I really dread Mondays. They are really long days. I have to climb up to 'heaven', go to 'hell' and eventually go to an in-between. For my 12pm lecture, I have to climb the impossible steps to get to stupid LT 32 which is on a hill and which I call it 'heaven'. It seems that 'heaven' is not that easy to get to (pun intended). For the 3pm tutorial, I go down to 'hell' - the unofficial smoking corner in campus. My goodness, it is totally smoking galore! And lastly, I have the espanol class at night which is somewhere between me being really tired and me relatively enjoying it. Mondays are really silly.
When I was on the bus back home just now, I saw an ambulance on the street and I suddenly thought that it should be quite depressing to see them zipping by because it would mean that someone is in trouble. Alas, when I was having this thought, I saw another on zipping past by the same stretch of street. How depressing can it get when you see 2 ambulances on the same stretch?!?
While I was on the way to school in the horrible-airconless-packed-single-decked bus 151, a silly thought suddenly occurred to me. It was really so silly that I almost laughed out loud to myself in the bus full of fellow NUS students, who would most probably think that I'm such an idiotic idiot who could not possibly be in the same 'prestigous' university as them (I'm being mean here, of course that is not true. NUS students are nice people).
I was thinking that since the job scope of a bus driver is to stop whenever people flagged them down, will they have occupational quirk (translation with credits to OWL so if its wrong, blame him! Anyway its 职业病 if you really don't understand the translation.) when they are off-duty? If they do drive whenever they are not driving the bus, will they have a tendency to want to stop their vehicle when they see people flagging or when gundus like kutu us try to hitch a ride? I mean, there will be people who have all these quirks like people in the service sector would be anal about good service and people like me (or maybe just me..) who had worked in Starbucks and would quite automatically start cleaning up their condiment bar or tables whenever it is dirty. So, it is also possible in the case of bus drivers right? Right? Of course I'm right.
Well, this basically does not serve any purpose or as any form of significance but I can only hope that the next time we try to hitch a ride, we will meet an off-duty bus driver.
I haven't been updating the blog as frequent as before, not that it was very frequent in the past. And now, I feel bad for leaving it to rot. :(
Well, the new school term starts again! And needless to say, the whole bidding frenzy was a period of frustration and madness but at least I have the comfort of it being the LAST TIME I'm going to go through all that rubbish. Actually, I secretly hope that the whole cors system will crash and save us all the agony.
And yes, before school starts, I was still in extreme playing mood. Mahjong, ktv, pubbing, staying up late and doing nothing, hanging out till late, you name it, I've most probably done it. And the evil online mahjong game. Thank goodness that the website is super laggy these days and I'm too impatient to wait. I think its a sign that I should stop playing it and if I can't stop myself, some bigger external power is helping me!
Oh, and I was supposed to start Intermediate Spanish today, so I thought, but apparently my dear friend was confused and miscommunicated with the person-in-charge. So, we both went down to Cambridge and sat in the office chatting to the person for an hour or so. And the dear friend, cheapo as always, tried to con a 10% discount from the person in Cambridge, failing apparently. And according to Dr Christian Huang, I am now also a Dr Xu in the area of Mahjong. For more info, read this.
Alright, I shall stop here for the moment. I'll be back. :)
I declare today Pens-hate-me Day. My supposed trusty pen died on me today during tutorial which was not a tutorial. It was a lecture and I freaking had to take notes! So I had no choice but to ask the friend beside me for a pen and his pen was working fine for about 1.5 pages and the ink started to lessen. And I was thinking, "no, no, no, don't die on me!!!.." Well, it didn't exactly die on me but it did ran out of ink. I suspect my friend secretly hates me and lend me inkless pen.
But at least on top of pens hating me today, there is a piece of good news! There is an extension for one of my essays that is supposedly due this friday. This is definitely good news when I have 2 presentations this week and 2 papers due this friday and I haven't started on the papers at all my progress is minimal. Yay!!
For some unknown reason, my laptop is unable to access my tagboard so if I'm not answering anyone on the tagboard, I'm not ignoring you k.
