbs, and for once the term "nephrogenic diabetes insipidus" didn't make its entry into my dreams. for i had none to speak of. hahaha~~~ *loud guffaws of victory*

denise told me to enjoy my sweet freedom, sweet presumably cos i've hankered after it ceaselessly for the past don't know how many weeks, and freedom because, apparently, the only tangible chains of reinforced iron and steel clad on my ankles and prohibiting my free expression for the past weeks had been academic work. i shall try my best ma cherie! but to be honest, i don't like how it's started today.

woke up late for the online discussion for vcf med retreat games. but thanks and full kudos to my poor partner, discussion completed at 1400hours. so now i have to source for the materials required for the games tomorrow right after i finish my business online.

Have to pack bag for the camp tomorrow. thinking of how i have to wake at 8am to give tuition at 9.30am on saturday, followed by a mad-hatter's trip to ngee ann city, really irks me. holidays aren't meant to be so breathlessly hectic... where're my novels? where's my cool music? where's the comfy sofa and the nice think ice cold milkshake?

i feel like i've been freed from slavery to books into a binding negro-hood to the mundane, nitty gritties of life.

am adamant in getting my books. i know i have to give tuition to my brother at 8pm tonight. so i shall finish up my mail clearance, get my bag and materials packed, make a few necessary phone calls, and go to the library.

i guess the only sanctuary i shall have for the coming week at least shall be only in the hour before bedtime when i can curl up in bed with beautiful masterpieces of verbal art.

sigh... oh well. and i am still amazed by how 3 guys contacted me by tagged today, asking for my number. i didn't know any of them!

so, so, so unholiday-ish.

bemoans

2007-04-03T08:50:00.000-07:00

i have no discipline.

started off today wanting so much to conquer all of anatomy and start on my physio. the well-wishing attempt started off benignly enough, with me lagging a mere 15mins behind schedule.

lunch: glass noodles, mushrooms, *what the **** no vegetables!* and 8 slices of paper thin squid masquerading as abalone. toss everything into a vaguely piquant (if u'll just bear with me on the stretch of imagination here - anyway stretch is usually by the aortic and hypogastric autonomic plexuses and lead to referred midline-ish pain)

postprandial stupor: jerlyn told me to watch tom and jerry vcd with her. one episode led to another and before i knew it, i'd lapsed into the land of senseless slumber for yet another 4 hr long stretch. drooled on the floor and on my sleeve, poised elegantly as a slab of twee bak for all and sundry see with the option to purchase.

beating myself senseless seemed a little masochistic for my tastes, so i vented my frustration on 1000 skips on the rope.

in retrospect, i have been particularly susceptible to fatigue recently. didn't use to be a problem for me, an alien to the concept of an afternoon nap. right now if anyone were to ask me to stay awake in the afternoon, i'd say the odds of me complying would be about as high as chee soon juan being elected prime minster at the next elections. mental note: sleep lab investigations warranted? mental dialogue commences with the rational other-self saying that i'm just displaying all the classical signs of med student hypochondriasis. issue KIV-ed in denial as i trudge through the next day fighting the wanton temptations of the elusive nymph called sleep. what do people actually DO in sleep? do they grow? do they heal faster? what IS it about downtime that makes it so lucrative and so necessary? why does my body demand so obnoxiously for so much sleep?

thinking of fat people dozing off inadvertently. but i've lost weight. a lot of it actually. that my tutee mentioned last week that i look "just normal" reaffirmed that i don't have a concav-ing mirror shipped in and installed surreptitiously in my cabinet from the Tent of Mirrors while i was indulging in my latest hobby - yes, sleeping. rapid loss of weight leading to lethargy? didn't happen last time before the plateau. jap studies indicate that those who sleep less than 7hrs are likely to fall sick. those who sleep more than 7hrs ARE most likely already sick. on average i currently sleep 10-12hrs a day. that's HALF a day SPENT UN*freaking*CONSCIOUS.

gripped by a blazing urge to buy as many cartons of caffeine tablets as i can find without setting off a lynch mob of caffeine tablet addicts. (i don't drink coffee. sets off the IBS haha.)

i don't know why i'm sitting here talking about sleeping. or about the miserable state of my life. or the upcoming exams. or my desire to change some aspects of my life. some temporary, some permanent, all lucrative.

i'm quite a self centred person, no?

have to reset my focus. have to get back my drive. have to remember the things i've read *!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!* have to... pass the exams. *tsk* so... cumbersome.

i think i've been misjudging Somalia for some time now. i've grossly underestimated the sheer level of despondency. caught stumbling on the oleaginous, precipitous edge of horror when i saw the pictures of the starving, of the dead. i don't have the rights to reproduce the pictures here, but if you have time after reading this, do pop over and perhaps, after that, u'll find renewed vigor in living your life in cozy and affluent singapore. at the very least, u'll wish u'd never taken the name of such a wretched place in vain because it really pains your heart to... i don't quite know how to describe it.

the pictures redefine the meanings of poverty. of hopelessness.

it's like walking into a surrealistic installation where the true leap of faith is believing that what u're seeing is real. you can't believe it cos you've never seen anything like this. on the other hand, it's so compelling. it's like how people slow down and gawk at fatal accidents. we know it's horrible, we know it's grievous, we know it's carnage and gore and the substance of nightmares. but we look. cos we have to. it's a human instinct... the horrors of it cry out so shrilly that not looking hurts, and u'll keep pressing the next picture button.

i'll leave you to judge what you want to do with your life, or perhaps even in the lives of others, after you see the pictures for yourself.

http://www.jamesnachtwey.com

go. if you feel your life sucks, just go and read the site. i hope it'll help to inject new faith and love into your life. it's not the panacea for depression, but it's an effective reverse psychology vehicle.

new pictures... a brand new cycle of ethereal beauty

2007-03-26T08:03:00.000-07:00

hellos people!!!!! gosh how happy i am to be able to blog once again *strips masking tape exuberantly off my lips* yay no more computer ban! well until the end of this week, that is.

i have so many pictures to share... i think i'll probably be here till AD3056 if i were to attempt to give a worthy caption to every picture, so i'll leave these eloquent pixels to talk to you as they have talked to me - by capturing those timeless moments of my life, i now present them to you!

oh before i do all the attach picture thingies... a quick run down of the amazing love in my life since i last blogged (in the middle of prep for CAs):

1) God has blessed my family with a brand new, coochie-coo, Johnson-and-Johnson-shampoo smelling little bundle of joy with 46XY chromosomal complement! i'm pleased to announce with great aplomb the much anticipated arrival of baby Luke aka xu hao xiang (yes, yes, another one of those immeasurably difficult chinese names that even the baby can't write properly by K2) - this little baby, named after a great book of the Bible and after the legendary luke skywalker (his dad is a star wars fan), has fallen in love with me! yes i declare it. he is MINE so shoo shoo all you dirty meathooks :D haha. nobody could please him except my heartrending rendition of rockaby baby :D do u have any idea how absolutely XING FU it is to watch a baby yawn and fall asleep in your arms? he was blinking and gazing up at me non stop even when all e other aunties were clamouring for his attention - now that's what i call great charisma, people. (sign up for NANA's course in baby attention capturing at any NANA-tic counters, S$48 for 2 hrs) i am so so so so so going to have my 5 kids. let's see anyone try to stop me hahahaha~ *manic laughter*

2) God has also brought together in holy matrimony 2 very beautiful people, Hsiao Yuen and her spanking new hubby, Mr Edwin Hong. i was extremely touched and inspired by how they made God the very centre of their relationship and their wedding on Sat... indeed that is nothing less than what every Christian child of God should aspire for - a strong partner who has first an unshakeable foundation in his/her love for God and faith in the Gospel, then a love and passion for things on earth. so despite my very wonderful phone not being able to zoom up close to the bridal couple, let me assure you that the bride was one of the most beautiful ladies i've ever contemplated. as the bridegroom rightly put it as he thanked his new mum and dad (in law), Hsiao Yuen was indeed a very beautiful bride that day.

3) and thank God for rara, steph, and the 4 quasimodos of the lab! (just kidding, really. dun kill me!) i had a great, great time after the wedding, even if we didn't watch a movie. in fact, i really liked the coffee session more than any movie. and yes, a foot spa is GREAT rara! next time i'll wear open shoes and get beautiful toes like yours! :D

2007-03-08T23:03:00.000-08:00

have to take a break. need a breather from all the insane, mindless mugging... it's gone far, far beyond the call of reason, to the point that i was tangibly asphyxiating in the thick gelatinous glut of details, sea upon sea of swelling details, none of which i recall after i wake from the numb semiconsciousness i call studying.
my release lies in my friends. the tight circle of good people who love God with me, and who cheer me up (to no end) and encourage me with little hissed GAMBATTEs when the going gets tougher than i thought i could ever be. i report to school every morning, and begin the solemn pilgrimage through the ruins of time that no living Man dared tread till now. referring, of course, to the darned notes, and the textbooks, all clamouring to engorge themselves with the most mundane, irrelevant and useless details. can you imagine how difficult it is to sustain life in such a harsh environment? picture a barren desert of scorching sun and malevolently swirling sand, blurring your vision and choking your throat till every breath you take becomes an uphill task, and all this while you cannot even begin to imagine the release awaiting you at the end of this synthetic tormenting landscape. nothing but a monotonous repeat of sand and sun for as far as your ailing eyes can see and your exhausted mind can comprehend.
i'm starting to just imagine what Jesus had to go through during His 40 days of fasting and resistance of Satan's temptations.
i was just telling slummi yesterday about me and my weaknesses when it comes to asking for God to intervene in my life... i'm the exhortion for permissive will kind. haha :D it just makes me LOL everytime i think of the recent misadventures i've unwittingly traipsed into, only to find out it didn't work out as well as planned but nonetheless i've still emerged unscathed even though every one was a harrowing near-miss, and it just strikes me that i am so freaking blessed that i could possibly try sprinkling some fine colored dust above my head and VOILA! you guys might just see a permanently attached angel hovering over my head, having an aneurysm and gastric ulcer from the constant stress of having to protect me from my madcap attempts at being a hero. i'm a pretty dumb little girl. i think i'm smart, or maybe at times i think i'm pretty much invincible. but then i don't realise what i do is really because God allows it to happen. brings to mind the story of how the little fieldmouse terrorized the entire forest into being afraid of it, simply cos it was walking in front of the fearsome lion. the little fieldmouse thought it was great and capable and awesome, but if the lion just deigned to step aside for a moment, you can just imagine what the dinner menu for the forest creatures will be for that evening.
i really need to get back into the habit of... i really need to thank my God. my Father. sometimes it's hard, but i believe that as long as i put in the effort to build a solid foundation for my faith, i wouldn't need the "1m tall stuffed toy Jesus" i asked slummi for yesterday :D problem with me lies in that i'm too engrossed in things of the moment and i tend to need tangible things to move me. isn't this the case for so many of us nowadays? our hearts are cold and weary and we simply turn on the default cynic mode whenever it comes to matters of the heart. by matters of the heart i refer to all the love in our lives - not just the smoochywoochy kind. includes family (asking myself: when was the last time i kissed my father? when was the last time i praised my brother? when was the last time i didn't automatically divert all my sister's requests to the maid? when was the last time i felt thankful for them in my life? was it only because of times of need or in times of ill health or difficulty that i turn to the Lord and grovel wretchedly before Him for Him to bless us all? doesn't that make me my world's worst hypocrite?) and friends (when was the last time i didn't remember someone's birthday only after a reminder? when was the last time i met up for a good heart to heart talk to ask about the lives of my closest friends? when was the last time someone told me i was valued in his/her life?). i've lost my eloquence and i've lost the ability to express myself articulately, with confidence, when compared to before. it's something i mourn and something i want back in my life... but more than anything else, if i could have just one thing on earth, is to have love for everything. i want to shed my coat of self-engrossment and passing impressions. i want to experience every moment of my waking moment in rich mode, i want to feel every single fibre of my emotions. i want to stand in the cold rain in the night and sing out loud and feel my tears run down my face. i want to throw away all the meaningless fights for status or popularity - i want to live my life my way and let that, by the grace of God, be the NANA that my friends recognize as a friend, confidante, mentor, kaki, sister... the list, i believe, is inexhaustible.
i want to be held as i cry out every single last drop of anxiety and resentment in my soul. i truly believe crying is cathartic, but being an asian it seems rather unacceptable to weep your guts out in public. no matter - i can denounce my race for the chance to be cleansed of the ghouls in my closet. the one thing i won't denounce is my citizenship in heaven! haha ^_^ well, of course. there's no 2 ways about it, and even if there were (well there IS cos God gave us the choice of life and death) i have only one choice.
even as i type this so many songs of worship are flying through my head and i can't help but share snatches of it with you all before i end this post and return to my world of mugging:

our God is an awesome God/He reigns from heaven above/with wisdom, power and love/our God is an awesome God
one way/Jesus/You're the only one that i could live for/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
You are my shield, my strength/my portion, deliverer/my shelter, strong tower/my very present help in times of need
so here i am to worship/here i am to bow down/here i am to say that You're my God/You're altogether lovely/altogether worthy/altogether wonderful to me
Jesus i believe in You/and i would go/to the ends of the earth/to the ends of the earth, for You/alone are the Son of God/and all the world will see/that You are God, that You are God

there are so many more that just makes me so happy i could die right now thinking of God and His love... i'm suddenly struck by how poor i was without Him in the past. haha. now i'm rich and "my soul is satisfied as with the richest of foods" (from a psalm but i've forgotten which one).
oh and my aunt is, even as i type this, in the midst of her first delivery... and we're 15 days away from witnessing the holy matrimony of one of my best colleagues from the lab. the pain of the world and the sufferings would never cease until the day Christ comes again to take away all pain and sorrow, but i think the celebration of life and joy even in our lifetime will snub Satan's futile attempt to wreak havoc... so i thank God for giving us happy thoughts in the midst of sadness, and for giving us the joy of knowing Him, and most of all, for the privilege to lean upon Him when we're weary.

it's 3.47pm and i will be gone from this place until the exams adjourn briefly next week, so till then, i pray that you will be well blessed with good health and good cheer :D

CNY pictures~~

2007-02-19T18:09:00.000-08:00

as promised, without any further ado...................

this is me in the car, en route to lohei dinner on CNY II haha! i'm wearing a purple empire cut dress (yes, again) with a generous bodice cut. it comes with a black and white striped belt at the empire-dress-line (what do you call it, LEH-nana???) yes. it's not a good idea to wear tight dresses with belts cinched so high up to a buffet ala carte dinner, but then again it helped me eat less than half of what i normally would. so basically it was money spent on ambience, not food consumption. haha~

these 2 very pretty ladies are the queen and princess of the tan household. so everyone bow down and pay obeisance to them! haha~~ my mum was decked out really hip-ly in this off shoulder top with silver accessories (the necklace comes with the top) plus a pair of lacey black mid-calf tights. i lent her my funky silvery chinky belt and everyone said she looks really good (haha thankews, thankews) so now i'm her officially appointed Maid of the Royal Bedchamber cum Fashion Consultant. Little princess jerlyn has got teeny rosettes in her hair, which was done up in a pair of intertwined french braids. too bad i didn't take a picture of that - it's really sweet.

these 2 shuai ges are my dad and bro! now hear this... everyone said my bro is a DA SHUAI GE!!!!! (and yar, i'm a mei nu now but that's a blatant lie) too bad miss shereen l*** has got first dibs on this hunkilicious babe magnet, so back off, girls :D if only he's take off those darned glasses to zap more females in the vicinity. hello he's got thicker eyelashes than me!!!! (not fair) i've got another shot of my dad leaning towards my bro's face (ahem) but that's gonna be a private collection for my kakis :D viewing upon request! i'd say i can see a little of what made my mum fall in love with my dad from this pic... according to the old pics, he's quite the don juan...

princess NANA and princess jerlyn! i love this pic~~~~~~~~

and the dinner wouldn't be complete without a quan jia fu (ahem the phtotgrapher is yours truly so obviously i'm not in) but even without me i must say i really, really love this photo. except the funny mouth expression on my dad's lips that makes him resemble a sucker fish.

And now the nian chu yi (CNY I) pics!!!!!

3 piglets in the back of the car. da shuai ge is having another recurrent episode of frozen zygomaticus major and levatore labii superioris again, as we all can tell :D his depressor angularis seems to be working fine though. partial section of the facial nerve perhaps??? :) little miss piggy stuck in the middle... sigh another one growing to look like me and IOH will be kept in business infinitely by my family. my mum is forever hip! haha. she's wearing a semi-lucent purple top with a tube inside, with jeans and a low-waisted belt, in accordance with what fashionistas all over the island are sporting.

SHHHHHHHH don't disturb the driver or else he'll veer off the road and we'll kenna horn again. haha ^_^

my mum says i look a little like belinda lee in this pic. could have something to do with the way i drew up my eyes... honestly i look better in pictures.

mr cool is smsing you-know-who.... just look at the way he's concentrating so hard on his phone i think the screen might spointaneously evaporate ^_^

one final pic~ haha do we look ai mei???

CNY post~~!

2007-02-18T05:19:00.000-08:00

a very very happy lunar new year to one and all~~~~

*cue the very sickening "xin nian lai lo~(dongdongdongCHIANG) xin nian lai looo~~~ song*

in case any of you darlings have been ensconced on the internet for so long that you've lost any semblence of contact with good old planet earth and mediacorp's immensely nerve-twitching series of CNY MVs, here's my 2 cents' worth on some of the more memorably irritating clippets that were produced with the good intention of bringing good cheer. first up to bat is "ah jie"'s rendition of some nauseatingly jarring song filmed in (i think) the orchid gardens. the song was already very very awful cos of the discordant repetitions of the same 4 words (my bro pointed that out), which, incidentally, can be a trigger for people with grand mal seizures. haha i can just imagine some poor sod twitching on the ground doing tonic/clonic hiphop moves to the migraine-inducing beat of the song. what made it worse was that she was decked in a really awful ancient-dynasty-red-lantern-like swath of red cloth that showed off a sadly barely-existent chest. furthermore she wasn't doing anything in the entire 5mins but bending down to, i gather, show off what is apparently hallucinatory material, and grinning idiotically at the camera, thus showing off very clearly what she probably didn't want to show off - her paired medley of fishlines. my dad was GROANING all through the song... haha :D second place is tied by quite a few songs. actually according to NANA there's just one very very very bad one, and the rest aren't too far off. haha. there's the song by all the female hosts of reality shows (with quan yi**** decked in a completely, shockingly, breathtakingly yellow jacket that screams DISCORDANT against the outfits of all the rest), there's this "good attempt" one by the newbies where 4 young people who look very photogenic push their faces up against the camera and make distorted, almost pained faces at the audience in an attempt to come up with creative poses all through the 5min long MV where there's nothing to do, no plot no script no nothing, save for 4 large circles drawn on the ground to mark where they have to permanently plant themselves before contorting their beautifully made up faces at the people of Singapore. and for miss fann ****'s MV, it was indubitably a nice and calm and relatively well done one save for the very blatant fact that it serves as her personal xie3 zhuan1 ji2... the point here being that she's the real caldecott queen now and everyone else, you guys can just stand to one side and stop whining about the hot sun at your photoshoot areas even as we all witness how the beloved queen capers merrily around a well shaded glade somewhere in ulu-ulu reservoir. smothered in spf 550 sunscreen, no doubt.

oh LEH was saying that we're all resigned to the very sad fate of being slaves to fashion unless we "live in a nudist colony"... i found that statement vaguely disturbing cos i tend to conjure mental images to fit what i encounter in words, and somehow the concept of me cavorting around nude in the midst of others doing the same is simply... very disturbing. yes. especially when my brain gives me the mental image in slow-mo. heh >_<"' anyway. so being the purported fashion slave i have to be (given that i choose to be anything besides a nudist), i glued my eyes to the TV last night over CNY eve reunion dinner to see what the artistes were wearing. if you guys were as sober and astute as me (heh - own up... how many hungover today???) you'd realise that 1) they put christopher lee and zoe tay together, then let fann drag christopher lee's little finger all the way down the stairs... TSKTSKTSK, 2) most of the female artistes wore empire cut dresses YESYESYES!!!!! (NANA bought into the empire cut bandwagon too! haha see i HAVE taste ok.) and 3) WTH were those 4 electronic pigs doing demolishing the cones on stage and wasting like, 5mins of airtime??? the point of the game was entirely lost to me, especially when i realised i was laughing not because the game was even remotely entertaining, but rather my sadist streak was showing up after i witnessed the immense difficulty 8 people have in controlling 4 metallic pigs (they were actually breaking out into sweat, God help them). my relatives were pretty clueless as to why i was laughing so much, so they looked collectively at the screen and suddenly i've reduced the entire tan household to TV gogglers for 2mins until they realised that it was really not funny at all and that i was either mad or severely inebriated (the former was right).

haha. oh well. oh my friends are all suddenly popping up on msn! :D if i have time i'll post some pics of me and my very photogenic family up here, right now my phone's dead and charging (CLEAR~~ 360 volts!!!!) haha :D

cheers all ya dudes and dudettes~ and go easy on the beer/bubbly haha!

