Wednesday, March 31, 2004

 
The Crimson Room.

mystery game. quite fun. google the answer key if you can't get it by yourself.

 
going to modify this song lyric [Edit: only changed all 'she' to 'he'] to reflect what I saw this afternoon, late in the day.


DO WAH DIDDY DIDDY - Fun Factory

There he was just a-walkin' down the street,
singin' do-wah diddy-diddy down diddy-do.
Poppin' his fingers and shufflin' his feet,
singin' do-wah diddy-diddy down diddy-do.
he looked good, LOOKED GOOD
he looked fine, LOOKED FINE
he looked good, he looked fine
and I nearly lost my mind.



a walking human-shaped void in the fabric of air and colour,
about this tall, and this broad of shoulder,
blanco-ed out from my field of vision.

curses.

One wonders whether I hate NUS more because of -him-, or because of NUS itself. The answer to this question has big implications for my honours project.


Tuesday, March 30, 2004

 
survey. for cheap thrills. in bad mood because of -him-. snitched this survey off -his- blog where I read again about how he's such a whiny loser. Nah I should stop reading his blog, it never fails to put me in a bad mood bcos he keeps Whining. nonetheless, grrr to myself.

YOU:
name = SM
piercings = intellect
tattoos = I was thinking of getting one on my shoulder recently, but decided against it.
height = 160 cm
shoe size = 7?
hair color = Black with white strands here and there
length = shoulder-length, growing it all out
siblings = three. girls, all.
pets = never before.

LAST:
movie you rented = Infernal Affairs I
movie you bought = nope
song you listened to = Ru Feng by Faye Wong, I think.
song that was stuck in your head = Shenandoah
thing you've downloaded = funny movie clip msned to me, about domestic maids
cd you bought = think it's called Remember
cd you listened to = an instrumental CD, Faces of the Harp
person you've called = Home
person that called you = Jax, I think.
tv show you've watched = Evelyn Tan's wedding
person you were thinking of = the bastard. Bloody rainforest scent outside the non-aircon canteen where I ate dinner.

Do..
you have a bf or gf = No!
you have a crush on someone = No!
you wish you could live somewhere else = No, I have a lot of things to do here
you think about suicide = Previously.
you believe in online dating = If it works for you, it works. If it doesn't work for you, then it doesn't.
you want more piercings = considering ear piercings
you want more tattoos = No
you drink = No
you do drugs = No
you smoke = No
you like cleaning = Not exactly.
you like roller coasters = No. Same principle as horror movies.
you write in cursive or print = Either. Depends on mood + lecturer's talking speed.
you carry a donor card = Yes

For or Against..
teenage smoking = Against
doing drugs = Against
premarital sex = Your choice, I boh chup abt ur life
driving drunk = absolutely against.

Best...
tv show = stopped watching tv shows or serials in sec sch
thing in the world = "drink, when you are thirsty. eat, when you are hungry. that will give you ease." idea not mine, from where I cannot recall at this particular moment.
thing to collect = Knowledge.
colors of all time = Purple
thing to do on a rainy day = go out in the rain with a good friend and splash water at each other
feeling in the world = love

Have you...
ever cried over a guy = Countless times.
ever lied to someone = Yes
ever been in a fist fight = Verbal ones. I win them.

What...
Perfume do you use = Oceanus, Clinique Happy, others here and there
shoes do you wear = slippers. I even drive in them.
are you scared of = see Bene Gesserit Litany of Fear, Frank Herbert in Dune series.

Number...
of continents I have lived in? One.
of drugs taken illegally? Does alcohol count? How about passive smoking?
of people I would classify as true, could trust with my life type friends? Quite a lot. Blessed with them.
of people I consider my enemies? Don't.
of times my name has appeared in the newspaper? One, I think.
of scars on my body? Here and there.

Have you ever...
Fallen for your best friend? Yes.
Made out with JUST a friend? No.
Been in love? Unfortunately.
Cheated on someone? No.

Who was the last person...
You touched? my eldest sis
You talked to? Davina
You hugged? my eldest sis

Have you/are you/do you....
Considered a life of crime? No
Considered being a hooker? No
Considered being a pimp? No
Are you psycho? Perhaps.
Split personalities? No.
Schizophrenic? No.
Obsessive compulsive? No.
Panic? Sometimes yes, and sometimes I'm so un-panicky the ppl around me panic on my behalf. Get real. Who doesn't panic at some point?
Anxiety? Not if I can help it. Never!
Depressed? same as anxiety answer
Obsessed with hate? No!
Dream of mutilated bodies, blood, death, and gore? trying not to.
Dream of doing those things instead of just seeing them? Absolutely not.