And somehow, I don't like this semester. There seems to be an endless flow of essays to be done and my brain is failing me. Must be all the 'too-intellectual' exchanges with a few people I've met this sem. Hopeless. Even at this very moment, I have trouble constructing coherent sentences here. And my essay contents seem empty. Just empty words. I think I'm dying. Blah.
Found out that I have lots of photos and stuff. So I figured that maybe I'll upload some of them up so that if one day my laptop decides to crash or something, there will still be a place where I have some of the photos.
Enlarge this to read. It's real funny.
cw's surprise bdae 2006.
Weiquan's 21st birthday party. And that's a lot of secondary school mates whom I have not seen for ages.
Recent ktv session with lh, rizuan and wugui.
Rizuan. Me.
Wugui. Me.
Us. And I found out that I didn't take any with lh.
Super cute dog at a pet shop. So cute that I was really tempted to get it..
I guess it's quite apparent on what this is. And it's made, not photo-shopped.
I can't help but think that Singapore is quite a un-news-worthy place. I bet you will get the same idea when you start channel-surfing (or rather, news-surfing) and find that ALL channels with the different news timeslots are reporting on the same things. And it is not very interesting news to say the least. It doesn't really give us much of an outlook on the world and what is happening out there (other than the seemingly-never-getting-stale news of the Taleban). I am absolutely sure that there are more things happening out there more worthy of being reported other than Taiwan men's obsession with 槟榔西施 and how it is a bad culture in Taiwan which the authorities concerned are trying to rectify. Hello, how many people out there watching the news are interested to know what measures will be taken to reduce the consumption of betel nuts? How many people are even interested in whatever the Taiwan girls sell, as long as they are in their skimpy wear?
And I finally understood kutu's agony of being in the same tutorial as the 'History Department Queen Bee'. She is so freaking irritating. She asks questions that have been stumped by historians and avidly debated in the academic field and when someone tries their best to give her a perspective, she claims that the person has not answered her question. Is she like stupid? If her question that has been troubling historians for ages (if you are interested to know, her question was, "What is the purpose of writing the history of previous dynasties/empires.") could be answered easily by someone in our tutorial group, I honestly don't think that the person should even be sitting in the same room as us anymore. He should publish his own bloody paper. So there she goes, wasting everyone's time with questions which are good for discussions but quite irrelevant to the presentations that were going on. She just have to be involved in every bloody thing. Even when we were asked to introduce ourselves in class, she has to butt in after every other person's introduction and start a mini conversation with him/her with almost no regards to the rest of the class. It is absolutely annoying.
The evil bidding rounds for modules are here again... I never got to find out how much I hate this system until now when I have to constantly up my bids in order to get modules which apparently, the whole world wants too! This is an extremely depressing process, especially when you are outbidded not by choice but because you don't have enough points to continue the bidding with those psychotic others who manage to get 6000 points from god-knows-where. And when there was no backup plans and I am forced to come up with one in case I can't get the modules I want. This is madness time.
School is starting again. After 3 whole months of not going to school, the idea is not exactly very appealing. And of course, the fact that I can't play mahjong every week after school starts is not very comforting either.
Speaking of mahjong, it is really such an amazing game and I can't thank the person who invented it enough. I can't exactly pinpoint who was the inventor but there were rumours that it was Confucius (?!) because the game was founded in one of the province right after he left the place. Well, if it really is him, I guess I can afford to forgive him for coming up with almost-impossible-to-understand philosophy of how a 'gentlemen' should behave.
Anyway, since I HAVE been playing mahjong every week for the past month and a half, it got me thinking about how I picked up mahjong. I remember going to my auntie's place every sunday with my mum and I would lie on the bed or sit beside my mum when she was playing and I just looked at how they played. The times when I get to touch the tiles were when my mum has to go to the toilet and so I would set up her side of the tiles for her. And if she was slow, I even 'collected' her tiles for her. As time goes by, I think I've learnt enough through watching and she also decided that I was good enough to play. So when she gets bored or irritated of playing for whatever reason, she would ask me to take over. And soon, my aunties too decided that I was a good extra 'leg' to have around because I could take over when they were tired. And so, that was how I ended up playing mahjong, with my relatives at my aunt's place. As I was telling a friend recently, maybe I have an added advantage over others who play because I started out playing with adults who included an uncle who would scold me if I were to throw tiles out for others to win. As compared to others who started out playing with friends who might be of the same level as them, I might, maybe have a little advantage over them. But again, it might be that I have 'mahjong luck' as a friend put it. But they say, 情场失意，赌场得意。I wonder how true is that.