2007-02-16T06:45:00.000-08:00

it's been a whirlwind of activity these past few days - i'd be mad to try to describe them by words, knowing full well the sad limit of my linguistic capacity. here's some memorable pics which require no addition of clumsy accolades from me... they speak VOLUMES ^_^

a little hiccup

2007-02-09T01:02:00.000-08:00

hi all.

a short reprieve from the usual contemporary, pseudo-chi-chi, retrospective posts. let's talk about something else than the usual moan and groan about schoolwork (though i'm itching to do so). can't think of anything offhand besides the upcoming valentine's day (kornehwoman..... look at the look on your face....) and my sojourn in hospital for the past week, and how i survivied day one back in school today.
let's not talk about hospitals... i've had enough of them to last me for a while without breaking out into massive urticaria-ish little red histamine-mediated bumps. (say that in five seconds and i'll give you a prize)
valentine's day it is then. sitting here instead of sleeping (as I should, i know, and fool is the one who bemoans the lack of time to sleep in one's usual life but slovenly mistakes blessedly given sleeping time as blogging time) and pecking away at my keyboard with 2 stubby fingers... remarkedly unromantic.
am dreaming of dinner in a very very exclusively 2-people kind of space, with clean, white tablecloth, fresh, succulent red petals from a freshly plucked rose scattered over the fine linen, and 2 tall wineglasses of sauvignon blanc with the glass stems beaded with dew from the cold chilled wine. me in a nice, semi-casual little black dress and managing to look half-civilised. and my partner opposite me in a nice, no-tie full-sleeved shirt and pants, and smiling. we're bathed in nice, ambient warm lighting and soothed by nice classical music. (not stupid, jerky, repetitive plays of weird, cheesy drama theme songs)
the appetizer arrives. it's a salad of nettled greens and purples, bursting bittersweet juicy goodness within every leaf. a generous vinaigrette of apple cidar and basil-tarragon with the merest hint of pepprcorns adorns the salad greens bashfully. there's no thousand island sauce to be seen. a delicate silver skewer pierces a full broiled prawn (NOT half a miserable prawn) and an understated, thick curl of smoked norwegian salmon, the entire thing balanced precariously on the salad. we plunge our salad forks into the quivering tower and tuck in.
next is the hot soup. it's a puree of carrot, tomatoes and peas in double chicken stock, accompanied by hearty chunks of chicken breast and miniature cubes of carrots. Fluffy, hot mildgrain bread comes together with the soup, and lots of creamy butter to go along with it.
the waiter approaches the table and asks him for permission to serve the merlot. he tastes the full-bodied wine, lets it linger in his mouth for a while, nods his head slightly, and allows the waiter to pour for both of us. we sip the wine and smile across the table wordlessly.
the service is seamless and impeccable. the entree arrives almost immediately after the soup disappears. we're sharing a single main course, and it's a full rack of lamb in herb-mint sauce. the cut of lamb is almost incredibly generous, as thick and large as a pair of clasped hands. the centre is barely touched by the grill, retaining a tiny ooze of red goodness. the outside is perfectly seared and glazed with plenty of herbs, and the entire dish comes served in a miniature pool of consomme sauce that has been broiled for 10 hours. the aroma is indescribable. he cuts effortlessly into the lamb and the meat falls apart with the slightest teasing, releasing a puff of steam and the earthy, garden-filled, beautiful smell of hours of tireless marination. he places a mouth-sized morsel onto his fork, puts sauce on it, and feeds me gently. i skewer a baby carrot from the side, pat pure sour cream onto it, and feeds him that. we're both taken by each other and thoroughly engrossed in the amazing textures and flavors in our mouths.
we leave the merlot and go on to the rose wine. it's a beautiful vintage and extremely flavorsome in its fruity bouquet. we each take a sip, glance at each other, and kiss each other on the lips as the passion of the moment demands. i can taste not just the wine, but also his cologne and the minty aftertaste of the lamb. it's a very complicated and attractive flavor, and i can't ever forget it. he puts his head at my neck and breaths in the hint of perfume i'm wearing. we both can't wait for dessert.
it arrives. it's a hot chocolate cake, hollowed out in the centre and filled to the brim with melted chocolate of the best quality. i do the honours of cutting the cake open, allowing the bosom full of dark sin to flow out unadulterated onto the pristine white dish adorned with a single sprig of mint. the soft cake yields without much resistance to the sea of chocolate, and i hurriedly scoop a huge mouthful and offer it to him. he reaches out a hand and holds mine, and chocolate drips from the cake onto the white tablecloth like ebony blood. he lowers his head and bites off half the piece of cake on the fork, and when he looks up his lips are dark with sweet, sweet temptation. i cannot resist and lean over to lick it all off, slowly. we ignore the cake, still dripping, on the fork, which slowly falls to the table.

ok i'd better not write the last part of this story... it might get a little too steamy for the little girls reading this haha :D ahem. but i hope it helps to conjure the image of a romantic valentine's for you, and it IS a good suggestion as to what you can do with your gf/bf this coming v-day! :D the story just gets you started... and the point here being, a good dinner is a very sensual experience indeed! try it if you don't believe me :)

the eternity in a minute

2007-01-25T06:57:00.000-08:00

3 minutes before i exit cyberspace, returning to the asphyxiating cocoon of reality where 47 pages of head and neck reading awaits prior to practical tomorrow.

tomorrow. haven't spelt this word in its fully unfurled, magnificent form since... i can't remember.

what can a person do in 3 minutes?

blog in an incessant monotone about completely irrelevant, unimportant, useless things. conjugating unhappy verbs and adjectives and nouns into a marriage of convenience and wanton need.

save a life. commence life-giving CPR, apply defibrillating shocks to a V tack heart. telling someone on the verge of irrescindable despair that s/he is loved. that there is at least someone who cares enough to say that statement. that statement may prove to be the very very thin line between a moody, pensive person and a very dead person at the bottom of a block of flats.

make a lifechanging decision. go into ministry. go into prostitution. get saved by Christ. succumb to the tempations of Satan. redeem a life claimed by God. refusing the gift of life from God.

witness the birth of a new life. witness the death of innocence in a wild eyed, sweaty, frantic child-not-yet-adolescent 10 years old, scrambling with soured calves and pained knees away from the father, away into the corner of the squalid little one room flat, away from the terrible, terrible, oppressive reality that is child abuse and pedophilia. witness the birth of the same tormented soul that more than once attempted to cross to Satan's land, and witness the singing of the angels in heaven. witness the physical death of the blessed soul and know in your heart that he ascends to heaven to be with the Father, who loves him so much it pains the heart to describe, and infinitely more than what scarred and flawed humans can ever offer.

3 minutes. it's the line between life and death, condemnation and salvation, eternity and termination.

will you choose?

2007-01-21T06:58:00.000-08:00

instead of diligently wreaking my distal phalanges by pecking spasmodically on the keyboard for the magazine article, i'm blogging.
spent this weekend completely unproductively, eyes riveted upon the TV screen which was sending out, at 45minute intervals, episodic re-runs of War and Beauty. the uber-popular (a season ago) HK period drama chock-full of indescribably beautiful women wrapped like chicken pita tortillas in a sparingly thin carpet whilst being delivered to sleep with the emperor. i admired neither plot nor acting skills of the strong cast (for this drama series, both male and female leads won the respective prizes for the annual HK film festival) - instead, i drooled shamelessly over the irrefutably breathtaking costumes. as a child, i've never failed to be enthralled to awed silence by women's clothing that is deeply, unapologetically drenched in periodic drama and opulence. victorian garb is amazingly beautiful, the lace details an intricate web of dark deceit and a malevolent facade of demure innocence. elizabethan collars and farthingales intrigued me and held me captive for hours as i imagined court ladies sweeping regally and doll-like through the gilded arched entrances into glaringly lit ballrooms where princes of noble birth waited to kiss their perfumed and gloved hands. but most of all, i was entranced, in this drama, by the purity of the untained white fur muffs the court ladies held during winter. white has always held an inexplicable spell over me ever since i discovered the magic in a simple bowl of vanilla ice cream, in the soft breezing caresses of a pure white woolen towel, in the sheer heartstopping beauty of an unadulterated snowscape. white is magic - the universal language of purity, of innocence, of virtue, of virginity, of submission. of the last, i'm certain, lies the interest of more than a few men. i've heard of an urban legend spun from myth that mothers whisper to their bridal daughters on the wedding day: to wear white lace lingerie to bed on the nuptial night. it has been wildly speculated that men desire nothing more than to receive their maiden brides in a teasingly ironic spare garment of white, that they may henceforth lay claim on their wives by marking territory over the once white but now sullied lingerie of the virgin. this legend goes on from generation to time eternal, but as society grows one cannot but notice that brides nowadays would be no more likely a virgin on the night of marriage than any other random girl u'd care to pick from the streets (about 50% chance, that is, according to a very recent street survey of 227 school-going singaporeans), and that the preferred colour of intense seduction is now red and black, in varying ratios and area distribution (on the body, that is). i don't speak from personal experience, but suffice it to say that i'm well-heard on stuff like that. once again, one need not know how i know such unspeakable things... :D yet again, i feel that since physical intimacy is a phase of human life, let's face it. for myself, being a Christian, i hold true to the biblical truth that any woman who lays with a man before marriage is an adulteress and a sinful woman, so i'd rather withhold animal pleasure momentarily till marriage than be sent to a hot fiery place after death. (and that place doesn't sell buffalo wings, alright?)

been pondering how i haven't been performing for CA1. the crux of the problem lies in the fallacy of immortality - i've never thought i'd scrap passes. so now that the truth has faced me point-blank, i'm going to work hard. i'm really going to work very hard indeed. and i pray that God will just hear my prayers for Him to grant me peace of mind and discipline to do what i've set out to do. i also pray for friends, i thank God for friends He has granted me, for they have indeed shared in my woes and prayed for me even in my times of need and despair. and indeed, even as i step out and embark on volunteerism, working with patients on a firsthand basis, i pray that God will use this opportunity so powerfully as a guide for me to come back on the path that leads me to the fulfilment of my childhood dream. oh Lord to come and make me a doctor, even as i promise to work hard from now till the end of the exams. from today onwards... no more nonsense and gallivanting, no more excuses to watch tv, no more slacking. full steam ahead... no distraction shall take me from my promise, by the power of God. if i were to ask God to relinquish my enemies, as david's psalms so frequently beseech God to do, i pray that laziness and empty envy be entirely submissive to the Lord, that i will no longer fall under their evil charms to stray from my focus. Amen! :)

and also that i will have the chance to live out alvin's advice to me: to love for true love, not for a love borne of physical tension and empty reassurance, to love as though that love could tear me apart.

i believe he is the world's happiest man, and that his girlfriend the world's luckiest young lady. to live in the testimony of such unconditional love is indeed remarkable, especially in today's world of scepticism and distrust.

2007-01-15T06:56:00.000-08:00

NANA is uploading CIP article into yahoogroups. said CIP article loading is not something the faint-hearted should attempt.

haha.

*no energy for deranged laughter* anyway. deranged nowadays conjures up mental images of fluxes from a set point norm for extracellular fluids. aaargh. cappucino lecturer's gotten into my head and resided in my frontal cortex like an insidiously chipping woodpecker. quite an apt mental image, now that i think about it - my brain is composed of matter just about as dense as cheapo wood and has about as many neurones as your average coffee table (none).

you know, it's rather disturbing that i still can't figure out how it is that when there is hyperkalemia, there's acidosis. ok so there's high potassium. say someone eats a steak, has orange juice, and eats that sicko durian-banana-split monstrosity as afters. so WHAM huge load of potty into the GIT, unregulated intake. minus minor GIT secretions, massive potty load goes to the ECF. in regular cells, insulin promotes potty intake. so that's fine. extra potty goes to the kidneys. in the renal tissues, high potty facilitates tubular lumenal movement. which is in antonym-mic movement with hpluses. so potty goes to the lumen as secretions and hpluses go to interstitium and into capillaries. so there's an acid tide? eh why does it make sense here. no no no... erpz. i need to read that again and summarize the whole glorified blood vessel thing.

sigh. complicate your life by entering the wonderful bloody (i'm not swearing) world of kidneys.

need my sleep. family's watching nacho libre outside, CIP article refuses to load, and i've run out of inane potty assertions in physiological disturbances.

oh btw. photowhoring is supposedly this trend, cos one of my friends suggested putting my photo online would suddenly propel me to stardom like xiaxue. well i have no idea how this is supposed to help me to avoid social-pariah-dom (i think it'd probably backfire and work in the exact opposite way of the desired effect) but here goes nothing, just for those kind souls who read my blog and haven't met me since like, T-Rex last asked Bronchosaurus if he wanted to try the new vagetarian food place around the corner.

well nothing appeared. sigh. sucks, too. haha. today's my whiny day.

metamorphosis

2007-01-02T05:54:00.000-08:00

NANA declares, NANA needs a change.

change is constantly taking place in each and every one of us. Subjected to tangible and intangible forces, of nature of synthesis of pure imagination, we're being moved in many ways unseen, every moment of our lives.
some changes are good. they move us to find our inherently innocent and loving nature, seeking the beauty and purity within the myriad layers of dreary, grimy soot smeared tirelessly into a greasy, choking, endlessly noir facade onto our faces and bodies by the bad forces. the bad forces are those that find deceit, conceit, malevolence, vengeance and hatred in the deep dark corners of our very flawed human hearts. they pull out these fanged and clawed creatures of doom and put them on pedestals of our hearts and minds, clouding good judgement and blinding all faith. they sully the whiteness of innocence and demolish goodwill into crumbly debris nobody bothers to take a second glance at. they're gargoyles, but worse in countenance than the Lord of Gargoyles and all its twisted, deformed, wicked slaves. They come together in the shadow of dusk to form the mirage of the Evil One.

but they shy from light, and light is precisely what makes them draw away shrieking horrible curses and names and pledging eternal vengeance when, once in a very long and tired while, a beam of goodness shines out of the depths of our hearts, like a beacon of light from a lighthouse in search of its own salvation.

NANA wants to grasp these exhausted beams of light by the hand and pull them up, uP, UP! out of the binding of the dark and into the light where they should be.

i've never doubted the inherent goodness of people. for me, it used to be "good, unless proven otherwise." *to all my law kakis: sorry for unabashedly lifting this climatic statement from the courthouse!* after quite a lot of rather unsavoury events, i'm ashamed to say that i've since taken the much more cynical view of "potentially bad, unless proven otherwise." my dearest denise has borne the brunt of my many excursions on the pleasantly beautiful but brittle facades of people, and she has come around to this idea after some experiences of her own. i'm breeding little larvae of mistrust and cynicism here in young hearts, and can I rightly blame myself for being so?

who rebukes and chides the patient who refuses to take another mouthful of medicine, if it nearly killed him/her the first time round? likewise, who can stand up and say truthfully,"No matter how evil, distasteful, worthy of hatred and disgust anyone is, i'll never despise the person!" and bring this statement to its nadir, yes nadir, by adding,"And i'll turn the other cheek too!" the truth is, we all harbour varying unpleasant emotions towards people who have done us harm, both intentionally and unwittingly, be it mild distrust or the more extreme i-won't-give-up-till-i-hunt-you-down-and-tear-you-limb-to-limb-for-what-you-did-to-me. People who sanctify themselves by saying, no, they never ever get angry at anyone - blatant liars. they probably misfile their income tax forms, too.

NANA has the same problem. being a woman, i find that this is multiplied manifold. some women - i wouldn't go out on a limb and say all, lest i get lynch mobbed tomorrow morning whilst having breakfast - truly have a hard time forgiving. we're not even venturing into the arena of forgetting. i think it could be inherited, perhaps on a heritable mutation on the gene locus on chromosome X right next to the gene locus for the anally retentive protein, or ARp1. why? because my mum has the same problem as me. i'd say hers is a little more serious than mine, cos i am able to keep my resentment and cynicism in check most of the time. which is a little stretched for her, cos she has this rather unnerving habit of being a rather nasty little angry person, unleashing her pent up anger against others by venting all of it on her family. which means us. strangely, she is perfectly capable of treating the person who crossed her with utterly impeccable manners and fawning sweetness.

sometimes i shudder in fear of myself "evolving" into a prototype resembling hers when i'm older.

enough of this mindless jabber. my vocabulary is incredibly deplorable - i had no idea that my grasp of rudimentary english could deteriorate/decompose at such an alarming rate. they ought to issue half-live warnings with english classes, so that users may be aware of the danger of waking up one fine morning and being unable to form a complete, grammatically correct sentence in english without spending more than 5 minutes drooling incontinently beforehand. gone are my halcyon days of good english command. nowadays, i'd probably fall to the ground Hallelujah-ing if anyone said i spelt diminutive correctly. how very sad~~~

well i've got some changes lined up for myself... i even took the liberty of calling myself a Project Makeover finalist. Project this and Project that are all the rage nowadays, is it not? i've categorized my judging criteria into 3 broad aspects: spiritual, academic, physical.

Spiritual: Candidate fulfils criteria if she 1) follows the walk-through-the-bible-in-1-year project faithfully, 2) attends CG in church and VCF faithfully and 3) completes 40 day fast without any further interruptions.

Academic: Candidate fulfils criteria if she 1) studies conscientiously, without unwarranted and UTTERLY UNNECESSARY chat-breaks lasting more than 5mins each, from end of school to 7pm daily, 2) achieves at least 70% for subjects A and B and at least 80% for subject P in CA2, and 3) Passes all 3 papers at pros and does not need to take any subpapers or viva exams.