Are you...
Understanding: I get into trouble because I'm too understanding, and I also get a lot of happiness with other ppl because I'm understanding. What's the point of this question?
Open-minded: i think i need to get to know more ppl for the fun of it, if that's what this question's after.
Interesting: no comment
Hungry: not now.
Friendly: generally, yes =p
Childish: who knows?
Healthy: hmmmm
Difficult: Pet me and I'm not difficult. Claw me repeatedly for insufficiently explained reason, and you die.
Thirsty: Not now.
Responsible: I hope so man. I'd better be. Thing about responsibility is that it involves the perception of the other party as well, to some extent?
Sad: Yeah.
Happy: Yeah.
Trusting: Where? Maybe.
Talkative: I have been described in this manner by some ppl, yes.
Lonely: On occasion.
Own a webcam? No.

Currents
Current Clothes: tank top and denim skirt
Current Mood: not happy, a bit out of sorts
Current Taste: water
Current Hair: long
Current Annoyance: -him-
Current Smell: uh, i think the rain outside my room smells quite nice
Current thing you ought to be doing: studying for the upcoming exams
Current Book: biophysics textbook
Current DVD In Player: No DVDs...
Current Refreshment: more water
Current Worry: how i can chat with my postgrad when my chinese is rapidly failing me
Current Crush: asexual, no crushes, not even looking seriously

On Dating....
Long or short hair? No preference.
Dark or blond hair? No preference.
Tall or short? No preference, really.
Mr. Sensitive or Mr. Funny? both. they're not mutually exclusive.
Good boy or bad boy? asexual
Dark or light eyes? No preference.
Pierced or no? Depends on the location of the piercing

On preferences....
Chocolate milk or hot chocolate? the milk. i dislike things that stick to my tongue after I eat them.
McDonalds or Burger King? neither
Marry the perfect lover or the perfect friend? Perfect friend.
Sweet or sour? Sour.
Root Beer or Dr. Pepper? i get high on vodka lime.
Sappy/action/comedy/horror? comedy
Ocean or Pool? Ocean.
Cool Ranch or Nacho Cheese? hate cheese. see above.
With or without ice-cubes? Now that really depends on what we are using the ice cubes for, darling......
Shine or rain? either. since both occur regardless of my personal preference, it's pointless to prefer.
Winter/Summer/Fall/Spring? fall
Vanilla or Chocolate? Vanilla
Gloves or mittens? gloves.
Eyes open or closed? wide shut
Fly or breathe under water? Fly
Bunk-bed or waterbed? either
Chewing gum or hard candy? i strongly dislike chewing gum. see above.
Motor boat or sailboat? sailboat with someone 'yandao' to sail it for me. No motorboats, reduce fossil fuel usage, save the earth.



Bah.


[Edit:] I feel better now. Thanks for caring.

 
Congratulations to my brilliant and charming urops postgrad student for passing his PhD qualifying exam. *grin*

When he said "QE" and grinned at me I was like, QE? (my closest mental match is QC Queen's Counsel.) until it hit. =pppp

Happy birthday to shuai lao tou zi =) uncle's birthday coming up soon. It all ties together wonderfully as the best bday present he's been wanting for a long time. =p Dunno what to get him, maybe should just sit down and talk with him for a while if he's free too, as he suggested.

happy happy day

so his hard work pays off after all. =) always so sweet to have this reaffirmed even in the fickle world of research.

Monday, March 29, 2004

 
and so I get drawn again into a discussion on what I intend my blog to be.

nmind, is good exercise for the brain.

In each entry, I try to put one and only one cluster of related thoughts.

This is because:

1. I think of it as a courtesy to my readers.
2. This clear and easy style of writing also draws comments. I like, I like! (comment whore...) But honestly, it makes me feel appreciated =p and happy too that my friends are actually taking the time to write a few words on my ramblings.
3. It also makes it very easy for me to argue with people who are going desperately out of point, because there are not many points to begin with in the first place.
4. It structures my thinking, issue by issue.
5. And finally, because I just like it this way.

Therefore, on bad days or bad weeks where I have no defined clusters of thought, and am simply 100% zonked out, I either don't write, or write simple entries about e.g. Google pigeons, or write long rambling entries which only reveal my inner morass of tumour-blood-vessel-like thoughts. The last category is painful to read, even to me, and so when I re-read it, the first inclination I have is to delete it. Only when there are no comments for it present, of course.

Which brings us to the very interesting point on how come a survey that I find painful and boring, filled in on a bad day, can inspire interest from some of my friends. Oh well. It's one of those life things, like peanut butter M&Ms and other icky but oh so delicious stuff.