And I just read an article about how playing mahjong would increase the probability of epilepsy and the best way to prevent this is to avoid playing mahjong. Seriously! How can that ever happen? And if you guys are interested in the short article, click here!
Is studying all about taking up subjects that you can score in? What about your interest? Even if it is tough to score, is it right to give up on it? It seems like everyone from school don't share the same view as me. They take modules in which they can score in. I take modules which I am interested in. Maybe it explains my CAP that is not as good as the rest of the uni population. A friend told me that if I had studied, he is sure that I would be able to do well. I wonder what makes him think so highly of me.
When people ask me what do I want to do after I finish school, I really don't have any answer, and it shocks people to know that I have no idea. Maybe I could do office jobs but I highly doubt so. I could apply for something related to my interest in history but I would be fighting against tons of graduates who are 10x more brilliant than myself. I could, of course settle for any random jobs that are available but I'm sure that is not I want.
So after some thoughts, I came up with possible jobs that I would want to apply for: - I want to be a museum curator, coming into contact with all the history that is kept and shown to the world. - I want to be a book reviewer who gets to read all the books on the market as my job but before that, I have to brush up on my language foundations which is probably as stable as an elephant trying to stand on its trunk. - I want to be a translator but of course, I need to possess the skills of being multi-lingual and I mean REALLY multi-lingual with knowledge of probably at least 5 languages. - I want to be a tour guide who gets to meet different people from all over the place and visit places all over the world. Now that a few choices are being analysed, nothing is easy. I'll have to figure something out.
I want to faint and question my sanity at the beginning of the semester. What had inspired me to take gender studies?!? It is so horribly, terribly, horrendously (I can go on forever!) difficult! Interesting it may be but the thing that I'm most afraid of now is to write out of point for the stupid paper. Damn it. Should have just dropped the module or something. It is too late for regrets now. I will just have to bear with it and hope for the best. Maybe the lecturers would love my handwriting - highly impossible but I'm hoping - and give me a B or something. Maybe the lecturers love some radical and totally new idea I would have come up with during the exams and think that I have the potential to explore the idea and view and give me an A! Maybe the lecturers will be feeling sleepy when they are marking my paper and in their sleepy stupor, they would be unconsciously writing a B/A for my grade.
Right. I know I'm just rambling. This is madness. I am contented with a freaking B-!
After another round debates, I've understand why people use cue cards but not pieces of papers to write their notes. It is almost indefinite that their hands would shake like mad. They may appear calm and speak relatively convincingly but just look at their hands and you will know how freaking nervous they are. Hands shaking like they had Parkinson's and it never really stops until their turn is over. It is absolutely amazing.
I hate to do group work. I hate group members. Maybe not all, but some. Especially those who put in minimum effort and give me rubbish to be compiled. I rephrase. I don't even mind rubbish because I can just delete everything but worse, she the person copy-and-paste all the stuff from ONE place and give it to us as it is. How ridiculous is that?!? And we had to edit everything including the format and phrasing. I think while I was doing the project that day, the person must be feeling really uncomfortable no matter where she may be (yes, the person wasn't around for our FINAL touch-up, which most of the time was spent editing the person's stuff!), because I think I was complaining and scolding and thinking of all ways to make life miserable for the person all the way.
Well, let me make one last remark here. )@(@$*(&%&#)(%*^*@_!_!(%&@)#
Always give your writing to a friend to proofread before you turn it in
If you have no friends, finish the writing well before the deadline and put it in a desk drawer for three days – then take it out and read it. You will find many more mistakes that way.
For style and readability – a good trick is to read a sentence out loud. If it sounds strange to you, it probably will look strange to a reader.
So nice of the prof to state this in his style sheet in which he prefers the term paper format to be. He has thought so much to include everyone in his list. Even those with no friends. No wonder he is well-liked by students.
And I found out that I didn't take any with lh.