Physical: Candidate fulfils criteria if she 1) jogs at least 4 times a week, regardless of the day or frequency, with 40mins or more per session, 2) attains SUSTAINED weight loss of at least 1 kg per week, 3) maintains newly dyed and fixed hair in mint condition until CNY rolls around, 4) does not fall prey to any snacks or urge to break fast, or to munch indiscriminately, during assigned hours of fasting, 5) stay away from fried foods and canned drinks of any brand and any name, and 6) maintain good health and good studying spirits.

gambatte kudasai ne~~~~~~~!!! *pats my own back with considerable effort* ^_^

the centenial post

2006-12-23T07:01:00.000-08:00

here i am on the eve of christmas eve, nursing a huge jug of (steadily warming) cold water and trying to fool myself into thinking it's cabernet sauvignon from the rothschilds, and talking crap on the 100th post on my blog. absolutely thrilling.

rainy, rainy, rainy the past few days. feeling blanched like a spinach and humidified like a... ummm. whatever it is that gets humidified. anyway. doesn't anyone else get horrible headaches and toothaches from all the raining? yes i did say before, and i'll say again, that rain is my inspiration for many wonderful pieces of poetry. BUT nearly an entire week full of days fitted ass-to-head with torrential rain is simply asking for a well-placed boot in the butt. even my spinal column hurts... but that doesn't say anything. could be the 6hours i put in for trolling purposefully and predatorily up and down town, haha. in fact i'd wager my 2 front teeth on it.

speaking of teeth. had my wisdom tooth taken out last last saturday. interestingly, i really didn't feel the pain (again, friends who knew of how i shook off any notion of pain in the previous wisdom tooth extraction will now shake their heads in gloomy i-know-what's-coming) and being the perpetual pig that i am, i promptly went to sleep after hitting home. woke up about 2 hrs later with a feeling that could be described approximately as being near equivalent to having a red-hot electric drill going right at the gum bed and a team of sadistic, miniature pakistani diggers heaving enthusiastically at every single nerve fibre distributed around the left side of my bloody face. and bloody is also descriptively right besides doubling up as a profane word: i'd managed to dribble about half a cup full of reddish drool while asleep onto the bloody pillowcase. (in this case the pillowcase is bloody indeed, but an effect rather an a cause) oh God it was such horrendous pain it took every inch of my self-control not to break into drama-queen-sized weeping and/or croak intelligible, bloody-cotton-gauze-ish curses. in fact i was so stunned (like the proverbial deer in front of the stupid car headlights) by the magnitude of pain induced by the removal of a TOOTH (how deceivingly innocuous) that i curled up (withered is more like it) on the sofa, drooled copiously, and stared evilly with squinty eyes at anything that moved around my periphery. not that i was actually capable of SEEING anything anyway, cos it seemed that the pain was sufficient to blow out my optic nerve as well. basically i had the image of what my eyes saw but they totally didn't register. seriously. my dad wavered in and out of my vision field for about 3 times before i acknowledged his presence with a spurt of reddish saliva that was meant to signify "what???" and trying to take 6 pills with that amount of pain... warrants a check up at IMH. if you asked me i'd seriously vote for another hemicolectomy again in lieu of this freakishly masochistic procedure. how do people survive it? my reasoning is, at least they're polite enough to gas the HECK out of you for the period of time post-op when the pain peaks if you're smart enough to opt for the colon resectioning. i'm guessing that local prostaglandins, histamines and all that vasoconstrictory factors act to trigger the simultaneous release of neurotransmitters involved in pain (my fave leu and met enkephalins, endorphin inhibitors or antagonists) or ARE in fact neurotransmitters involved in a further symph cascade. ah whatever. adds to the pain of suffering, thinking about all these crap.

ah, enough hypochondriac-ish waffling. dreaming of the absolutely delicious dinner i'll prepare tomorrow for my family, after i dutifully discharge my responsibilities as a tutor *HUGE growl of frustration at being delayed by 2.5hrs from getting to cook Christmas dinner* anybody wants to hear the menu? :D

appetizer: garden salad served with sauted mushrooms and garlic croutons, hand-mashed potatoes american-style (meaning flavorfully herbed and buttered, with tangible chewy bits that you can entertain your teeth in instead of those sickly, watery, starch-granules-floating-in-water nonsense they call instant mash noawadays)

entree: choice of pasta with chicken alfredo, seafood cream or beef bolognese sauce, and macaroni with 4 cheeses for the kids, served with a bubbly crust of cheese, creamed broccoli and a stuffed baked potato on the side, drowned in sour cream, bacon and chives.

grill: hickory smoked lamb leg, and pork chops served with a choice of mushroom or sambal sauce. roast chicken and baked crumbed cod fillets. Imperial scroll - a medley of sukiyaki pork slices ensconcing dainty enoki mushrooms, in teriyaki sauce.

dessert: mini egg tartlets with custard sauce, or japanese style pancakes with red bean paste and hot chocolate sauce.

ahhhhhhhhhhhh. NOW THAT's MY idea of a Christmas dinner. *great big grin*

perfect 19~ age of immortality

2006-12-12T17:51:00.000-08:00

wanted a break from editing an article stiffly starched to 6 pages of recalcitrantly evil, unremitting headachey text. closing my eyes doesn't help, eating chocolate doesn't help, trashing the com doesn't help, and listening to the vague strains of an overtly, vulgarly ecstatic Barney rendition of "I Love You" in the living room certainly doesn't help.

suddenly brought back in a nauseating deja vu to the day I reported at CAP, and learning of the entirely cause-for-enthusiasm requirement that we are to cough up, or regurgitate, or physically sick up a poem entitled "The recalcitrant recidivist" by the end of the day.

the first thought through my incredibly diminutive (i still can't get the spelling of this word down pat) brain then was: what's recidivist? i turned to the innocuous young lady next to me (fellow camper, replete with 2 large duffel bags for a 3 day camp) and was about to open my mouth to ask when she abruptly bent down, took out pen and paper, and scribbled furiously. i loitered in her vicinity for the next 5 minutes pretending to be entirely taken with fascination by a remnant of spiderweb on the noticeboard, when she finished her spasmodic penmanship. i peeked. the paper (A4) was 3/4 filled, and the heading? You guessed it - The recalcitrant WHATEVERTHEHECKIT IS. instantaneous poetry - just add hot water and stir.

i had the option of fainting on the spot in awe of such blinding talent, or run screaming. i opted to escape into the nearest toilet and asked myself what i was doing in an abattoir where they specialised in slaughtering talentless pigs like me. the mirror didn't reply (how surprising), so i rejoined my group of brainy GEPpers, whereupon i introduced myself as the sole non-GEPper who got in by virtue of my dischordant poetry. and everyone nodded. in the end, it wasn't too bad, but trust me, the shock of entering the AGM of MENSA by accident must feel like that. or somewhat less shocking. haha.

i'm somewhat immortal nowadays. got back 2 results out of 3... i haven't died from the shock. no vagovagal reflex. no neurogenic syncope. no psychosomatic reverse peristalsis. scrapped a 58 pass in anat where the average was 65. physio was slightly, but not much, better off. the average was about 82.5, which is coincidentally what i got. rether expected, if you consider what i was doing in 15minutes prior to both exams.

ANAT: *me, frantically* hey, what's the perineal nerve? *bermuda triangle* comes from the pudendal nerve. supplies perineum blahblah. *me, more frantically* but where does it come from? the internal iliac nerve? *grace* there's NO INTERNAL ILIAC NERVE!!!!!!!! *me, perplexed* but i saw it just now... oh no don't tell me it's the artery... *mutters incoherently to myself hereafter in despair*

for information's sake, the pudendal nerve (roots S2, 3, 4) gives a perineal branch. And this elusive pudendal nerve doesn't come from any internal iliac nerve. it comes from the inferior hypogastric plexuses. sigh. so now we all know why NANA gets 17 wrong out of 40 punitive questions.

PHYSIO: *grace* why does the female have less RBCs than guys? *Me, in a tone of superior knowledge and confidence* NO, the GIRL has MORE than the GUY! we have to cos we menstruate! *grace, in great doubt* but that's the point... if we menstruate we have less right? *Me, still in cocky tones* no, feedback mechanism... *someone else quips* no, grace's right. girls have less. *me, shocked* huh? really??? but R&T says it's the other way around!!! *whips out notes to prove my point* there, see??? *jabs at the sign for female* see, males have less. *grace pouts* that's the FEMALE sign... (you brainless toot) *me, in a white-faced look reminiscent of a man about to be executed by firing squad* oh my....

and how i managed to get 82.5 will remain an everlasting mystery, not only to myself, but also to the professors. haha. well at least i can specialise in being The Anomaly. med people love anomalies cos it gives them the opportunity to publish. haha :D

was thinking of making a top 10 list. about what? don't know. haha. i'll improvise...

top 10 reasons why people want to be doctors (cos i've gotten YET another student who desires to be a doctor LIKE ME *shudders*):

1) the pay is, imaginably, perceptively, allegedly, DELUDEDLY, good. (people forget we begin our honourable career with a 100K debt stapled to our sorry butts)
2) the prestige is lucre to the superficials' ears. (i don't need to remind you all of the recent spate of homosexual and drug-addicted physicians, as well as the rise in inappropriate prescriptions that made patients turn black and expire in agony in the ICUs, leading to the need for topless relatives to protest vehemently in the lobby of SMA)
3) we can heal ourselves and give ourselves MCs. (then why are so many physicians dying early, and why are we so exhausted??? MCs my foot, unless u're referring to our ability to feed ourselves Big Mac's. which the less-exhausted-and-more-physically-and-mentally-able physicians are still able to do, but this optimistic sign deteriorates with age)
4) we bark orders to the nurses who scuttle away in fear and awe to carry out our every order. plus give us massages when we're tired from giving so many orders. (over my dead body. it's NURSES who give us the orders and WE who give massages. ha.)
5) we get to save lives like those top-rated korean, japanese, hong kong and, if we're desperate, mediacorp drama serials. (can someone please inform these deluded people that patients either wait for long enough in the A&E to heal themselves, or they expire. we just keep dashing around pretending we know what we're doing, while praying really fervently that the old uncle in bed 14 doesn't croak cos his distant relative's some bigshot partner in the hospital admin.)
6) we enjoy the best in life, with luxury houses, cars, 14 maids etc. (read: heads of department. married into socialite circles or came as a debutante/heir into medical school. struck lottery. if you're not in these 3 categories, you're a sorry, no-life, damned broke old maid/loser who can't afford enough 3-in-1 coffee mixes to last through the month)
7) the mention of doctor gives you priority treatment and unending reverential awe from people. (nowadays, people look at you like you're potentially gay, an addict, a malpracticing idiot, or an underaged liar when you mention that you're a doctor. and you're given priority treatment once in a while - at accident sites where they need a first aider.)
8) your parents stop nagging you to study harder so you can be like Ah-Seng next door, who went off to study law in Cambridge. (if anything, they nag harder when they see your deplorable grades, and YOU begin to WISH that you had the intelligence to go to cambridge like ah seng while you had the chance.)
9) you get more ang pow money. (token appreciation, read: S$2.00, for free 30min consultations for every relative during what i call the Chinese New Year rounds. bring your steth and sphyg to add to everyone's festive cheer but your own. if any consolation: you can freely dispense the recommendation that everyone cut down on bakkwa intake, which leaves you free to invade the entire plate)
10) we can wear white coats and look cool walking purposefully along hospital corridors. (white coats end up more vomit/crap/urine/blood stained than anything after a shift, and we don't look cool, we're just shuddering in fear of what the next patient would present us with. though the element of surprise wears off after a while after you get sprayed with vomit/blood/urine/feces YET AGAIN for the 90th time on any given shift.)

i'm making a comeback~

2006-11-18T22:38:00.000-08:00

it's really strange to tread in this place, a little corner of mosaic and spiced-air, a little bit of whimsical lace trailing in the dusty breeze, a little bit of black-sprayed wooden furniture too small to fit. a little world belonging to me in cyberspace. do people still call it cyberspace? it's so long since i broke out of my reverie into limbo, struggling to find myself in the mad chaos they call med school, finding so many kindred souls and tumbling around having fun wasting time mugging like hell together. i was so sceptical before i came in - the snobs, the haughty know-it-alls, the cliques, the outcasting of those whose limbs don't fit. the impossibly high moral standards that turned out to be only in significant parameters for those who take notice of it. having to seek refuge in the little haven soaked in phenol-chloroform tucked away in forgotten research link, my rara and my little cloud, my alex and my wc (who now has a girlfriend, or a girl whom he fancies, and the girl is a student of his, oh how SCANDALOUS for the man who was my ideal husband! but looking at his marvellously blissful face oblivious to rara's spilling of his secrets, i felt more than a tinge of envy for couples in love) and my little fishies. fishies get killed for research and tanks get replaced, but my love for the people who shared 8 months of my life with me will never change.

so many people have walked into my life without so much as an excuse me. some intrude, some peek in, some loiter and pace around my periphery, oblivious to my presence and my watchful eyes. some make a ruckus and camp in my cerebral tissue day after day, some fade away. some i try to snatch and hold on to desperately, but alas those are the wisps of memories that refuse to stay. i am thankful i can still write, albeit not as eloquently as before, not as emotionally as before. walking through 3 months of medical school has reduced my once flowing repertoire of cheem vocabulary to a thick starchy consomme. but who complains of a tasteful concoction of multiple flavors if it retains the purpose of its existence?

i've made so many new friends. i've fallen in love, unrequited love. looking at the man who holds my attention and feeling the keen call of my heart for him to notice. my heartbeats synchronise with my desire. i feel acutely the feelings of the heartbroken man whom i may have hurt, who may or may not one day stand up at my wedding, and look at me with sad eyes. i look into his eyes, those orbs that want to say to much but are silent. i am forced to look away, so that he doesn't see the tears that reciprocate his hurt. i pretend to be hardhearted. but who am i that i may judge him for throwing my life into manifold chaos, such rainbow colored entrophy it may injure the eyes to see. i am but the girl version of him, albeit totally silent. they say girls love guys in secret, and guys love girls in less secret. i pray to God to show me; i think He has, but i am but a fool, an ignorant fool who cannot read signs even if God brought them down right before my eyes. i am torn. i may be ambiguous, i may be friendly to all. but what they see of it is but personal interpretation. some take it at face value, others find me charmingly sweet. what can i say to the one who thinks i am leading him on?

i'm sorry.

i will not forget how i wanted to cry after he said he was lonely because of me.

i am lonely too. Seek refuge in the Lord. He is the best boyfriend ever. but how can i say that to a guy? Afterall God is a man. and we all know: thou shalt not engage in homosexual acts. muahaha.

found God, trailed away from the path, lagged. found God again. my friends are so amazing, and i find strength in their resilience. reminds me of this song:

love unfailing/overtaking my heart
You take me in/finding peace again
fear is lost in all You are
Jesus i believe in You/and i would go
to the ends of the earth/to the ends of the earth
for You

it's currently sitting at the top of the charts for me. humming it everywhere... bringing God with me. our God is an awesome God - portable! :D or maybe mine's just a really bad translation of the word omniscience. haha :D

missing the days when i used to curl up on the cowskin sofa and merging my big cow butt with the cowskin... reading a book. my favourite authors... whose prolific narrative skills have given their thoughts birth in the form of multiple titles. i'm itching to get at them, but CAs are in 2 weeks. i promise i will devour every single title i'm lagging in right after the last paper on the 8th of dec. watch out, NLB ^_^

lost weight, gained interest in jogging like a hamster on a wheel. overcame my disdain for people who slogged on a stationary machine and going nowhere. hiding in the comfortable indoors, seeking weight loss with the aircon gym and its quaint, lovely security uncle. he squints up at me whenever i call him, and i like it when he smiles at me benignly in return. i like to make people smile - i realise i have this penchant for igniting smile reflexes in complete strangers. it could be my bad teeth structure, it could be my flabulent lips. whatever it is, i never fail to incite people to smile back at me once i launch one of my own in their general direction. and it gives me a kick when i see them wander slowly away from me afterwards, wondering who the HECK i am. haha :D and of course, i get more ingredients, more chili sauce, better service, and a compliment on my manners whenever i am a good little girl. it really makes me very glad to make people happy, taking just 2 seconds out of their frown-soaked day to flex those smile muscles. people are so much more humane and radiant when they smile :D it doesn't cost me anything... and i can ride on the afterwave of their endorphin crest. it's a great thing to do for people around you today - try it!

ana carolina reston, a brazilian beauty of 20 years who works as a model, passed away because of anorexia. now i'm not going to say anything more about this but i know what i want if i had all the power in the world.

i would make everyone live happily. no more fighting. no more body dysmorphic disorder. no more bureaucracy holding up much needed aid to those who are lying in a squalid flat and wasting away from hunger. of course it's extremely flawed, my wish. make? that's against human rights - there are forever minorities of the population (who prefer to be called such rather than the politically incorrect weirdos) who refuse to live happily. and of course, making them happy would be a grievious abberration of basic human rights. and then the anarchists, whose happiness hinge on the misery of others. God must be having such a hard time... :P

that's half an hour with me. in the past half an hour i've spoken my mind... taken a break from studying... thrown aside my masque and simply written down my thoughts. blogging today didn't make me naked - it made me look at myself and go, wow. i had no idea i could still blog after so long. now it's back to mugging... today i'll be focusing on physiology. how our normal bodies work. it's beautiful, but i need to go past the details and look at the big picture.

someone asked me: how can it be that people in the elite schools predict they'll fail even before the test? i gave an answer. but i want to rewrite my answer here.

it's my way of protecting myself i guess. the more i tell myself that, the more i think it will actually happen. and when it does, the people who have heard me say that I'll fail will take it as i've already steeled myself for it, and i'll just tell myself - hey, at least i'll have an alternative career in fortunetelling :D

the fall of the OMELETTE

2006-09-29T07:44:00.000-07:00

one fine day, the EVIL omelette was taking a stroll through the Garden of Strong Swiss Cheese. As all EVIL omelettes do, it walked with its head (the frothy egg white bit) high up in the air and snorted superciliously at anyone who passed and deigned to sneak a glance at its awfully EVIL silhouette. it had a motley crew of capsicum bits, mushroom bits and the most fearsome servant of all, ONION bits trailing behind its glowering shadow of DOOM, waiting to fulfil and satisfy every whim and fancy that caught His Evil Lordship's eye (the EGG YOLK) with every inch and fibre of their obsequious, subservient (but secretly rebellious)... err... FIBRES.

TEO (the EVIL omelette): that pebble looks fat. it looks like a boulder.
servants (in nasal falsetto unison): YES ME LORD.
TEO: and sooOOOOO???
S: YES ME LORD. WE WILL ANNIHILATE THE BOLD BOULDER LIKE PEBBLE.
*massive groaning effort as the last capsicum bit hauls out the laser gun and passes it army drill style to the next in line until the (nearly sunburnt) onion captain got it and fired off a wobbly shot at the offending pebble*
*the shot misses*
TEO: FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLL!!!!!!
*grabs laser gun using its albumin-saturated ectoplasmic pseudopodia and fires an EVEN wobblier shot at the increasingly offending pebble*
*the shot misses and goes so damned wide that it turned back after 500m of flight (by some crap unproveable physics law) and went deep in the hypodermal fascia of our dearest EVIL omelette*
TEO: AHHHHHHH!!!!!!!! *^%& &*^^& (^%&$%$ ^%^^^ ^*()_%$!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(translation is unavailable owing to the use of overtly primitive and crude vulgarities, as well as the freaking ruling about the use of inappropriate language and defamatory statements (mostly concerning the state of one's sexual deprivation) on the internet)

now the servants decided that the King was weakened (by his own sheer stupidity, ahem, we meant ineptitude, errr, no scratch that. by his... indisposedness?? whatever.) and so the time has come to USURP the throne. and naturally the leader of the pack had first dibs on the gaping wide BUTTHOLE on the omelette's derriere, and it LEAPT RIGHT IN.

*START OF SHAMELESS PLUG* will the onion captain survive the oozy slimy innards of the fallen omelette??? will he drown in CHOLESTEROL and die a triglyceride, we mean, tragic death??? *end of SHAMELESS PLUG* carry on watching this space for more if you want to know how a ginger-and-white patched Hungarian speaking fox and a spoon with a constipation comes into this warped tale!!! :D

~the EVIL omelette: first of the many sagas~

2006-09-23T08:32:00.000-07:00

at the beginning, there was no light. there was only darkness.
and God spoke. "Let there be LIGHT!" His forceful voice reverberated throughout the galaxies and ramified throughout the many many subatomic particles floating aimlessly in antimatter (maybe cos they were trying to zone out after reading too much Snell). and so there was light, and all was bright, and God saw that it was good. (prior to that it was pretty hard to see anything at all :P)

and then there was separation of the land and heaven, and of the land came forth water, bountiful quantities of it to irrigate the lands of the future inhabitants of the land.