So I'll leave boring stuff around for a longer period next time, if ppl like it enough to -comment-. Probably the best way, yes?

Happy day to all of you. =)

 
hi ppl. okay since the survey thing has been irreversibly deleted, i'm going to fill in the same survey again, okay?

but since I'm no longer permanently dehydrated, perpetually hungry, pressed by deadlines, irritated by religious speaker, or especially stressed out by anybody in any way except Jax's weird PR remark and one of -his- remarks elsewhere, it's not going to come out with the same answers all the way. Just telling you. What's going to be there is what I feel right now, right here. Seems good enough, better than last week's one I would think.

------

*10 of your favorite songs
- all you wanted - michelle branch
- slicker than your average - craig david
- the yummy pepsi ad with beyonce, britney, and pink, going We Will Rock You
- that one leh, that one leh *jumps up and down* teresa teng, "la, la la la la la lala....." right, like that's some clue. dunno what it's called lah.
- Beethoven's 5th symphony when performed live (re SCM concert last Thurs evening). Quite fun to see all the strings playing together.
- Regret - NewOrder
- Bizarre Love Triangle - NewOrder
- Pokpok - which I've only seen once
- The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls (yes, yes........)
- this is the song that doesn't end....
- and many others

*9 things that you wanna do
- eat regularly
- sleep well
- be a good example for my eldest sis who has just passed her driving test (and ah ma here passed 3 years ago and has picked up some of the atrocious habits of S'porean drivers)
- reassure my parents truthfully that I am eating regularly and sleeping well (see pts 1 and 2)
- happy things
- fewer deadline things packed together. unfortunately there's this thing called exams, coming soon.
- not have idiotic friends making strange comments on me which I am compelled to refute because those are simply not true
- learn how to fly
- prepare for exams
- aka zhuan xin du shu

*8 things you enjoy doing most
- make that one thing. Live.

*7 favourite memories
- sure got one, but now can't think of any

*6 things you touch everyday
- wallet
- watch
- handphone
- food
- my clothes?
- very hard to say, on some weekends I just spend the whole day sleeping and therefore touching none of the above.

*5 things you do everyday
- read
- eat
- sleep
- read more
- talk

*4 things you are good at
- i
- have
- no
- comment

*3 movies you'd watch over and over again
- matrix one
- beauty and the beast, disney, circa 1991
- minority report

*2 artists or bands you've seen live
- dhs chinese orchestra, back in 1992
- Singapore Conservatory of Music orchestra, last Thursday evening

*1 person you'd spend your life with
- who?

I. List your top three favorite:
A. Bands
- the NUS a cappella group, Resonance. They're performing on 26 June, Sat, keep that date free! =ppp
- hwa chong chinese orch, cos my cousin plays there
- acjc choir, for pure style

B. Movies
- this question
- is
- repeated

C. TV Shows
- i don't watch tv

D. Clothing stores
- anything from: far east
- heeren
- u2, sometimes

II. Choose four words to describe your personal style:
- occasionally abrasive
- often sweet
- dislike ppl who confuse feelings with logic in any way whatsoever
- occasionally forceful

III. What are your 3 favorite hobbies:
- talking with old friends
- talking with new friends
- talking with cute and friendly strangers

IV. Describe your dream weekend:
- one where time doesn't pass until I've done all that I've wanted to do

V. What do you look for in a potential boyfriend:
- sheesh what a question
- must have attractive looks
- must be able to argue with me and win sometimes
- must be able to derive meaning from his own activities when I'm not there
- faithful and committed to our relationship

VI. Who is your idol and why:
- this varies on a fairly frequent basis

VII. Describe the person you dislike (NO NAMES) and the reasons why:
- sigh. too tired to dislike anybody.

VIII. If tomorrow were your birthday what 3 things would you ask for:
- peace
- love
- happiness for all mankind. hah.

IX. Describe your favorite outfit:
- nothing at all

X. Where do you hang out? What do you like to do there:
- recently: at home, sleeping.

XI. List the last 5 things that you bought with your own money:
- dinner
- chocolate
- ice cream, the weather was hot
- before all that is last week already: Sat breakfast
- and Fri lunch

 
a song with soothing melody.

Shenandoah.

 
I am getting a surprising number of comments for my deleted entry. *looks shocked* Didn't think that was possible.

so...... after spending a week in kill mode*, bcos of project deadlines, tests, religious talk, "good evil warlord" who has since then owned up via email as somebody I know and who didn't mean to sound strange, going places with various 'yandao', and then going home over the weekend to realise that my home is a place of serenity where my eldest sis can hug me and with perfect justification call me "scruffy", life is much better. =)


a question: How much wood can a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck can chuck wood?