God smiled and saw that it was all very good. but there was no life. so God created the first man and the first woman (out of NOT the first rib, NOR the last rib of man, but from CHUNKS of the last 3 ribs of man, bilaterally, and taking most of the last 3 costal cartilages with it. why? cos the last 3 ribs are floating ribs, and dammit, if ribs were meant to float then what are we doing with luxury cruiseliners???) and this laid the foundation for future medical students as they recognized the law: Man will have chest pain, and the chest pain arises from Woman (cardiothoracic law of the Serene NANA). and God took pity on them as they had nothing to entertain themselves with (yes, no MVs, sadly) so God created animals. but the problem was, what to create first? there is, currently, gazillions of species of non-homo-sapiens cohabiting Earth with us, so it must have been quite a significant event in heaven when God moulded the first animal to share Man's inheritance of the land. God was ingenius. In fact, God was so omniscient and all knowing and powerful that he saw only ONE solution to the problem - he had to create an EGG. (so now we all know that eggs come BEFORE chickens. and that is the law of the Serene NANA - see the entry in the encyclopedia under miscellaneous laws and TALK COCK rules)

so there was an egg. it was ellipsoidal, and it was encased in a homogeneous layer of calcium carbonate, and it was porous. and all was good. Man and Woman came before the egg, and were amazed by its perfection. so for 3 days and 3 nights they gazed upon the egg with the utmost concentration.

at the end of the 3rd night, bordering on the 4th day's dawn, Woman turned to Man and said, "I've had enough." (in a tone that is miraculously preserved throughout the centuries and demonstrated in the Woman Who Watches 5 HOURS of EPL Direct Broadcast With Her Spouse)

Man took his eyes away from the egg and looked at Woman. He saw that they were becoming emaciated from malnutrition, and were beginning to exhibit the signs of kwashiorkor due to the failure to acquire sufficient essential dietary amino acids. This would lead to the downfall of Man (and Woman, for the rabid feminists out there) if nothing was done. Being primitively intelligent (simply cos there was nothing to compare their intelligence to on Earth at that point in time), Man looked at the egg in closer detail and found that the egg came with a piece of dietary recommendations datasheet, typed in Arial font size 6 (primitive Man's eyesight was probably good due to the need to hunt subsequently). and he saw that the egg was nutritious.

5 hours later, Man broke open the first egg, and cooked it on a hot stone while Woman watched. (this is basically reflected in modern househusband-run families, though the Woman component most likely doesn't stop at merely watching as a disinterested spectator anymore - add in nagging, complaints and condescending remarks as required.)

the freshly cooked egg was perfect in its colour distribution, with concentric peripheries demarcating the yellow (median) centre and the white (lateral) yolk. it was such a perfectly cooked egg that Man felt proud of it, and called it OMELETTE.

OMELETTE was an intrinsically nice egg, because it arose from God's desire to entertain Man. however, the stone on which OMELETTE arose from egg was tainted with EVIL tissue-factor-activated-Factor-7, and this caused coagulation, and the coagulation was a cascade, and this caused EVILNESS. the runny egg was oblivious to its impending doom and fall from grace into the abyss of HIGH CHOLESTEROL in the blasted land of Rhoades&Tanner Island, as it basked merrily and peacefully in the sun waiting to be cooked. when the egg was fully cooked, it found that it had metamorphosized into an EVIL OMELETTE, with an evil glint in the yellow edge and bubbles of congealed albumin along the periphery of the egg white of such BLINDING EVILNESS that it nearly rivalled that of the ONION PANCAKE's. (but this will come later)

and thus we have the EVIL OMELETTE. do you QUIVER in fear? do you SHAKE in fright? do you STUTTER in agony? ah, all you worthless minions, to be trodden underneath the EVILNESS of the OMELETTE, beware.

for the sequel is coming.

2006-09-07T23:51:00.000-07:00

haven't been blogging for nearly an aeon now... *huffing and puffing and choking on the dust floating up from the blog* speaks volumes about my ability to perform basal maintenance on my intellectual property. not that it's worth anymore than the dust coating it jealously, but then after all it used to be the product of my long-dysfunctional neurones ^_^

anyways. let's talk about my very eventful medical school life.

it's tough. it didn't seem to be overwhelmingly demanding when i first stepped into the lt for the first lecture of my med sch life, but fact has proven otherwise *in a hugely raucous manner to boot*. anatomy has been a breathtaking whirl of facts and minute details that threaten to drown those who Do Not Read Their Snells/Moores Before Pract. so what happens goes roughly like this for these unfortunately un-diligent denizens of m1:

*SIDENOTE* alvin, daryl and yihern shall henceforth be named TBT (the bermuda triangle, bound by The Yihern in the most inland corner and The Daryl in the outermost marine corner, with The Alvin making up the boundaries joing the above 2 constituents - why TBT is cos anyone normal who goes near them during anat practs invariable get LOST)

clueless guy/gal/me: oh. yay another exciting pract. *tries to breathe shallowly cos of the formalin fumes emanating from the preserved Once Living Human Bodies)
TBT: YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAY another EXCITING pract! time to DEMONSTRATE our superior intellecual powers, boys! *alvin gets too excited and starts choking on the fumes, but it doesn't dampen his enthusiasm a single iota*
me: *pokes flaccid muscle with my finger* so what's this?
TBT: if you look closely, this is the lateral border of the teres major which inserts in the inferior angle of the scapula, and directly above this along the medial border of the scapula you see the insertion of the teres minor, and then you see this REALLY FASCINATING ridge here, so prominent, it's the spine, and hence you get these 2 zones called the infraspinatus and supraspinatus and yadayadayada... *eyes bulge out resembling the appearance of a patient with advanced Graves' disease*
me: *takes 2 frightened steps back* uh, yeah. ok. errr. ok then what's this? *ruffles thru the atlas and failing to identify any greyish strings of tattered musculature hanging languidly from the abducted arm*
TBT: AHHHHHHHHH. *satisfied sigh* i'm GLAD you asked this - this is my favourite!!! veins!!!! :D *maniacal grin*
me: *runs away screaming* but I'm NOT GLAD i asked!!!!!!

afterword: i returned home, stared glumly at my snell, measured its thickness, and failed to read up for the NEXT pract yet again. and the positive feedback cycle resumes.

further horror stories for physio and biochem to follow... ^_^

terminally retarded blog

2006-08-10T23:30:00.000-07:00

heyas peeps. bored like hell and seated (once again) in front of a terminal in the medsoc room. oh, i just realized this is NOT medsoc room. this is the room next to medsoc room. hurhur (big difference) anyway this is the Room With The Annoying Beeping Alarm When The Door Is Opened For More Than 1 Nanosecond and Has Blardy Cold Aircon and Is Perennially Inhabited By DOTA-Mad Seniors. who have just collectively emitted a primal cry of dismay (apparently some vital bits of colour that stand for their player motifs on their screens have just been annihilated. muahaha). i have never understood the (inexplicable) attraction of computer games to males. it must be due to the fact that the male brain is an ancient, faulty prototype of the much more advanced female brain, and is hence more susceptible to the ultrasonic lull of the computer game theme songs.

*girl and guy walks past a games shop hawking the latest gory computer game starring some electronic nymphet with impossibly huge assets that threaten to overflow out of the ZZZ cup bra she's wearing whenever she moves her body to dodge a bullet or whatever*
girl: hey look - there's a sale in front with NEW bags and shoes from what i saw 5hrs ago!!!!
guy: uh, yeah. *jerks his head back* oh i saw something.
girl: come with me to the sale!!!!! *yanks the guy forward*
guy: *drooling* ooooooooohhhhh... new game... all hail... the... new gg-.. game....
girl: COME OVER!!!!!!!! NOW!!!!!!!!
*girl physically drags guy away from the lifesized cardboard poster of the game*

i'm sure this lively conversation is being carried out in 29 shopping malls islandwide as i type this sentence . haha. call it intuition, but then i stick to NANA Law 247 Part A: Guys are predictable AND programmable.

anyway. today is one day before float. which makes tml the day of reckoning of our days of toil and labour - days of making pad-like thingies from magazine pages and LOTS of masking tape and fashioning them into bricks, building up the pyramid from planks of glued wood, painting the behemoth-ian contruction and cellophan-ing the louvre side of the pyramid. i say behemoth, for i have yet to see the ship from KE7. it has been widely touted to be immensely admirable in size, for the hull measures as high as the entire height of our pyramid. i wonder how they managed to stick the other appendages onto the hull if it's so tall - we had to have various males from our OG climb onto chairs/stools/overturned paint cans to *piak!* the pad-like bricks onto the apex of the pyramid.

speaking of which, i profess i can no longer ignore the pangs of hunger in my tummy as i sit here waiting in vain for the guys from my OG to come. they will be here at 6pm :P by which time i shall be rendered dead and bak-kwa-ed from dehydration and malnutrition. hurhur :D i shall grab a bite from one of the canteens nearby. or maybe i should try the cafe. or maybe i should apply for the darned kopitiam card. okies. i've made up my mind, kopitiam it is.

scandals galore! talk has been rife of a certain SOMEONE who has amorous thoughts of our lovely miss jean, as well as a new fu1 qi1 dang3: SH and who else but mr radio himself. he, with his winsome *NOT* character, has been caught conversing EARNESTLY with miss SH during lunch yesterday. his eloquent, languid eyes professed his deep love for her as they chowed food together. anyway, i chalk one UP for SH!! haha way to go, girl! :D can't wait to marry off my new sistas from the OG. it's so lovely to see couples ^_^ haha. oh anyway. made a little faux pas just now when WL was talking to me. i can't even recall what it was that we were talking about (see how traumatic mistakes can cause instant amnesia :D) but i was trying to say "my OG's Brian" and somehow my brain decided to change it to "our Brian" midway, so the collective result was "my... Brian". and thus the HAMSAP old man decided to capitalize on my flaw in tongue as a Freudian slip :P sigh. talk about scandalous. anyway, i was asking him and steph's bf (shoots, forgot his name AGAIN!) about how it was possible to be attached when med students stick with a TINY 20-odd strong tut group all through the year and chances of finding a guy with deep jiu3 wo1s in my tut group is abysmally small. so the 2 love sages told me to ask my friends to intro guys from their group of friends. or i could always walk up to a group of people gathering around and talking crap and just contribute my own share of crap. (no prizes for guessing whose lousy idea this is hurhur) interestingly, i also read an article on HOOKED, an e-zine, about how to catch the guy you fancy (applicable to all girls and martin). the article was non-descript but the remarks posted against the article were indeed eyebrow-raising. there's a huge hoo-ha about how the author was trying to insinuate that guys from arts aren't as intelligent as guys from the more "pro" facs e.g. med and law. in my opinion, i think it's just a matter of "loosen up buddy, you're being too anal already". frankly speaking, people take offense at the tiniest suggestion nowadays. can't take a joke, really. it's appalling, cos the remarks posted were more like they were trying to vent their pent up frustrations and exaggerated anger out on the author on the basis of a flimsy, harmless suggestion. i didn't see the whole point of how people could go on and on endlessly about how it was a gruesome "insult" on arts guys (and even the arts fac as a whole) and how "bimbo" the author was because she was trying to write about how to get a guy. so this indicates that NUS people are no-lifers who can't take a joke and get sorely offended when people suggest that they need help in finding a partner. if you want to know what a true blue bimbo/brawn-without-brains does, check out the "pro" facs and u'll find that there're as many, if not more, such specimens than the allegedly "not-so-pro" facs like arts. and for goodness' sakes, the terrible personal insults and mudslinging exchanged on the forum were much much worse than those i'd expect to see amongst ignorant, self-centred adolescents, not near/full-adults in a tertiary institution. it's the perfect example of "a storm in a teacup" and "making a mountain out of a molehill". my first reaction after staring bug-eyed at the humongous list of comments on the article was: What's the big deal? yes, and i still can't see a reason behind the huge backlash, so call me philosophically challenged, but i guess i'll just keep quiet and roll my eyes :D

update about the scandals later! :D

update from Mount Rendezvous

2006-08-06T22:17:00.000-07:00

ensconced in the chilled, comfy chair in medsoc room (or rather, the computer-endowed haven where DOTA-med students worship at daily). due to popular demand, i shall quickly provide a further elaboration on the lubby-dubby relationship between irene and zs (plus martin and zhihan).

irene: the hazelnutty eyed ingenue with near ethereal beauty and grace and intelligence. also bite sized (for easy portability) and has a mane of fine, long and luscious brown hair. *collective yummmmm from the og guys*

zs: sigh. do i have to repeat the fact that he's EDIBLE??? go girls. take a bite and prove me right. BUT BUT BUT save a bite for me :D hehe.

martin: hairless (allegedly WAXED *gasp*) physically-male-but-mentally-indeterminate persona. a little hazy on the description here, but sigh. i'm straight. so i have no idea what our effeminate co-star *ahem scratch that* *replace with martin* likes. hurhur.

zhihan: son of murky origins. purportedly, according to popular urban legend + ancient myth, the prodigious progeny of madamoiselle irene and sir ZS. (but how come the son is older than the parents, or at least younger than one of the parents, escapes my train of logic. haha.)

the story goes.... (in a misty glade in the celtic times ^_^)

I: *looking like the classical celtic nymph-goddess* oh ZS, ZS, wherefore art thou ZS?? (taking a cue from her soulmate aka Miss Juliet, who is born from Shakespeare's dusty mental recesses SEVERAL generations later. again, the regression in timeline defies understanding, but then it's always said that NANA's brain basically consists of a brainstem and a few neurones floating here and there. so the lack of understanding is, ironically, understandable.)
ZS: *looking like his darling's male counterpart* oh, my darling, herefore art I. (bad grammar not a liability of the producers)
*both throw themselves simultaneously into the loving embrace of his/her loved one*
*several steamy scenes later (censored for the benefit of the juveniles writing and reading this) the story continues*

ZS: oh I my dah-dah, have you heard of the latest grapevine news? we have a SON and he is zhihan!
I: *reels in shock* oh really ZS my dear?
ZS: i kid you not.
I: i wish you would stop talking like a stiffy old literature character. *sniffs disdainfully*
ZS: orh sorlie. liddat say, can or not, hunh?
I: can i kill you???
ZS: ah kill me not sweetheart for we have more pressing things to attend to. the son, arh, that zhihan, who is he and wherefore he comes? ah shit my language mess up already. alamak.
I: *takes a huge breath to stop herself from committing husband-icide* not from ME that's for sure. who is he? what does he look like? where does he stay? how do you know he's our SON?
ZS: i heard from ah-brian who heard from ah-shaun who heard from ah-hanjie who heard from ah-marc who heard from ah-
I: *tapes ZS's mouth with duct tape* just tell me the POINTS i want to know, thanks.
ZS: *muffled* he is our son and that is the truth. the stork told me.
I: *rolls eyes* so the STORK told you. i see.
ZS: and also we did a DNA test. and the results perfectly correlate the claim. a genotyping experiment is also running as we speak, which will further add credence to the story.
I: *looks faintly glassy eyed* uh, yeah.
*suddenly a tiny brown blob appears in the horizon and gets bigger as it runs towards the pair*
M: ah, my hump, my hump my hump my hump!
I: he calling me or you?
ZS: dunno. depends on his mood today... yesterday he went for guys and the day before it was girls.

*story to be continued*

oh, romeo, romeo, wherefore art thou romeo?

2006-08-03T19:57:00.000-07:00

luuuurrrrrrrrrrrvvvvvvee has smothering the air in which we breathe for the past few weeks. love with a capital L. and a capital O. and while we're at it, a capital V and E as well. it's simply mind-boggling, the amount of saccharine dripping from the pores of everyone in close proximity to the purported scandalized couples within our OG. i wonder if people get hyPERglycemic from all this *aawww* sweetie-weedie talk and *B's trademark EH-EHHHH* smoochie-woochie acts :D but i AM amused (to no end) by the amazing sporting-ness of sarah and ZS because they simply act like the real thing. it's amazing. when scandals come your way, take it in your stride (like shaun haha) and put on your best shakespearean mask!

let's do a quick recount of the scandals in the OG so far (ahem you may want to tarpow food for the next 3 days if you intend to read this from start to finish haha):

1) our golden couple, sarah and ZS
sarah the beautiful damsel arrives at the second day of camp and stuns the pants off *nearly* all the guys in our OG by her unrivalled beauty and grace. (i'll talk about the nearly later! haha!) ZS the closet HAMSAP but outwardly dashing-delicious-cute-hunky-shuai guy eyes her and makes his move on MSN, broadcast *gleefully* by the OG RADIO, several days later. the wonderous and fairytale-like courtship and eventual virtual proposal is available on request at ONLY S$999.99 from the RADIO! get yours today! it may vastly improve your love life! (or send you into irretrievable despair from watching one too many saccharine courtships between jun-nans and mei-nus haha :D all mental anguish caused from the purchase of this proposal will not be our producer's liability)

2) marc and serena, the penultimate unrequited love story *TEAR JERKER spoiler ahead*
marc the wonderful Godly man, upright, righteous, full of principles and morals and everything nice (think powerpuff girls, the guy version and 3-in-1 somemore) is transfixed by the grace and equally Godly character of serena, our heroine. he finds opportunities to sit next to her, talk to her, establish eye contact with her, engage her in conversations purportedly *ahem* about their common friend in where? MGS issit? and eventually, declare his love (KABISH from marc) *deletes LOVE* *replaces with "preference"* for the perfect, flawless serena *goddess athena to the eye of the beholder, she is none but perfect, free from the tarnishes of the evil world, yadayada* during truth and dare at the idyllic tanjong beach. ahhhh, if only the confession wasn't under duress and in the presence of so many other busybodies. like a certain NANA we know. haha. ah, but the divine love story of compatible fellow Christians ends here, for our heroine's heart is already promised to another man. *pats marc's back as he weeps uncontrollably* sorry, marc.

3) WL and PX
it started with a bedtime confession to GH by WL: "i'm in love! i'm in love!!!". it continued with the disastrously inopportune insertion *also by the prodigious WL* of the following enquiry during the romantic proposal from ZS to sarah: "where's PX?". we at the RADIO department extrapolate with confidence that this epic tale of underground crushing will end happily with something along the lines of: "will you be my hazelnutty eyed one, oh PX?" nevermind that hazelnut eyes are the trademark rights of ZS's gf, nor the fact that PX's breathtaking beauty and charisma has already claimed the hearts of all but ONE guy in the OG. WL will win the hand of the fair lady in due course. *cues sagely nod by RADIO*

4) brian and jess
to quote from the ancient chinese adage: tian1 yi1 wu2 feng4. and also fu1 chang4 fu4 sui2. this couple has been romantically linked in the course of their "professional" duties. which is to disseminate and/or generate scandals of couples in the OG. and lo and behold, we see a SELF-FULFILLING prophecy here. now let's see what the RADIO has to say.
NANA: now brian. come confess. are you in love with the talented and winsome jess?
RADIO: *agitatedly* EH-EHHH, no scandals! i will not be dragged into a scandal! *backs away in fear*
NANA: now don't resist. resistance is futile. MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
RADIO: how on earth did this scandal arise? i don't even know what was happening!!
NANA: errr. that's what most of your scandalized pairs say. so that means you and jess really got sparks lah.
RADIO: *in abysmal despair* ..........
*RADIO slinks off to coach biomed quiz instead of continuing further arguments about his scandals*

4) shaun and SH
rather non-descript, this romantic tale has yet to blossom into the highly diseased *ahem scratch that. replace with highly developed* state of the sarah-ZS union, but good things grow, isn't it? (or else we'll sue lipton for misleading little kids) we'll give them some time. so far, james has gladly acted as the moonman (yue4 lao3 for the uninitiated) by sending a msg to SH using shaun's phone, and we have collectively put the 2 fledging lovebirds onto the same kayak. will this beautiful tale sink or swim? we'll see! stay tuned for more.

other odds and ends (mostly weird crushes and even weirder BROKEBACKS):
1) irene and ZS, or irene and martin (following the super-bizarre lesbian in a man's body theory)
2) GH and sarah (errrr. no hope la man. sorry :P)
3) brian and PX, as well as ZS and PX, and all the guys in the OG and PX (with the sole exception of marc) - follows the same argument as #2 haha.
4) shaun and ZS? (been floating around like a truncated, dispirited ghoul without any true substance. but all cute guys attract people from both sexes. so says the Law of The Beautiful Bods.)

wow. see? epic love stories can take place in minuscule settings. Thou shalt not disparage the possibility of a legendary lovetale in a small OG, yes? :D

medicamp!

2006-07-23T18:40:00.000-07:00

the smelly chaotah taupok shall hereby declare herself officially initiated into the medfac after 4 gruelling, inhumane days of camp. but to be brutally honest, it was so damned fun that i didn't even want to break camp! ^_^ yes i must be sadistic - thanks to the master sadists in medfac lol :)

e first day we hibernated during the sponsor talk and traipsed around NUS for the trail game, then went to Aloha Loyang where we played this asinine thigh slapping game (reason for the HAMSAP guys to slap the fair thighs of their hapless female counterparts), this game called SHA!!! which was totally totally nerve wracking (and pointless) and resulted in some pple (esp ZS!!!! haha!) resorting to weird unauthorized hand actions out of panic/desperacy/lunacy - thus giving rise to this new deeee-dooooo game where we made more hand actions. i'm never laughed so hard before in my entire life - i thought my freaking lungs were gonna plop out wetly into my lap during one of the hilarious screwups :D dinner was absolutely fun cos a very reluctantly lovey-dovey couple entertained us by feeding each other their packet dinners as a forfeit :D no points to James for cheating by gulping (and almost choking on) half his packet of rice before we could start the forfeit proper! :P unfortunately, me and SH elected ourselves lightbulbs by following/tailing PX and WL to collect drinks from e common terrace, resulting in my mishap with the uncovered drainhole at the side of the road. hahaha i thought WL would just get an ogl to come pass the bandage so i can compress the stupid ankle and limp back, but the entire og entourage made their (really impressive) way down the road just to see how the blind pig is doing :) thanks peeps. so the night whiled away whilst i sat on a chair and watched my fellow piggies play ball in the dark :) then they had their nightwalk, which was in this maze in the park by the sea, and which i was forbidden from joining due to the koyak leg. bleah. i ended up falling asleep on the floor of another og's chalet, which probably caused a fair bit of excitement when the unsuspecting og returned from their hair-raising nightwalk to discover a fat corpse splayed out on their doorstep. haha :D i apologise for any sympathetic tachycardia from this incident! anyway my og came back at the unholy hour of 4am in the morning, and we fell asleep at 5am. haha how wonderful.

the next day was inter-og games, but the beautiful morning was slightly marred by rain, which, thankfully, stopped rather quickly. sarah came on board the piggy ship and was promptly confused by the stunning number of people with similar-sounding names. anyhow the poor girl was spared from extreme confusion when the games were declared on after the drizzle died down :D we had quite a few really really really really weird games, not to mention this really kinky one where james had to endure S&M in the sun and the og took turns smearing funny stuff on his face and body. i believe sarah was the LUCKY girl who had the fortune to smear red colouring on a sensitive area of poor james' body *ahem* but anyway our cross-dressed britney spears WON! yay you go james! :D oh and glenn was on the opposing team! haha he was supposed to be kim jong il, but i think he still looked quintessentially glenn-ish after the makeover :P

3rd day was wet games and a massive waterbomb fight, which is too painful to describe (seriously). let's suffice it to say that 1) concentrated dynamo is seriously NOT FUN in the eyeball, 2) joel has a six pack! joel has a six pack! and we're not talking about heineken here!!!!, 3) ice makes guys' backs turn red like cold sashimi *yum*, 4) female hair DOES NOT convey water well and 5) water bombs made of sea water BURNS, DAMMIT!!! #*%^*(#&* hahaha :D
we were seriously knackered after the insane games, but somehow my og mustered sufficient horsepower (go piggies!) to decide on a TONG XIAO cycling from pasir ris to changi and back. poor GH had to cycle like nuts to make our tandem bike go up the hill (instead of down) hahaha and i certainly WASN'T helping by singing all his favourite songs off key :D muahaha. but k-box, anyone??? ^_^ oh and there was a bidding thing where we won 3 bottles of soft drinks (instantaneously guzzled on the spot). i won a box of peanut butter sandwich biscuits for being the tallest girl in my og and eating a quarter of a watermelon e fastest, and a can of cotton candy for being one of 4 mushiest love letter writers! the 3 lil pigs generated 3 out of 4 of le moste romantic of the romantic, so we're sure to be hitched in no time, eh, piggies? :D

on the 4th day of lunacy we had to break camp, oh, how woeful it is! (sing to the tune of The 12 Days of Christmas) lugged my battlegear home, bathed, collapsed into bed and was unconscious for the next dunno how many hours :D hahahaha.

tiring? what an understatement.
madness? you bet.
sadistic? oh YEAAAAHHHH...
but man, i'd give my 2 front teeth to go through it all over again! ^_^

THE THREE LITTLE PIGS ROCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *watermelon, watermelon, banana, banana, raisinraisinraisin, raisinraisinraisin, rambutan, rambutan!!!!!!!*

2006-07-16T03:48:00.000-07:00

cocoa

the fortifying temptress wafting into the subconscious
trudging in the shelled cast
of a molten faceless man

beckons (chirpily, it seems)
come, have a sip, and put down your burden for awhile

the man's clouded opaque eyes seek furtively
for the source of the entreaty
the white of his eyes are distillated flesh
the flesh of a man long dead and pumped full of formaldehyde on a morgue table.
he cannot see beyond the deathly blindfold of his worldly wants.

his stubbled face, well lined with worries of ages past
(since man first fell from God's grace) that of his fathers, and the fathers before him
turns in supplication towards the voice.
he cocks his ears (heartbreakingly)
like the abandoned puppy we saw begging for love that the owner didn't give.
the love that was relinquished and buried
when the owner threw it in a dishwasher left on till the next morning.

for the puppy had, oh he had
been a naughty pup indeed
to chew the button off the Ferragamo
of the owner's pet tit.

the love that was rebuked and not mourned
when its dead carcass was left out in the freezing snow by the roadside.

for the puppy had, oh he had
been an ignorant pup indeed
not to know that every act of humanly love
is lethal poison within.

the man thinks he's found the source of the elusive joy
taunting his senses.
the grimy fingers unceremoniously jammed into the tatty coat
grasp spasmodically in the air
closing upon a crystalline snowflake (winking in mischief at his futile efforts)

but he doesn't find the comfort he seeks.
his heart is still cold (echoing the bloodstained tears of yesterday's anguish)
and his heart is still blind.

till the day he dies
he will find no reprieve
in voices that call out to him
to relieve the burden he carries

(for he cannot)
(for he will not)

a pinch of the wind

2006-07-14T00:36:00.000-07:00

am approximately 30 minutes away from a swim. feeling awfully guilt ridden from ingesting a pack of instant noodles (with egg) for lunch, plus a couple of sneaky bits from my sis' lunch curry :D muahaha. food thievery is fun. but it makes me fat... not to say bloated. hahaha. i feel like a puffer fish. rewatched disc 2 of madagascar during lunch! (we lost disc one. and no prizes for guessing who misplaced it :P) i think i can commiserate with Alex the Lion when it comes to steak cravings haha :) i'm a notoriously itchy-mouth-ed girl. but recent events wrt my misbehaving gut has reduced my food intake (yay) especially when it comes to my favourite rich, creamy foods (bleah) haha :) i dunno if it's God up there who decided He has had enough of watching me whine incessantly about my ballooning frame and yet indulge in closed-doors-no-holds-barred snacking, or just a stroke of luck (whether good or bad is purely subjective and undeserving of debate). but this IS still weird, whenever i'm introspective enough to think about my newly evolving diet of soybean milk, tofu and odd bits and ends.

bought 10 bucks worth of fishies yesterday and hauled them on the 811 feeder bus for a ride around the neighborhood. do fishes get bus-sick? :) hehheh. my mum thought so - she was saying they'll all be moaning and flipping upside down by the time we reach our destination. but they proved to be hardier than their mystical bussick comrades cos when i checked them after we alighted from the bus, they were merrily darting around in the bag and biting each other's butts. my tank is beautifully enhanced with the presence of these new tank members... mental note to get more plants to decorate their living habitat :D

am somewhat troubled. being a medical student (or a prospective one, in my case) can weigh heavily on interpersonal relationships. this is very true when the people around you harbour high expectations of you and want you to be their personal physicians. they expect a 19 year old, who has yet to step into a single LT in the SOM, much less grasp a single salient fact in a medical student's syllabus, to be able to miraculously come up with a diagnosis and instant, and i stress the word instant, cure for someone with dizziness from hypertension. they don't take no for an answer. they are the epitome of ignorance and persistence. and especially of the very evil power to instil a dreadful sense of guilt and self-reproachment in the INEPT, STUPID and UNDESERVING (prospective) medical student. i was so hurt when the person scolded me for "wilfully ignoring" the patient when the patient in question "struggled so hard to bring me up and make me what i am today" and that i "totally do not deserve" to be in medicine. and that i ought to just withdraw my name from the list. and perhaps, while i'm at it, i might as well take a long sushi sword and slit my throat and collect the blood as a sacrifice for my sins.

bleah. if i haven't even started school and they already treat me like this, what will happen when i'm really in school? and why do people like to make me feel guilty? as in, i agree to help and do what i can, but could they please NOT threaten me with visages of death and all making their illnesses and pains seem like my fault? i didn't tell them to eat durians. i didn't tell them not to take their medicines on time. and i certainly don't have the telekinetic power to create dizziness spells in them. and even if i have the power, i believe i wouldn't do that. it's not right to wish suffering on others. like, yeah. i don't like to feel helpless when the people around me are ill. and that's precisely what these people love to do to me. i'm not a physician. i'm not a doctor. i'm not a medical student... yet. please give me a break. i'm not omniscient. and i won't be omnipresent. what would become of you, when i have to be on call next time and an emergency episode occurs? will you call me on my handphone and demand that i appear instantaneously by your side? will you berate me to the point of worthlessness for not being there to miraculously heal all your pains? will you force me to forsake my duty and disown me for taking care of my patients (because it is my God-given job) instead of nursing you at home? will you? will you be selfish and have me all to yourself? or will you gloat when i hang my head in shame if i were unfortunate enough to lose a loved one when i choose my work over your demands? whose fault will it be, then? will it be mine, of negligence? or will it also be yours, for crying wolf once too many? will you cry out taunts and ill-sounding names, calling me a coward, an unfilial child? will you call me a panderer to others, for fame and money? will you say that i have sold my soul and turned my back on humanity?

i wish you wouldn't. because that would break my heart.

but i know you will, for you are the spitting image of your mother, whom i used to despise. but i will forgive you, because you don't know how much words can hurt. you don't know that what you say can snuff out life in a person as surely as a bullet from a gun. i am not God. i am not Jesus. i am not a saviour, i am mortal. one day i will be judged before Him, as you will, too. and then i will say that i have kept my heart and mind, because i have kept and will keep my tongue from retaliating at your baseless accusations.

if people say that being a physician merely entails the burden of holding responsibility over the patients, then i say i am not a physician, for i hold the burden of responsibilities over all the people whom i love, and some of whom knows that i love them, and hence use this love to their advantage as a gambit in threats.

why are people so calculating, scheming and blind to the greater Love of our heavenly Father? if only i could love with such love, and that the ones i love would love me as much as such, the world would be so much closer to our Lord. humans are only mortal, i know. and my flaws are incalculable. but i still have dreams of the day i meet the Lord. and he will take away all the apin and suffering on earth. being a Christian gives me the strength to find glimmers of hope in the grimmest situations. God fortifies.

i'm lazy. it's already 4.10pm and i haven't changed into my swimsuit, which means i wouldn't have enough time to swim if i don't get my butt moving and translocate myself to the pool by 4.30pm. but i must, for the noodles and curry are weighing heavy on my stomach (also my conscience, but i'm pretending it doesn't exist haha).

looking forward to cell group later. yay :)

a little while we sit in reflection

2006-07-11T21:08:00.000-07:00

check out this site, peeps!

http://matt.simerson.net/humor/history.shtml

jj sent it to me. it's absolutely hilarious - betcha never knew all these stuff! :D

God is great, God is almighty. Thank you Lord, for coming into my life, and for opening my eyes to the beauty of people and the world that You have created. For you Lord, nothing is difficult or impossible, and through you Lord, everything is possible.

Lord today i commit my life unto you again and refresh my faith in You. I pray that even as i go about my daily activities today, tomorrow and everyday in my life, Lord, I pray that you will minister to me and through me, and that You will make your mighty presence known to me that I may abide by Your words and laws in the Bible, and I will find wonder and gratitude for all that has been given to me through You.

Thank you Lord for giving me the inspiration and strength and obedience to heed Your will. Thank you for opening my clouded eyes to the love of my parents, and thank you for giving me back my loving heart, that I was able to initiate greetings to them this morning. I pray that you will sustain this loving relationship between us Lord, and not to let it fizzle out shortly, for Lord you know that my heart's desire is to serve you and my parents and my family Lord. Lord your love is neverending and rightful it is that my praise of you will never end as your glory pours out into my life. Lord i pray that you will preserve my family as they go about their lives, and that you will protect them from harm and ill health Lord.

Lord i heard your words echoed in my friends' words yesterday. Lord it is your will that we spread the gospel and make your glory known to the world Lord. Lord i pray that you invest in me the strength and courage to go out and touch the lives of the uninitiated in uni, with your words and by your love. Lord i pray this, that more of the world will see your righteousness and strive to become more like you in perfection, and give praise to you as it is right to do so.

Lord i pray for my churchmates, for my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, and I pray that Lord you will walk amongst us and with us, and fortify our days on earth with the satisfaction and comfort of your presence. Lord i pray that you hear their prayers and you will answer their doubts and soothe their worries with your healing and merciful hand Lord. Lord i want to ask especially for your protection and ministration in KNW, pambam, jess, ht, ll, mel, diane, cindy, melz and wanting's lives and their families Lord. they are special to you as they are to me Lord and I pray that you will watch over them, lay your grace upon them and bless each and everyday of their lives.

Lord let us begin each day as though we were newly made in your love Lord. Open our eyes to your power and might and your everlasting grace. All these i pray, in Jesus' name, Amen.

- heartfelt prayers carry SO much strength and conviction that they are living miracles from our mouths, really. Praise the Lord.

a happy harping harlot hums hymns

2006-07-10T03:06:00.000-07:00

i love my life.

life is beautiful. how could one not get intoxicated in the ethereal substance that feeds our veins and nourishes our thoughts like heavenly manna? ok, maybe u're one of those cynical people who refused to claim Israel after the Lord brought them to the threshold of the promised land, but i say: For once, throw down your blindfold of fear and cowardice, and behold the world.

life is goOOOOOOOOOOOOOD!! *mimics Australia's yodelling travel ad*

ok i'm not madder than i've always been, but just in case you're scratching flakes of your scalp off trying to think what on earth made me so darned happy, the answer is: JESUS!!! (and NO, i'm NOT cursing. bleah.)

benzene-NANA turned 19 officially at 9-something PM yesterday. anyway that's rather inconsequential. the thing is, it was a very non-descript day. no trio of bright yellow canaries serenading me from the windowsill in the morning when i blearily took my deathly-stinky first yawn. no streamers cascading from the ceiling and tickling my good ole philtrum into an unholy spasm of morning allergies a la KNW-style. no booming party music. not even a watered-down, wavery rendition of the centuries-old Birthday Song by some cranky, arthritic Old Man Symphony down in Some Ulu SympRetirees' Club.

i got up, realised i was going to be late for service for the THIRD FREAKING TIME in a row, thought of the UNHOLY amount of time i always spend trying to decide what to wear, and shrieked softly. the result sounded like a cross between a strangled cat with heart failure and a pureed frog.

i raced through the morning washup (meaning 15mins), grabbed 2 closest coordinates from the ironing rack, and squeezed myself into them. threw on the string of faux pearls and combed my hair. appraised myself critically in the mirror with barely-open eyes. i actually looked presentable - a black lace halter, a brown tiered flare skirt, pearls and a white (actually, greying) cardigan. ok. out of the house i ran, and into service i barged (raising a number of eyebrows - not least cos i forgot to put on the darned cardigan BEFORE i entered the hall of worship, so i was too uncovered for my own good. but i rectified this eyesore immediately *grins innocently* haha) and sang and worshipped and prayed.

and forgot the time. i realised i was 1 HOUR late for work at the darned bookstore by the time service was over. sigh. but i was happy that i didn't miss the service, cos it was worthwhile. we were talking about revival that day, and i decided to make my birthday wishes in accordance with the theme. amongst other things (too mundane to mention hurhur) i prayed for a revival in my faith, and for renewed happiness and content.

on my harried trip down to the bookstore, i received several messages from my parents, regarding the long-un-set-up-ed modem (which now IS *grins proudly*) and my whereabouts. and u know how ornery i can get when i'm hot, bothered, late and stuck in a mobile sardine can.
i gave clipped, short answers to their enquiries and felt guilty afterwards (same old thing everytime) and arrived at the bookstore, with all of the above, PLUS a heap of guilt to boot. an excellent way to start a birthday. i noticed a man with arms laden with a bouquet and cakebox reading the titles on display in the window, and gave a cursory smile at him as i opened the shutterdoor. he followed me into the store. i expected him to pick out a book or browse around the store, but he didn't. what he did changed my day dramatically and reinforced my belief that God hears and answers prayers. especially birthday ones :)

the man held out the bundle of things on his hands towards me.
"Serene Tan? This is for you."
"Wh-at?" my eyes plopped wetly onto the floor in surprise.
"Happy Birthday." he beamed.
momentarily, i understood. the very people i have been curt to just 10mins before have arranged for a surprise delivery of a birthday cake and bouquet to my workplace, for the simple reason that they LOVE me.

i felt so overwhelmed i didn't know whether to cry, or to laugh, or to kiss the man. i chose the 2nd cos it was the least socially embarrassing. after i signed for the things, i called up my parents immediately and thanked them effusively. but i felt so bad that it was over the phone, for i would have given anything to have them right before me so i could hug them and kiss them for what they have done for me. it was a watershed moment. at that point, i understood that my parents are truly crazy, and that they love me without any qualms and conditions, and the love is unfettered by my physical dimensions, my ornery-ness, my multitudes of faults and inadequacies.

and God loves me, for He gave me my parents, that i may have such love on earth as I have from my Heavenly Father.

He answered my prayers, and for that i am defeated, euphoric, grateful, and repentful all at once. it was not a miraculous revival, but the smoking embers of my heart where my faith lies have been stoked, and the flame is back. i may be one of the unworthy, who would not fully believe unless i see, but i thank the Lord for His signs of love on the day of my birthday. so now i know i can do better: to reaffirm my belief until it is fully independent, for the Lord said,"You who have seen believes, but blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe."

i lead a blessed life.

my favourite worship song is "More than life"... ok this is a little sidetracked. but yeah just for the record. haha.

anyway the rest of the day was spent with HT (she looks so lovely with her new curls!) trekking through the sales at causeway point, whereupon we enjoyed ourselves immensely trying on stuff that NEVER fits me :D and stuff that caught her eye. in the end she had in her possession a wonderful, elegant cream embroidered dress, a fluffy CREAMPUFF skirt :D (why does everyone contrive to be fluffy creampuffs lately??) and a frilly pink top that has the soft frills arranged to look like convergent foamy waves on the seashore. oh, and a multicolored pearl bracelet. my spoils of war were much greater in number: 3 pairs of jeans, a pair of flowery pointy toed shoes, a pink necklace, 1 white spag top, 2 cardigans and a bra. hahahahaha. if clothes and accessories were artillery, i'd be on par with the US Defense Force ^_^ we also parked ourselves in front of the chocolate stall in Cold Storage and ate up all the Aunty's stock of samplers. haha :D i must say, the white chocolate with almonds tastes AMAZINGLY like dabaitu nai tang :P very sweet. i think my teeth rattled in their sockets when i tasted the morsel of *ahem* aphrodisiac. i was merrily educating the Aunty on the beneficial effects of PEA that is in chocolate :D but her tales of customers buying containers of dark chocolate and eating them for breakfast, lunch and dinner and YET NOT GAIN WEIGHT is simply fatally unconvincing :P

after the excellent shopping spree, we wanted to try the apple-shaped peach flavored japanese ice cream dessert as well as the tempura ice cream at this place called Ichiban Sushi, but it was already time for me to meet my clan at GV yishun for a movie, so i made a date with HT to meet again next weekend to massacre the sales at Orchard (far east, suntec and the whole stretch in between!) :)

oh anyway, the movie we watched was Re-Cycle. it was touted to be horrendously hair-raising, but i found myself stifling a yawn and actually dozing off in the middle of the movie. not only was it diasppointingly devoid of creepy-crawlies and eeeky-weekie elements, it was an EXTREMELY grotesque rip off from Mirrormask (esp the library scene and the floating bits near the Transit area masquerading as original ideas despite their appearance in almost the exact same form in Mirrormask). i was so disappointed. i was NOT scared, i was BORED, and i was IRRITATED. the plot was completely boring anyway. around halfway in the movie they decided they have run out of ideas to scare people and resorted to simplistic, unconvincing gore and Family Planning, "Family Day" campaigns.

sigh. haha bad movies are the norm, anyway. but i feel that it's a huge pity that the pang brothers are losing their touch of being able to scare people subtly, like in The Eye.

lab withdrawal symptoms

2006-06-30T20:38:00.000-07:00

sigh~ i miss the lab.

the whiny centrifuges... the perpetually dysfunctional heatblocks... the LUNCHES... the POST LUNCH pre-coffee gossip... the POST LUNCH POST COFFEE gossip... :D i miss my blood brothers and sisters. a lot.

what will july bring but a sepulchral gloom of solitude and silence? the metamorphosis of sweltering summer to the gusty monsoons of autumn brings in its wake a prenatural chill in the chambers of my heart.

huh. even my poetry sucks :P

okok july rabbit pls dun bonk my head. it's just unfortunate that the time of my graduation from lab attachment falls in the month you were given birth in. but such is Murphy's f***ed up law, isn't it :)

i guess i'm going to show u guys a bit more of the wonderful angels who have been sent into my life and given the (behemoth) task of educating and caring for me:

meet XG. he of the completely befuddling gene constructs and transgenes. he of the protein purification columns and embryo microinjections. he who magically appears at 8am every morning despite leaving at midnight the night before. he of the monumentally stunning (not to mention inappropriate) exclamations of "si bei" and "wah lau" :D

this has GOT to be the world's cutest doctorate student.
anyone who doesn't agree, please post me a picture of the phD student/postdoc whose adorable-ness supercedes this guy.
and if i agree that u win, i'll drink a bottle of loading dye (colour of your choice - blue, green or orange) haha :)

my boss. my immediate boss, that is.
HE IS THE WORLD'S BEST MENTOR. EVER.
and no submissions claiming otherwise is allowed! :D

sometimes inexplicable things happen to the lab members (me included), and things like this result. we bear no responsibility for any loss of dignity to any real snowmen and snowladies and snowbabies as a result of this creation from used icebox ice.
but i still chuckle at the ingenuity of the use of pipette tips and loading dye :D

2006-06-30T00:53:00.000-07:00

heyo emm! yeeling! :D how have u been??? haven't heard from u in freaking ages. haha great to see ya popping by. u should've seen my face when i saw ur comment haha :D e ultimate "reunion" face haha.

quite a long time since i blogged. distinctly recall promising knw's mum a space here pertaining to her culinary disasters - one particularly memorable episode in which the following (imaginary) dialogue transpired:

(knw prepares a pot of HEALTHY aka no salt kimchi soup and presents it to mum)
knw: hey ma, try this kimchi soup. i made it!
(mum takes a sip of the soup)
mum: wah. plain water with red coloured vegetable bits floating inside. no taste one arh.
knw: no la, eat "qing dan" good for health ma.

Later... (unbeknownst to our budding chef)
mum: this soup too bland but throw away very wasted. i remember my ma telling me about the wonderful qualities of dark soy sauce...
(pours a liberal amount of thick dark soy sauce into the previously pale pink kimchi soup)
mum: wah, looks better already. at least got colour... *sips* and got taste also.
(knw wanders into the kitchen and peers into her soup pot)
knw: WAH MA! what happened to my soup?!
mum: i enhanced it lorh... come let me tell u about the wonderful qualities of this thing called dark soy sauce... :)

lol. i anticipate rising sales of the brilliant dark soy sauce in view of the massive propagation of its "wonderful qualities". not least to mention its ability to create a savoury, black broth out of thin pink vegetable soup haha :D

am ensconced in the office creating comparison files out of the sequences obtained. today's the laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaast day :P

this is THE LAB OFFICE. i rmb asking wc to get me something to eat from outside once. something small that i can nibble surreptitiously in the lab.
his eyes BUGGED out.
"in the LAB! no NO NO NO! cannot!" he stuttered, shaking his head vehemently.
"huh, why...?" i was perplexed. (we eat ALL THE TIME in the office)
"got EB! contaminate the samples!!" yelled my mentor.

then i realised that poor mr organized has compartmentalized the LAB from the OFFICE. hence the huge objection to my small snacking :D hehe.

see why i say he's my dream husband??? ^_^

the lab proper. due to *AHEM* trade secrets, i can't tell you guys what the little green thing in the picture is. or the little blue things. or the little white things for that matter. or the little pink thing (though it's obvious that it's a chlorhex wash haha lol)

haha. the joys of IP protection.

miss RARA and miss NANA~ we rawk.

*cool handsign*

The Man Himself. At Work.

he refused to smile because it was against his personal principles to "smile when one is doing WORK". i guess "happy worker" doesn't really exist in his dictionary :D

but if u look closely u'll realise that he's already stifling a laugh haha :D so much for principles.

haha well. so that's about all from e lab... my 2nd home for the past half a year. extremely unhappy that i have to leave... it's what i call the "dammit, leaky eyeball+forced extradition from comfort zone" syndrome. *sniffle* and it's so strong that even the thoughts of me embarking on my future career of being an MBBS holder isn't enough to make me feel happier. yucks.

so this is true AFFECTION for my co-workers... colleagues... friends... mentors... kakis... sisters and brothers... Hungarian or otherwise :D i'll never forget XG's inopportune exclamations of "si bei" as and when he fancies haha!

a bit of flim~ yes, flim, not film.

2006-06-19T07:40:00.000-07:00

why flim? what is flim? has Nana gone off the deep end? has she abandoned all outward display of normalcy in mental processes and proceeded on the trek on e path of lunacy? or incoherence?

fear not. the answers to those seemingly inanswerable questions are: cos it sounds like flimsy, and i feel a bit of flimsiness tonight (err which brings to mind - i may want to reconsider the lunacy plea haha), no, maybe, and yes. and if you're utterly, irretrievably lost in all this nishnash nonsense, ah, you're normal indeed. dun fret.

finally completed the presentation and given my talk today. i suspect that i took more than the 10minutes allocated to each student, by around 5minutes or so. however it was over in a blur for me. if you ask me, i'd say i was in some variant of traumatic-stress-induced-anmesia, babbling like a loony hare and jabbing my bamboo pointer (apparently the laser one's run amok) at the screen with rapid, spasmodic pokes of my wrist and retaining not a singular iota of memory of the entire performance. a national fencer would have been mighty proud of my excellent skills in lancing and parrying like a cracker on amphetamines at the poor inanimate screen.

am bushed.
am bushed on a cracker.
am bushed, on a cracker, with parsley sprinkles and bacon bits with a pretty please.

if i were any more exhausted from blinking my sore, parched eyeballs at the goshdarn screen for the past 5 days, i would have spontaneously degenerated my complex cellular structure into a massive slimy lump of green fluorescent cells.

oh, and i finally passed both my theory trial tests. on the dot. hahaha. talk about "unintentional accuracy". this phrase itself is oxymoronic on nature. like author like words, eh?? haha.

as i type this, my orange female guppy is unabashedly honking the blue male on his backside, whereas in nature this should be the other way around. could it be due to food? a change in diet leading to a surge in "initiative for procreation" in the female? or is she just plain sex-deprived (like a certain someone who's typing this) and needs someone, or even SOMETHING, to hump? this could be a massively good paper in Nature.

oh my goodness. i think i've evolved into a full fledged scientist. with the inquiring mind and all the works.

help...

babyish thoughts

2006-06-18T09:37:00.000-07:00

spent a tiring, draining day at the bookstore today, serving the upper crust of Singaporean society and swallowing my pride. My pride seems to resent being swallowed at weekly intervals very much, because every time i do it again it just gets harder not to wail, give up, flop on the floor and bawl my eyes out in self-pity.

self-pity must be a SIN somewhere in God's Great Big Book on What Thou Shalt Not Do. it gives me a strange feeling of quiet solace, thinking of how God would peer down at me (i keep imagining God to wear a pair of grandfatherly spectacles - gosh sometimes i think i'm mixing Him up with the idealized version of a benign, protective grandpa, but on hindsight, isn't that exactly what He promises us, His children?) and give me a half-smile when i'm just on the brink of giving vent to the little squeal of frustration rising in my throat, and shake his head (almost inperceptibly) and wag His finger at me. so i force myself to smile and take a deep breath and to keep going. Plow through the sludge of rudeness, hoity-toity arrogance, wealthy apathy and condescension...

but sometimes the war is hard to fight. when i want to cry, i want to have someone to hold me and talk to me and soothe my frazzled nerves and tell me not to succumb to idiocy - those people aren't worth sobbing over. and since i wish not to be hauled into court for being "lured" into a homosexual act (arhem) i guess i won't be unloading my burden on any of my poor, innocent and definitely male-inclined female kakis. sigh.

the old chinese sage who said "ya ba chi huang lian, you ku shuo bu chu" has hit the nail on the head. why is it that all these proverbs come in so useful?? and so eerily accurate??? i must sit down and meditate away from the insidious allure of the TV someday and perhaps i might attain some sort of illumination/enlightenment (or as Denise puts it, an awareness of things i had never previously regarded as existent).

part of the reason why this is so hard on me (whilst others may simply shrug it off) is due, no doubt, to my inherently strong sense of self. or rather my NEED to be acknowledged. is it? no. i believe a more appropriate term is respect. i need people to recognize that i am useful when i have a solid accomplishment that is worth notice, and i want the respect that comes from it. this explains why i have been so stubborn (to all the kakis out there who're still scratching a nearly-bald spot on ur head trying to figure out why i'm so ornery) and why i would rather fight to the death than concede defeat in a situation where my reputation is at stake. my closest friends would know, seeing me hobble across hc campus in that weirdly funny gait that screams for the director of LOTR to hire me as a permanent extra hobbit. or the times when i attend school 2 days after an operation, only to find out that i expire much faster than i thought (and thus lend myself as material for many cripple jokes and fainting scares haha). i am a person who cannot afford to lose when i know that humiliation follows the defeat. in things that don't involve my reputation, i'm much more relaxed. cavalier, even. knw has exclaimed innumerous times about my need to rein in my bad habit of cussing at random in public. i'm a disgrace sometimes. it's not conscious, just a rather exaggerated form of release when i know i'm safe with the people who love me enough never to agree to insult me even when bribed. but for failures? sorry mate, i gotta do it my way. i gotta fight to the bitter end. as my mum told me: pa de yue gao jiu die de yue zhong. it hurts more to fall from grace when i'm high up. it's so true. i thought nursery songs were just crap, but i know better now. i'm learning it the hard way... but that's always better than not knowing at all. i'd rather crawl, grovelling and weeping in excruxiating pain, to school, than to see a failure on the exam cert.

i've lost count of how many people who love me and care for me who've tried to cajole, scold, scream, coax and sweettalk me into resting, taking things easy. i'm being irrational, i'm being plain stupid. i know this doesn't make me heal faster from the stab wounds all over me, but it's a primal instinct. i can't fight it. when it beckons, it's not a gentle, susurrous calling that draws me misty-eyed towards the goal slowly. it's a hardfisted b*****, shrieking at me to move it, do i want to fail, do i want to be insulted and humiliated, do i want to die in shame - if not, i'd better haul ass, and fast, or the whip's gonna come down hard where it hurts the most and break me, break me good, break me into a whimpering, useless mess that can't say my own name -

and i always shiver in fear. i work for fear. i can smell the danger in the air when someone responds not to an innate drive or passion, but fear. it's going to be nothing short of cataclysmically disastrous. the results will never be good. the person will never be happy at what he/she has accomplished - just slogging blindly, one day at a time, one chore at a time, one additional slavery noose around the neck at a time, until the neck swells and breaks under the collective strain of all the burden. it's blind rage driving competition, competition driving jealousy and hatred, animosity driving depravity and loss of self esteem, and finally the bitter self-mutilation/destruction that usually follows such regressions. i'm stuck at the jealousy part. i feel the ugly green monster creep up on me and sneer into my ears when a pretty, rich, smart and svelte lady passes me. it makes itself known unabashedly every morning when i stand before the mirror critically eying myself. it makes me see a scarred, obese, ugly, rude, selfish, poor and infernally stupid person masquerading as a normal one. i shake my head and turn away, but i'm just escaping truth.

i'm going to tell myself from today onwards:

1) i am made in the likeness of God. if i say i'm all that i said before, i'm saying that God is either really lousy at making people like me, or God is flawed. Since God is perfect, then the 2 statements are negated.

but that doesn't quell the ugly green monster. it flails its arms wildly and shrieks into my deep self-discontentment, fanning the embers of a smoldering firestock that could spell trouble if left to burn unchecked. so i will also tell myself daily:

2) i will not bring shame unto my parents, who have belaboured to create me from themselves, and nurture me, and give me food and shelter if nothing else, and to allow me room to grow to the being i am today. to proclaim myself worthless and bound for destruction is to spit on their faces, denounce all that they have done in my interests for the past 18 years, and to crush their bodies under Satan's jealous sulphur-lined boots. i must love myself, for my parents' sakes if nothing else. i will not let Satan have his way with my inner flaws.

i'm drained. this is a catharsis, an epiphany. i have dragged my screaming, protesting skeletons out of the closet and laid them bare before all who read this blog; i have nothing to hide. i feel like i've fought the fiercest war in the century; i'm oddly liberated yet mournful of the passing of my inner flaws.

from now on, i'll be who i am, and no more, and no less. you get the whole deal, or you get none. i will not covet riches, beauty, intelligence - all these are transient. i will not begrudge others their blessings.

i believe i will find the people who treasure my quirks, idiosyncrasies, and imperfections. and in return, i will love each of them and pray that the Lord bless each of them in turn, with all my heart.

2006-06-11T21:13:00.000-07:00

pammie returns with tiramisu and sausages and tinned tomato puree on tuesday.

sitting placidly in front of the laptop on my desk, pecking the keys with as much precision as a woodpecker drunk on milk kahlua. in case anyone is wondering, milk kahlua is a feminine alcoholic beverage, prepared using kahlua, a sort of hard liquor, and a ton of milk. on the first taste, i was struck by its resemblance to chinese medicine. but after a while, it starts to taste like the chocolate milk Alex is strongly insisting on. i guess it's either an acquired taste or the fulfilment of the power of suggestion. if u press me for an answer, i'd say it's suggestion. especially since i have never recalled my chocolate milk (or cocoa-laced glyco-protein complex, if you like) to leave a burning aftertaste. or perhaps i've never had the misfortune to be afflicted with GERD. haha.

sprained my ankle at 23XXhours on saturday. i was conscientiously trying not to disturb the meticulously arranged chairs of the wedding banquet at my void deck, and forgot about the slight curb at the edge. it's so slight that i estimate it to be less than 5cm in height. no child could possibly trip over it, not even a toddler testing out its newly biped powers. but apparently i have overestimated my superiority over a fresh bipedal human. i tripped. and landed sideways, not fully comprehending what had just occurred besides the fact that i had successfully overturned 3 of the chairs which i had very recently strived not to overturn.

Then the pain kicked in, with all the gusto of a purple newborn infant wailing lustily to get its first breath. wow. never again will i scoff at anyone who has a sprained ankle. it hurts like **** reincarnated. i hauled myself into a kneeling, subservient position and decided it hurt too much to make any further moves. there i remained for all of 5 glorious minutes whilst everyone stared at me and my playdead antics. eventually i plucked up sufficient courage to sit in a chair (one of the merrily overturned ones) to examine the injured foot. it was amusing to watch the extremity balloon up and fill the shoe in a matter of minutes. insta-elephant-legs, you could call it. it looked just like papier mache dipped in a tub of water. i struggled not to cry and laugh maniacally at the same time. fortunately i succeeded in repressing the 2 conflicting emotions, or else they would've called an ambulance to ferry me to the Land of The Ha-has With People In White Jackets.

i limped home, shamed at my defeat by a 5cm curb which 1 year olds sneer at and hop up and down on when they play catch with their mates.

the next day, i woke up to the dreadful realization that someone had taken a hacksaw and spliced off my foot (not too gently, either) whilst i was asleep. i looked down, expecting to see my left leg to end in a bloody, congealed stump of flesh. but the foot was there.

magically magnified, to boot. it truly resembled the world's biggest pig's trotters. if my mum smeared black soy sauce on it, i would've received a Guinness certificate proving my possession of the abovementioned delicacy in a snap. the ice pack and compression applied haphazardly close to the witching hour the previous night had not been as effective as hoped. but i was fortunate in that no boogeyman with rusty hacksaws had visited me while i snored and drooled last night.

not the best image in which to present, not even to my potential homicide-r, you see. pretty, well-brought-up girls do not routinely show themselves scantily clad around the lower body with lines of snot and drool hanging about their faces. as some famous but forgettable (ah, the irony) celebrity once said, one must be beautiful, even in the face of death.

sometimes i envy my guppies. they parade themselves nude in public, putting their bodies up for public scrutiny, without a trace of shame. sometimes they even allow themselves to relieve themselves and trail a line of compressed crap behind their asses without bothering to find some kleenex.

ah, to live in a world without mirrors. in a civilised world without mirrors, the ugliest people needn't be self-conscious, for they know not the magnitude of their superficial anomalies, and the people around them would be too polite to say anything about the issue.

even those ugly enough to induce appetite loss in others would simply think that the offended party was just having a routine upset stomach from, oh, too much yoghurt or something.

you see, we need to live with a kind tongue and no mirrors. maybe this is a form of HR/etiquette heaven.

but my heaven would simply have NO beautiful people in them. period. hahaha.

2006-06-06T06:52:00.000-07:00

decided to pop in for fun. not that i came with any specific agenda in the previous posts... well, not all of them, anyway.

pammie-san and christina-madamoiselle are happily ensconced in some rome-venice borderlands, trying to evade xenophobes who're probably refusing to sell them any strawberry-flavored brollies cos they have a brownish tint to their complexion. well... i suppose anemic-looking xenophobes need the brollies more. but honestly. Asians don't all engage in manic HIV inter-transmission and eat pig internal organs, you know. and come to think of it, pig organs probably taste much more substantial than the film-thin equanimity those people exhibit towards Asian visitors. at least pig organs don't taste sour and bitter and downright condescending.

ah, here i am, engaging in sensitive cross-racial debate. so sue me... but don't screw me. it'll be like screwing a bloody wine cask without e wine... just loads of sour vinegar. hahaha.

2006-06-01T04:41:00.000-07:00

hehe been taking a long break from blogging. i guess the convenience of surfing blogs and chuckling at the muses of my kakis is proving too tempting for me to resist, hence the loooooooooong vacation from my usual vitriolic verbal diarrhoea. heh. my mouth (and brain) have taken a backseat and are happily munching on loperamide like M&Ms :) anyway. let's see what happened since i last came here...

1. jerlyn's birthday chalet. where: changi fountain view chalet. when: 25-28/5/06. what: 3 crazy gals crashing an unsuspecting 5 yr old girl's 5th birthday party :) haha no la. we went with invitations duly offered and accepted. it was just that we merrily disappeared at the crucial BBQ-fire-starting-and-food-preparing phase and went XIA-PING-ing at Tampines mall :D forgive me my shopaholicism, for i repent of the obscene amounts of money splurged on bags, useless accessories and... i forgot what else. hehe. anyway we adjourned our shopping spree to return to the melee at the chalet grounds (approximately 10 sweaty people crowding around the teenyweeny BBQ pit and trying to CPR it into producing a decent flame - not to mention a certain potbellied "hunk-wannabe" who excitedly pranced the length of the courtyard wielding a pair of hot tongs without a shred of clothing on his back, much to our merriment) and set up the Localised Entertainment Centre, aka the JIALAK-LAH, SO DAMNED LOUD sound system :) my 2 mates bawled jay chou ballads lustily at the top of their lungs whilst my relatives hastily crowded outside for some fresh air (and reprieve from the din) with their plates piled high with curry chicken, beehoon, chicken rice, BBQ meats and fish, vegetables and other really tasty knick-knack finger food delights. my mum commented that those 2 singapore idol wannabes sounded drunk BEFORE they even drank anything alcoholic :) oh, and talk of drunk! miss TLEH is officially declared as the Most Easily Inebriated Female haha :D it was hilarious. she ate too much, took a glass of sparkling juice, and collapsed on the bed pale and gasping whilst me and kn the 2 merlot addicts regarded her with bemusement over the tops of our wineglasses :) i mean, it was 2 perfectly sober people with 3 glasses of 13% alcohol each to their account versus one very KO-ed gal with just one glass of sparkling juice. gosh. oh, and for the record. hard liquor tastes like fresh acetone. it's overpowering! :P this girl is definitely sticking to cocktails and dessert wines :D

and we just acquainted ourselves with the term "a la ka" menu. hahaha. imagine 2 angmohs coming into the restaurant, asking for the advertised "a la ka" menu dishes, a la carte style :P

oh, and brisk walking at 5am in the morning, with absolutely zero clue as to where we're walking to, and singing jay chou's ballads screechily, is an ABSOLUTE blessing. thank you kn ahnteh... i'd never have realised the sunrise was so beautiful until you introduced me to the miraculously bracing morning air.

a handful of muses

2006-05-24T08:47:00.000-07:00

been euphoric these few days. basking in the joy of being accepted into the prestigious medical faculty, thinking about the high loan amount required, disseminating the news to all my friends... it's been a whirlwind journey since i opened the webpage proclaiming my acceptance last Saturday.

in retrospect, i've felt particularly satisfied upon having this childhood dream of mine fulfilled. but i must state for the record that i've felt rather smug about proving the people who doubted my capabilities wrong. BUT, the key word here is BUT, i didn't get into medicine based on my own capabilities. it's God. He has made it all possible. without Him, the screwed up interview would remain screwed up, and nothing else. in my pride and excitement, i've forgotten that it's not my accomplishment. it's God's will and His blessings and a LARGE dose of His grace. so i say, Hallelujah! Praise the Lord. i would do well to keep this in mind and not let the glory of being a medical student get over my senses. i pray that the Lord would continue to bless me with the ability to be a compassionate and knowledgeable doctor, and to serve my patients well.

i recall asking pammie-san why she suddenly turned into a pious, fervent Christian when she was abominably blasphemous back in the good ole swinging bitch-fest days. i couldn't understand how a rebellious, punk-ish, half-goth-half-rock-chick-half-non-binte-genius could metamorphosize into a reserved, sensible girl in such a short period of time. and apparently, now i know. it's in my heart all along - the consciousness of the missing part of our lives. it's the presence of God in our souls. the Holy Spirit in our bodies. the gratefulness for the death of Jesus Christ on the cross for all of us sinners. it's such a blatant truth, and it's such good news, that it's crippling. it's breathtaking. when i understood it, in that split nanosecond, i simply couldn't do more than gasp at the sudden heaviness in my chest. and you just can't help but cry in joy, in ecstasy, for what the Lord has done to redeem us sinners. but only if we repent, ya? so repent we must.

and of course, reading those one-quote-a-day inspirational guidebooks helped me a lot in linking significant biblical references to my daily life. it's thought provoking and absolutely touching. never once have i been able to go through a month's worth of quotes without crying. and twice i've been sniffling silently on the train cos it's my train-reading material :) sigh. but i'm not perplexed or ashamed of my loss of control over my tearglands. it's ineveitable. knowing the grace... it's just overwhelming.

just had a huddleclique swim-dinner congregation! it was excellent. i recommend the rojak at clementi (behind the wet market hawker centre), it's frighteningly good. the sweet sauce is great! and apparently i tasted hints of citrus-y lemon in the turnips... so that's how the uncles prevents the turnips form turning brown... :)

alright! gotta go sleep. will update more soon! :)

matriculation

2006-05-20T10:09:00.000-07:00

OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

THE NANA HAS BEEN OFFERED MEDICINE.

OH.MY.GOSH.

all i can say is, PRAISE THE LORD. PRAISE THE LORD. PRAISE THE LORD. and i thank Him for hearing my prayers.

a bit more musing

2006-05-17T08:33:00.000-07:00

hi all!

haven't posted a proper blog in ages, i'm afraid. too engrossed in the tsk-worthy world of msn chats to engage my neural pathways in some serious acetylcholine kicking :) the horror of forgetting the name of the class of chemicals that cause semen to clog and increase uterine contractions in the female genital tract! (it's prostaglandins, by the way, if u need to refresh your memory as well :P)

i hear resounding groans (and some distant wok-pan-hammer-shifting sounds)... i take that as a cue for a temporary cease in biology discussions. *dodges the first flying pan*

Arsenal against Barcelona tomorrow morning at 2.30am!!!!! i can already imagine what the bulk of the topics up for discussion on tomorrow's morning express would be, given glenn's fervent support for Arsenal *GO, ARSENAAAAL!!!* and FD's neutralistic stand on the match. *cue deadpan voice* *yes, yes, glenn. go, arseeeeenalll...*

i'll be extending my job attachment at e lab till end of june, by which the SINE paper had better be ready or else i'll just plunge my head in the autoclave and turn it on full blast. (or my boss' heads) (whichever is more cost-effective, hahaha :D)

flu bug making its rounds, from the labs on the fifth floor down to my lab. my poor colleague has been out of action for a week. and still doing the headache-fatigue-puking thing. i guess it'll take a while for her to recover. meanwhile i'm eating more fruits!!!! :) healthy baby!

swimming with a glider is straining. i felt my arm muscles creak when i was frantically stroking them like a spasming frog whilst trying to catch up with e KNW :) atta girl! u're a good glider.

chalet next friday in honour of the 5th anniversary of The Day a Tiny Purplish Package Swaddled in White Cloth was Delivered to Our Family. the aforementioned purplish package has now expanded under hydration, nutrition and TLC to a robust, boisterous female preschooler. i AM immensely proud of her.

alright. that's all for now, folks. kn got into nursing (atta girl!), pammie into FASS, and denise is smugly reminding that i have NO acceptance from any uni whereas she has THREE unis waiting for her to make her coveted, important decision. All the best, dear. but let's try to be a bit more sensitive to the less-fortunate, shall we? no haughtiness, please! and of course, our prof zhuang is eying the prestigious wellesley women's college. way to go! and with an A*STAR scholarship as well! :)

i ought to consider opening a fish shop under the sponsorship of all my highly-illustrious friends. here's what i call true SUCKERSHIP :)

alcoh~~wha~??

2006-05-14T08:53:00.000-07:00

i've just discovered the beauty of alcoholic beverages... they rock.

they suffuse u in a warm lava-ish glow and make ur cheeks turn into groundlights for landing airplanes :)

*hic* i'll write more when i'm more sober. hahaha!

erratum

2006-04-30T06:21:00.000-07:00

yes. the little eastern heretic has spoken. she shall henceforth be known as little eastern heretic (LEH) instead of TEH :P

sigh. her idiosyncrasies. such... yes. indescribably quixotic.

heretics unite ~~ brooches!

2006-04-29T23:06:00.000-07:00

hey all!

went out on an excursion with kn and TEH (the eastern heretic) yesterday after work... to city hall!

we went on a romp across the white bridge spanning the s'pore river (oh what a disgrace. i don't even know the names of our landmarks :P ah, blame social studies for the useless propaganda and insufficient practical knowledge - for all you know, miss lim, if we ended up flunking our a levels we could still be trishaw-women and wax lyrical on the bridges and lime-coloured supreme court roof!). that was rather nasty cos i was dressed in a mid-sleeved white cardigan (my 2 streetwise kakis were decked in 1. sleeveless SEXYSEXYSEXY camisole top and 2. white teeshirt) and had a long skirt to boot. the end result was a very sweat-drenched NANA complaining all the way from the bridge to the shop (located on south bridge road).

the aircon from the shop was a very welcome incentive for us (well, at least for me) to start purchasing anything we could lay our hands on in gratitude for the reprieve from the sweltering heat. haha! eventually kn got herself 2 packets of earring-appliques, a chain of black pearls and a roll of 0.4mm fish wire (to re-thread the pearls), whilst yours truly bought 2 chains of pearls - 1 black and 1 au naturel :) am rather pleased with the purchases (though a tad on the ex side), they will come in useful for the date tml! :) denise was agitatedly anxious about our evaluation of her recommendation, but honestly dear. the shop was great and the goods were good, so fret not! we appreciate your recommendations! :D

after the frantic shopping spree (and a-very-happy-denise-armed-with-2-more-chops later), we proceeded to march gaily to that IT mall (shucks, the name evades me all the time!) where my mates retrieved CASSSSHHHHH *ka-ching!* and NANA thick-skinned-ly accepted KN's offer to treat me back for a lunch that i had treated her to aeons ago. moral of the story: make friends, lots of friends - you'll be reaping what u sow! :D that is true, and i thank the Lord for all my friends :) so we traipsed back to Petals, a subsidiary outlet of the SHATEC group of restaurants (after Rosette shut down, regrettably) and had our tea there :) kn and i shared a set meal comprising of caesar's salad, lobster bisque and grilled salmon with flat lobster in orange hollandaise sauce, followed by hot apple crumble :) sounds yummy? it was, to a certain extent, considering that all the food was prepared from scratch by SHATEC graduates :) i'm proud of the young aspiring chefs - well done! the orange hollandaise sauce was especially endearing - i was expecting an inappropriate, clammily sweet sauce of orange puree, but was refuted by the nicely seasoned offering that had just the slightest suggestion of citrus and was infused with a rich creamy base. looks like i might just have to tweak my notorious criticism of fusion cuisine - not everything tastes like high CRASS crap :) though i feel i must mention that the traditional lobster bisque doesn't contain carrot shreds :P heh. i guess they were trying to work in the concept that Singaporeans require more dietary fibre :) but i hold the opinion that our peristaltic functions are fine, it's just our attitudes that are severely constipated :P denise sampled the tiramisu and proclaimed it to be acceptable. the nice thing was that the waitress/waiter brought us samples of the desserts for us to choose - much better than the usual blind imagination of a piping hot dessert that ends up to be a horrendously thinly-sliced, lukewarm disappointment :) we were torn apart laughing raucously over a range of topics ranging from scandals, passing-out ceremony dates (NANA hereby retains the proffered suggestion of being a free escort for the exchange of free food and drink :D) to the use of a spade-shaped culinary device that was offered to kn at the start of the main course.

kn: *picking up the spade and examining it* what is this, a butter knife?
(waitress puts a bread roll on kn's plate)
NANA: i think it's some sort of a dessert thing.
*mrs wong yells in hapless supplication and faints - the horror of her pet student getting this question wrong*
TEH: no la! looks like some main course thing.
NANA: oh yeah - got flat lobster right. maybe it's...
kn: oh, to pry the lobster one!
NANA: ... no la! to flatten the lobster la! maybe it's not flat enough, then u're supposed to PIANGPIANG on it before eating.
*the others collapse in laughter*

... various happy experiments/surgeries were done on the main course using the spade before the waiter came to retrieve the plate...

TEH: *addressing the waiter* so what is this for?
waiter: for cutting the fish. *duh look*
kn: *GASP* i was half correct!!
NANA: oh man.
*kn and NANA die laughing. kn chokes on her tears*
waiter: *incredulously, to kn* are u okay? *to denise* your friends are (hand signal = NUTS) :P

loss of decorum in public = priceless :D

sigh. sorry mrs wong. please don't write to cambridge and request for a revoke of my A1 for f&N haha :) i really mugged hard for the egg essay... despite not being able to identify spade-shaped objects at the dinner table :P

i realised that i could fit into size 12 skirts! yayness. haven't seen size 12 since... sec 1. haha :P but the top needs more toning!!!! gambatte ne! :) swimming later - 20 laps at least!

i scouted the entire raffles city for a brooch/ruffled white shirt but was disappointed until kn spotted a wonderful brown suede/felt one (with weird dreamcatcher-like feathers sticking out at 5 positions along the perimeter). i promptly purchased it excitedly and requested for the feathers to be cut off (we must be the weirdest customers in a long long time) and also bought kn a nice blue-sequined brooch! :) hehe. so we're even, dear! hahahaha. the blue brooch set off her lacey camisole perfectly. very lovely :) kn suggests that i place my brooch on the non-dominant side during the interview so that the judges wouldn't jiggle their eyes out oogling at a brown flower on my chest when i gesticulate :P

denise bought a pair of golden-sequinned shoes! they're princess pumps and are really rather cute. but the sequins are rather blinding :P OKIES OKIES truce!!!!! u have WONDERFUL taste, dear :) pls don't kill me.

wish me luck for the coming interview, guys! i need loads of luck. and i pray to our Lord that i will have the strength to perform well! :)

:pray, [think]

2006-04-26T05:22:00.000-07:00

i send out a heartfelt request for all my kakis, soulmates, blood brothers and sisters, acquaintances, friends, shoulder-brushers, brief-hi-ers... whoever you may be, please spare a moment today to pray for Joan Chan Shufang, an RG senior of mine.
If you guys read The Straits Times, last Sunday they carried a story on her in Lifestyle. She is suffering from tongue cancer and is facing the very painful fact of imminent premature termination of her life in 3 weeks to a few months' time. Her treatment options are "limited", and all she can do now is to live out her days with her family, friends, and the unanimous love and prayers from strangers like us.

there is a mass to be held this saturday at the church of our lady star of the sea, in Yishun (right behind yishun national lib) from 9am onwards, in the AV room on 4th floor. It's a catholic church, but if you're free and would like to spend some time to join others in prayer for Joan, please do try to make it (regardless of race, religion, denomination, love of wasabi flavoured ice cream... etc). Detailed directions can be found at joanchanshufang.blogspot.com.

sitting down
in the middle of an empty room
dark in the edges (filled with stark whispers
cutting through
the pregnant silence)

someone is mourning (but not;maybe)
dressed in white
i can see frills in the collar
meticulously worked over with a spidery hand
in blue satin.
i can see
opalescent glimmers of
the things that make us (not happy)
on the cheeks
turned (pointedly) to the side.

i advance
tremulously

and i cannot suppress the fear in me
when the mourner acknowledges my intrusion
by turning to face me

i recognize
my face in tears

and my heart (anointed by the awfully sad droplets)
clasped in the skeletal hands
wrapped delicately in white (worked in blue

satin)

and there is no trace of soul.

would you like a retroposon to go with that?

2006-04-23T09:03:00.000-07:00

did my first stint in the bookstore on saturday from 3-9pm (said bookstore shall remain anonymous, for its own sake :P) haha. bookstore assisting is really fun and educative. For one who has had limited experience in servitude (tends to strike out in rebellion and petulence when ordered to serve in an obsequious manner) and sales (the only thing i'm selling is my rotten cranial remains, at half of its factory price :) good as a substitute for manure), it's a really eyeopening experience. i'm intrigued by the amount of work the tongue can do - sweet talking gets books sold, if nothing else. Simply by gushing over several copies of sparsely illustrated children's literature by some really obscure writer, i managed to convince a guileless mother to purchase 3 of the series of (apparently useless and mindbendingly simplistic) books.

hehe jj says i ought to start asking for commission! :P the only ire is the necessity of attending to customers who are apparently either visually handicapped or outright illiterate (in that case i have absolutely no idea what they're doing in the bookstore in the first place) and saunter/wander/drift/swarm into the bookstore AFTER closing hours. thus making the poor darth-vader-dubber NANA rasp rapturously about more obscure writers for an additional half an hour @_@ i threw in the towel and called it quits after i made an additional 18 bucks of sales after 9pm... by the time i shut the system down it was already 9.37pm and 2 more blur souls came in expecting me to miraculously restart the machine just to collect like 2 bucks from them.

NANA: sorry, man. tough luck... i'm bloody hoarse :P

anyhow. i simply HAVE TO tell you guys about this really bizarre dream i had this morning/last night. i was reading a book titled Near Death Experiences in Children blahblah and a book about 101 philosophy questions (there was one about terrorist shooting and the ethics of voting or minimal sacrifice vs maximum death). And right that night, i dreamt that i had an argument with my mum, and i committed suicide by leaping out of the window (i didn't note whether it's the bedroom one, or the kitchen one. more likely the kitchen one...) and fell to the ground floor. i vaguely register gasping on the ground floor before this funny cartoon with 4 origami-instructions-like pictures popped up and showed what sort of haemorrhage occurs for what degree of rib-puncture of the lungs... apparently the 4th picture (with both sides of the "folded paper" shaded green representing equivocal haemorrhage) (ok i know this is weird. don't even ask me what it means. it just popped out and i have never seen the term equivocal haemorrhage before) was circled, showing 2 ribs broken off and puncturing both lungs. so that was my injury. then i was suddenly transported to the A&E or something, and i was up on the ceiling looking down (yes, in comes the proverbial out of body/near death experience part) and i saw myself on a bed with all sorts of tubes and all. i guess at this point i was sucked back into my body cos i suddenly, viscerally felt myself gasping for breath, and i could (weirdly) see myself sitting bolt upright in the hospital bed and gasping like an incipiently dying fish. but just as abruptly as i was drawn into the body i was repelled out again, to the ceiling, my body flopped lifelessly back onto the bed, and the doctor came in and yelled "tell the family to prepare to collect the body"!

and this is the really weird part: the voice of the doctor was surprisingly real, and just as he was yelling i could PHYSICALLY feel my heart not beating, myself not breathing, and i felt very, very DEAD. really. i don't know how to describe this, but i did feel like i DID die. the weirder part is, after i KNEW i was dead, i heard the alarms of the machines start ringing and all.

then i was magically transported to some other place where jj was being executed by gunshot (aka the philosophy book situation) and i met up with his floating soul and we started chattering about how we both died. haha. totally surreal.

moral of the story: DON'T read too much non-fiction in a day. it does funny stuff to ur subconscious. lol.

am still trying to figure out if i really DID die last night? hmmm. so far the closest theory i've got to explaining the physical experience of the dream (i've never FELT in a dream before) could be that i happened to have contorted myself into a facedown position and thus managed to enact a semi-auto-asphyxiation situation which coincided with the timing of my death in the dream. but such coincidences are really rare, if they DO happen at all.

ah well! philosophers must have all gone mad due to the subconscious manifestations of their voluntary thoughts :D

hip, hip hypocrisy

2006-04-20T06:23:00.000-07:00

can anyone say hypocrisy? i just looked in the mirror at myself and found that hypocrisy is just a synonym for yours truly. and i feel awfully ashamed of myself.

all that talk about keeping calm and blase about interviews. all the nonsensical proclamations that i don't give a damn about which faculty takes me in (not which faculty I GO TO. there's a huge difference). all the useless preaching about keeping a "ping chang xin" to mian dui the rejections and unfavourable outcomes.

Oh, dear Lord. Save my soul for i have succumbed to the sin of lying to myself. in so doing, i have deceived the people around me, and i have even partially convinced myself. but i know the Devil is eying my denial with greed, so please save me.

i cried twice yesterday. once, when i ignorantly and irresponsibly poured my orange gourami (TT, which stands for The Terminator) and angelfish and 2 other larger gouramis into the arowana tank. The arowana snapped open his jaws and chewed TT like a gummy sweet. Despite refusing adamantly to partake of any living food in any given form in the past 4 months that I have been here. i thought TT was gone for good, but miraculously he was hanging on to his dear sweet life - for all of 6 hours, before succumbing to the calls of the Great Beyond.

Thus TT became The Terminated. yes, not a funny joke. my mentor came up with it in a sad bid to cheer me up cos my crying was making his goosebumps protest.

I am an awfully irresponsible girl.

The second flooding of the lacrimal ducts came when i was helping my mentor (the one with the sick jokes :P) cut fin clips for DNA digestion. Sometime in the late evening, and it was raining depressed raindrops outside. alex the mentor decided to tell me a story after i confided in him my disappointment in myself for being such an ingrate and hypocrite when i am already being favoured with the chance of being considered for medicine.

alex: let me tell you a story.
me: *unaware of the imminent floodgate-opening story* ok, say lor. free entertainment, haha.
alex: you know har, i had a friend. he was also like you, he worked like a workaholic and cared about his career and money the most.
me: most youngsters are like that - very materialistic. (note that i still couldn't shake off the hypocrisy despite all the self-berating)
alex: yar. so he worked and worked and worked and forgot about his family. he slowly forgot his mother (his father, i assume, has already left this world some time ago) while he worked his guts out to earn all the money and the certificates. then one day his conscience struck and he thought: oh, i forgot all about my mother.
me: *faking nonchalance* hmmm.
alex: so, like any other modern "filial" youngster, he called up his mother. "ma, come i treat you to dinner." The mother was so happy to hear from her son again and couldn't say much more than her eager agreement to the dinner appointment. so they met for dinner at the restaurant. the mum has become much thinner, older and more frail since the son last saw her, but she was so happy. she was smiling, and laughing, and he had never seen her any happier before in his entire life.
me: well, yeah. i mean, they lost contact for so long...
alex: the mum was really really happy that night. so she said to the son: "next time, we come here again, but on one condition: i will treat you. promise?" the son casually agreed without thinking. he thought, just a meal can make her so happy, it's not even a classy restaurant. he sent the mum home and they parted, mutually promising to make a date for the next dinner soon.
me: *thinking, oh no. she dies. i bet.*
alex: then, not long after the dinner, the son got a call from the police. they say the neighbours found the old lady dead in the flat alone. so naturally the son was quite sad and all, but he thought, well, she's old. and all the usual mental excuses people think of when they're trying to convince themselves they're not guilty.
me: yeah... *thinks: he's hit the nail on the head - i AM trying to run away from my fear of rejection by feigning apathy*
alex: wait, not finished yet. during the funeral on the day after the death, he was there busy with stuff and visitors when he got a call. he answered, hello? a male voice said, is this mr XXX? he said, yeah, speaking. the voice says, oh we're calling from YYY restaurant, your mother made a reservation for tonight but paid upfront quite some time ago, we're just calling to check and confirm your presence tonight?

suddenly my throat just closed up tight and i couldn't breathe, and everything clouded over with salty depressed guilty tears taken from the chilly april sky. and i cried.

in my mind, i can still see vividly the image of a well-dressed businessman and his wife, sitting at a small round table set for 3, looking at the sole empty seat and weeping silently together to mourn the loss of the last reunion dinner for the family.

alex, i'll never forgive you for making a stupid girl sick with the flu cry twice in a day! >_<

brainiacs in need of supplementary sponsorship

2006-04-14T08:37:00.000-07:00

something has been weighing heavily on my mind these few days.
i realise that a great majority of people have been overtly concerned over their imminent scholarship interviews/tests and their outcomes. with people, i refer to my peers... this same issue has been observed by pammie, who has likewise expressed her opinions on this issue on her blog.
i don't have much advice to offer to my anxiety-ridden mates except the fact that worrying does no good and goes nowhere. you can go for the test/interview and worry your head into a permanent hillscape, and it doesn't ensure that you'll perform satisfactorily. you can come out of the test/interview and speculate till the cows come home and seasoned stockbrokers fall on their knees in abject admiration, and it still doesn't alter the already predetermined outcome of the test/interview written on your portfolio. in case of rejection, you can cry your disappointment into a river of salty tears, and it still won't change the outcome a single iota. and it thus follows, to any rational person, that all these worrying, fretting, speculating, crying, moping and all sorts of emotional rollercoaster stunts that all of you force your poor stressed bodies to undergo is simply and utterly USELESS.

thus, please save yourself so much emotional turmoil. go for the tests with a calm heart and peace of mind - trust in your capabilities, and yet bear in mind the parallel, if not superior, capabilities of the other candidates. do your best. when you finish, don't discuss the questions if it upsets you, and engage yourself in useful activity (e.g. preparing for the next interview or a hobby) if you're agitated and restless. when you receive the results and you're told it's not contestable, and it's not to your favour, accept it as best as you can and shift your focus to another more viable option. if they are to your favor, and you find that you're still crying, for God knows what reason, you ought to dial the number for a Woodbridge ambulance. immeidately. you might be experiencing severe sudden happiness shock syndrome (SSHSS), which causes temporary (or sometimes permanent) psychosis.

alternatively, for the latter persons who find it difficult to even speak coherently into the phone to ask for the aforementioned vehicle to transport u to a comfortable quiet padded cell, NANA offers an economical alternative service of rolling-pin-whacking on the cranium, which costs next to nothing (you just have to provide the rolling pin).

as an afterthought, maybe the misshapen head you get after you regain consciousness in a psychosis-free form may disturb u enough to send you into severe sudden unpleasant shock syndrome (SSUSS). which present as signs identical to that for SSHSS.

oh, which also means that another round of cranium-whacking is in order! :) business will be booming for NANA and her infamous rolling pin then.

editing a thesis:assignment in bioinformatics

2006-04-12T08:11:00.000-07:00

i have duly assumed the unofficial post of editor for all incoming assignments, theses and personal statements for the people who are acquainted with me and my poisonous pen.

very poisonous pen. lethally poisonous.

suck on the nib and you'll be chromatography-compatible. now if THAT doesn't scare you, my lameness will. haha! :P

anyway! i'm subscribing to the morning express on "Crrrasss 95" every morning! it's addictive, listening to babyish glenn whine infinitesimally and hearing FD's chuckles in reply (out of exasperation, insanity or a mixture of both, it's for us to guess and him to know). Today's Honorable Professor Haaaaaaiiii-kinoyoto-san's quote was pretty amusing:

"Do infants enjoy infancy as much as adults enjoy adultery?"

yes, crrrasss, i know, but then again crrrasss is so hard to define objectively. *chuckles* and being low crrrasss is apparently a compliment :) go figure.

caught short

2006-04-06T06:44:00.000-07:00

heya!
interesting things have happened since i last left my potently poisonous thoughts here! i see they're still smouldering :) *waves absently at the smoke* anyway. let's tackle them one by one.

i tried tickle's IQ test - utterly reminiscent of the pri 3 workbooks that my terrorist teachers dropped merrily onto my cluttered head (thus incurring permanent neurone death) and which got me a place for consideration in Rosyth or Nanyang. Up till today I still feel very proud for not uprooting into the land fertile with nutritious, brainy brains, a decision which led to one of the most fulfilling careers in my life as a student leader as well as, SHOCKINGLY AND SCANDALOUSLY, an outstanding pupil of the year. well anyway. tickle's phD test designers proclaim me to be a visionary philosopher. they might as well call me a shitting shitter for all the difference it makes to my puny ignorant brain. hahahaha :D my IQ score is, disappointingly, 136 only. lol. so i'm not, as i thought, very smart. haha. eh pam! do it and tell me if the einstein head they show at the end with ur results is groaning cos of ur stratospheric scores that're indescribable simply because those phD designers haven't had the (mediocre) brainpower to come up with a 2-word description of a person with an IQ score of 307.

*i can just about hear denise say exasperatedly: why DO I CARE what my IQ is???*
*and kn with her 2 cents' worth: wah, 136 arh, NANA so smart... i only 189 lar. so lousy.* *shuffles off and mopes*
*NANA graciously presents KN with a well-placed knuckle on the philtrum*

today i became an accomplice to crime and was nearly arrested by a well-built malay official from the Ministry of labour! and i discovered that neural pathways that're responsible for transmitting shock signals (manifested in humans by means of jaw dropping, involuntary drooling and the like) are instantaneously blocked and rewired to observe the most insignificant minutiae of the face of a threatening figure when in shock. perhaps i ought to perform some behavorial tests and claim my nobel prize for socio-psychology :D let me tell you what happened!
i nodded off to sleep on the bus ferrying fellow scientists and me to buona vista after work today... as usual (well, for the past week, actually) i was as lethargic as a alcohol-ed nematode and utterly ravenous (more like itchy mouth) after work. and lo and behold! i was thinking of curry puffs and poof! a young malay chap with a styrofoam box full of curry puffs appeared at the covered overhead bridge from the bus stop to the mrt station! it was miraculous. so i merrily fished out my wallet and told him i wanted sardine flavoured puffs. he promptly dug around for a pack of green dotted puffs (green dots means sardines, and unspeckled ones are potatoes - the UNIVERSAL code for 3 for-$1 curry puffs!!) and passed them to me. i passed him a 2 dollar note. he handed me a dollar coin's change. and then...

his collar was roughly snatched up and forwards by a burly yellow t-shirted man who shoved a identity pass in the poor guy's feckless face and trussed his arms behind his back. all these happened in a split second - i barely registered the fact that i had just bought puffs from an illegal hawker when the burly puff-seller-accoster (who looked like an overstuffed tweety after a nuclear leak and probably had a couple too many puffs himself) turned to me, eyed the incriminating bag of puffs i had clutched in my ice-cold hands and growled,"Please leave the premises."

oh my. i didn't need telling twice: i just grabbed my bag and hauled ass! and meanwhile everyone behind me was boring individual pairs of laser holes through me cos they probably thought i was:

1. an accomplice to the malay hawker who got an unfair lucky break from the official, leading to insanely furious accusations that i probably bribed the yellow canary-like official with special puffs with extra egg or abalone or whatever, or
2. i was an informant. a stinking, blue-cheese-infested, sneaking and utterly despicable informant.

suddenly i didn't want the puffs anymore, but they still cost me 1 dollar, and 1 dollar is money, so i hurriedly stuffed them into my bag and hoped nobody would suddenly turn around on the train and point a gnarly finger at me, screeching: "YOU'VE PUT HIM BEHIND BARS!!!!!!!"

well. if we think logically, the rough action was probably to intimidate the errant hawker into compliance. and he probably would be fined, not jailed. unless he's a repeated, unrepentant offender. and we all know what God does to such recalcitrant socially-inepts: toss them to Satan for barbecuing! yay. ok. so grilled hawker with sambal isn't very palatable, but then again i felt slightly less guilty about it after it dawned on me that i contributed a dollar towards his fine-to-be.

yes. what an exciting, introspective kind of day.
i'm looking to a run-in with mr canary again tml when i suddenly find myself with an insatiable craving for fried springrolls sold by yet another license-less hawker.

and does anyone want to watch THE MAGIC FUNDOSHI? tickets at 18 each for the cheapest seats, opening on apr 16. it looks really hilarious! :) although hossan leong and kumar are all stuck up snobs in real life.

and i don't even want to go into emma yong! *scuttles off in fear*

dedication

2006-04-02T08:21:00.000-07:00

this song is heartfelt. from the depths of my immature, impressionable and innocent soul. yet untarnished by lust and power chase. to be sacrificed in the death of youthful fascinations soon.

ONLY YOU

i walk the streets
eyes unseeing
only thinking of you
my mind poisoned
with constant images of you
only you

[chorus]
oh what have i done
why have i gone
and given my heart
on a silver platter to the Devil
killing myself from deep inside
from wanting you
what have i done (wrong)
i've fallen in love with you

i live my life
in the shadows
the only rays of light
to free my darkness
are constant images of you
only you

[Chorus x 1]

no matter what i do
no matter where i go
i cannot escape from wanting you (so badly it hurts)
all of you
only you

[Chorus x 1]

i walk the streets
i live my life
only hoping that you
will one day see
that i live, and i breathe, and i dream
only you

Only you...

- to my secretly admired. with all of my innocently broken 19 year old heart.

and to all my friends, whom i have confided this secret to: this is how deeply, madly, irretrievably i have gone. ha! :D

yowza

2006-03-29T05:50:00.000-08:00

yo all!

i shall emulate olly's highly emulative example and post something on this freakingly old and dusty blog! I wonder if online diaries can collect dust? They just lose their spontaneity and allure after a while... Makes me feel like i'm doing a rote report of my life. Which is 99% sordid affairs and dirty jokes and 1% cranky psychosis :D

anyway... I really must state for the record that being out with kakis makes me exhilarated! so kakis: please ask me to be exhilarated! haha. and i realised that arcade mole-pop-up games are not only violent but wrist sprainingly fun! :D

can't think of anything particularly fun to talk about at the 'mo... except for my absolute liking for this guy... but it's off bounds! off bounds! *Shoo*

heist

2006-03-15T05:15:00.000-08:00

hey all.
haven't aired my dirty laundry up here for a long while. not that i haven't got any new dirty laundry to air, but more like i've been overwhelmed by the sheer amount of sirty laundry i can have. maybe i'm still reeling in shock. ha. my eloquence has flown merrily out the window together with my wits and they both said cheerio, adios.

not a good sign. when one's eloquence and wits wave bright yellow sun-brollies at a gape-mouthed oneself and sing happy holiday songs and basically abondon one when one needs them most.

been dogged by a couple of nasty infections lately. They certainly knew how to antagonize me to their fullest potential by popping up just right after the release of results and the commencement of the flurry-hectic-panic application cycle. so happily i was, stuck in a hospital bed (deja vu) gazing no-pointed-ly at the whitewashed ceiling whilst my multitudes of peers challenged each other to phalange-fracture by pecking furiously at their keyboards and waxing lyrical on why they'd make excellent scholarship or course candidates.

honestly i felt rather blissfully detached from the panic that everyone else was inevitably undergoing by not having a single application form in my presence. it wasn't until some innocuous little voice in my head (and i swear for the fifieth time i'm NOT schizophrenic) told me that the psc gateway closes (literally) on the 10th that i started panicking full force. which led the entire freaking ward to understand what a chao-loser i am (with lousy results) with an absolutely kiasu-kiasee attitude. ha.

but eventually i did manage to render whatever little bacteria-infected brain matter i had left into a 497 word essay, which i promptly submitted to the darned gateway at around 1am and just flopped like a dead convulsant fish onto the bed and writhed around making myself look perfectly like the backached-headached-eyeached dying fish that i wasn't.

anyway. people, learn from the great guru. do not sit like a shooting-range duck and wait for ur smartass doctor to instruct u... cos basically some of them can't be half-arsed enough to explain to you (since he/she reckons you're just like any of the other 5,673 braindead retards who're illiterate, uneducated and uncouth that they have to treat every year) and the other are just half-arsed enough to know that they don't know enough to put crap together to tell u shit. so they just keep mum, sit on your test results and nod their heads in a sagely/enlightened manner. do go online and trawl through the veritable trove of information (and tons of shit as well) and find out for yourself, through various sources, what exactly ought to be done. and don't be afraid to tell the half-arsed idiots that you want specific tests done if you read up enough to know that they're conclusive, useful tests. and apparently even the best need not necessarily be right (yes, yes, i know, holier than thou and all that) so get a second and a third opinion.

well anyway the above paragraph was an excerpt from my conversation with my boss. he's awfully concerned and nice. but if i don't haul my ass back on the double, even a nice man can have limits. so i am being a good obedient girl and resting at home. (well, mostly.) (ok, i TRY, ok?) (and yes, i know RESTING is stretching it a little bit.)

anyway. i found out most of what i needed to know from the internet regarding my bacteremia cultures. i think of the two, chryseobacterium meningosepticum is slightly more interesting. i say this, bearing in mind the key aspect of it being a lesser known isolate and role as an EMERGING infectious agent compared to pseudomonas aeruginosa, which we all already know is a common nosocomial infections agent. and apparently the fact that 2 out of 3 of my team doctors can't pronounce the name C. meningosepticum properly tickles me enough to put it at a slight headstart against its buddy pathogen. yup. its easy to google the names if you have them, and most of the stuff can be found from nature, pubmed or CDC (if you're dealing with infections). contrary to popular belief, nature does not publish articles solely related to the mating behavior of gorillas and alligators. they do medical papers too. and if the text is too arcane, check the online dictionary or come ask me!!!! *waves hands wildly in air*

people, is USP very elitist? and is anyone actually sacrificing an application slot just to fulfil the needs of a scholarship which i'm rather confident of not being awarded? gosh.

trepidation feels so numb.

2006-03-01T07:46:00.000-08:00

received the long-dreaded results today. to protect the already dangerously-frayed sanities of my friends, i shall not continue to comment on my grades beyond the purest technical description.

GP: A1
Math: B
Econs: B
Chem: A
Bio: A

suffice it to say that i am the first human to experience eyebrow-lifting at stratospheric heights. and suffice it to say that i was so shocked that my lacrimal glands gave up on me altogether and i could not, simply COULD NOT, squeeze out a single tear. in fact my face looks exactly like mr bean just as he realises that his swimming trunks have fallen off his body.

my parents are over the moon, of course. like the proverbial cow. or cows. hurhur.

it's well known that this round of exams was significantly harder and less run-of-the-mill compared to the multitudes of TYS qns we slaved over prior to the actual thing. i guess this accounts for some of the less-than-expected results. but i wouldn't know. apparently i'm not the only person who did not finish her papers (of 3 subjects) but still passed. and despite the migraine, i would like to venture out on a foot and say thank you to guo meimei. your cockroach song has done wonders. i suppose juniors taking economics ought to invest in this CD and practise their essays to its beats.

what next? doing chem mcqs to the tune of Shnappi????? *faints facedown to floor*

i would still have 3 hurdles to cross before i can get anywhere close to realising my childhood ambition: becoming a doctor. namely the shortlisting process, the written test, and the interviews (2 rounds). i do have 2 backup plans, one of which relies heavily on my to-be-published scientific papers. i shall cease to speculate and will not comment on my future simply because nothing is predictable enough for me to declare confidently now.

i did not feel particularly released today (as what denise describes), or relieved, or happy, or sad, or whatever heart-rending tear-wrenching emotions that nearly everyone else experienced. i was pretty much numb. and i do faintly recall with bemusement what i was pretty lucky not to have deferred.

was i scared? probably yes. was i nervous? definitely yes. was i intimidated at the thought of facing multiple fails? very definitely yes.

but somehow when you add all these together you get a clean slate in your mind. :)

so long~

2006-02-18T07:42:00.000-08:00

yo!
haven't blogged for damned long... feels totally rusty. *creaks and grimaces* heh. ah well. i guess i could say that work has been extremely busy. usually this excuse works 80% of the time for non-lethal no-shows for appointments, dates, gatehrings etc etc... i guess the list could be extended to include blogging! :)

i'm recovering nicely from the op, the wound is, thankfully, still alright. got a call from a sexy-voiced dr *gosh every male is sexy to me nowadays* to tell me to go see the infectious diseases specialist (the angmoh one) cos they managed to grow something abnormal from the excised tissue. sounds ominous? fret not. usually "abnormal" can be stretched to the limits of lycra-pants to include anything from super-resistant S. aureus (of the notorious nosocomial MRSA fame) to simple blue-green cyanobacteria that simply wandered absent-mindedly onto the agar plate at the wrong time. heh. i say, maybe the installation of mini bulbs to signal traffic for bacteria would stop them from wandering like idiots into my lipids or onto the culture plates. haha. but that would make my tummy the "hong deng qu" or red-lights-zone for bacteria. ooooh. haha. conjures up images of torrid sex. *as usual* my hormones seem to be running wild these few weeks. i wanna hump every other shuaige i meet... though, i strongly suspect, they may not feel the same towards me. hurhur.

went out with KN and pammie today for dinner! damned suaku. e crystal jade closed down already still mo-chup-chup go there and gape at the empty facade. haha. so we ended up chowing on sushi *pam: RAW fish!!! i dun eat RAW fish!!!* *me: sushi IS raw, dear.* and icecream from mac's! :) very full. went corporate-clothes shopping cos kn insists that she has absolutely nothing to wear. shopped at espirit and tsk-tsked the exorbitant clothes on display at boutiques. i basically tagged along and ate my icecream contentedly while admiring my newly permed hair. haha. it makes me feel va-va-voom sexy! heh :D i'm not joking. but then again, it could be the raging hormones rather than the new lolita hairdo. haha :)

bought 10 bucks worth of fishes today! now my tank is overcrowded with suckerfishes, guppies (who cluster at the top and seem to avoid the newcomers... tsktsk so antisocial), tetras, one clown loach, one striped dunno-what whiskered fish, and e 2 infamous fighting orange diamonds. haha. i'm seriously going to buy a large tank and start a real landscaped tank. this small one my bro can inherit for his saltwater pufferfishes and clownfishes and baby garoupas.

tomorrow and next weekend booked to the gills! gosh. tired, tired, tired. but what the hell. my friends are gems! :D and you know what a woman loves best.

last of my worries~!

2006-02-09T17:03:00.000-08:00

hi all...

am pretty much exhausted so i'll make this short. went for e lipectomy on tues and stayed till yesterday (thu) cos of the severe nausea. still in pretty much pain, so i'll lie down and rest for a while before i go back to the lab for the rehearsal plus cell check later on in the afternoon. take care, everyone! will give a better account of what happened (actually not much) the next time i'm on. the only thing important that i wanna say is that i'm so glad that all this pain is not for nothing - finally i can say that i won't have to take the stupid abscess problem into uni! yay.

i think trailing a drainage bottle around is a really asinine thing to do. lol. now i know why i ought not to go to work like that. cos it's really stupid.