Warning: Do Not think about this Question if you are Busy, or Otherwise Occupied.

I can just imagine Jax's response to that actually: "Meowwrrrz! *licks feathers from whiskers* No more woodchuck. The question is moot." =p


*kill mode: when one's heart is not required in the fulfilment of one's immediate duties such as chasing down unknown stalkers or doing homework, and therefore starts rusting badly from disuse. Undesirable mode to be locked into.

Friday, March 26, 2004

 
[killed off boring mass-email-survey-type entry]

 
nothing quite like having coffee with a 'yandao' to make life satisfying.

oh wait, I should add, meeting someone new whom I've seen in same JC but never met before, is .......... not fun when that person talks like he/she hasn't learnt anything since JC days. So much for high positions in JC indicating the substance of a person, as -he- and several others still in the JC world would assume.

Btw before that went for religious talk with old friend, new acquaintance as in prev para, and another totally new acquaintance. The talk was ridiculous - great showmanship, and no substance. I think it gives religion a bad image and particularly that particular organized religion, although I've always quietly believed in this one more than any other, on the rare occasions when I think organized religion's not all that ununderstandable.

I'm not going to say anything else about that talk here because once I start I won't stop, and it's gonna offend a lot of people who will then pick bones with me about it until the end of my days. No no thanks. Let's just say, if you were there, you were there. If you weren't there, you weren't there, and I can't possibly describe in a believable way how totally illogical it was without you suspecting that I'm against that particular religion, which I'm not. I just hate the way the speaker structured and substantiated his presentation topic. Repeat, -totally illogical-. Total -speech and drama- tactics. No central message unless one listens carefully.

Lots of linguistic hazing so that one's brain gets lulled into drowsiness. Interspersing self-evident statements with totally random unsubstantiated un-elaborated assertions so that audience thinks he's quite smart after all and doesn't challenge his assertions. Stopping theatrically and moving on to another thing altogether when he thinks he's made a point, and the sleepy audience agreeing that he's made a point when actually he hasn't at all. The central message being a bald assertion and coming out -only- in the question&answer session.

Stupid quotes from various dead people left, right and centre - quotes not used to structure an argument but simply brought up because they were said by some famous long-dead people. Speaker yelling agitatedly into the microphone throughout the talk. *I give speaker the blank fish-eyed may-your-bones-fry-in-their-own-juices stare*.

Speaker rudely ragging the ppl who stood up to ask good questions about his boldly irrational speech. To boldly venture forth into the land of illogic while cloaking it in dead men's quotes is to volunteer oneself to be questioned as befits a blabbering loudmouth. People asking questions do -not!- under any circumstance deserve to be cut off abruptly by a snickering comment before they have finished saying and structuring the issue they are concerned with.

Oh, I talked about it after all. Well well. It doesn't sound believable, right? See I told you. And the guy's supposedly a great religious person. The only nice thing I can say about him is that he's a very good public speaker with great flair for timing and dramatic accents. Made for TV.

-upset with this great blabberer-

Did I mention that he didn't even state his premises or main points? When asked for clarification on those, he sniped at the ppl asking questions for being -so completely stupid for not understanding his talk-. The fact that all 5 questioners were asking for clarification of simple things like main points, already says something about the substance of the talk...

[Edit:] *richly quiet creamy savagely cynical gentle amusement*

Thursday, March 25, 2004

 
Some miscellaneous musings: I was hoping for a rainstorm to occur today, when doing work in the sun-filled area of my room yesterday afternoon. And when I stepped out from lecture just now, it was raining! Yay!

The fun part of that was that it was raining rather listlessly, and I was simply drifting quietly from LT to the canteen, walking my friend to his lab. He asked why I was so quiet, and I said, "It's a drippy day. I was actually hoping for thunder, lightning and pouring rain." At that moment the rain got heavier. =p And my friend said, "There it is!" *grin*

And I'm now sitting in the most private corner of the public comp lab during lunch peak hour, not feeling hungry or cold or tired or bewildered, and having the chance to do happy things while printing notes for the 2.00 practical later.

I see rainbows everywhere, that offset the taste of stalker nut's blood running bitter in my mouth for the past three days. And I'm meeting Bjorn for a drink later. Yay.

To be uncomplicatedly happy for just 2 hours in every week.... =p that's essential.

and how are you all?

Tuesday, March 23, 2004

 
Google and pigeons: cute things for computer ppl. link

Saturday, March 20, 2004

 
I am a stupid fish. Someone tell me never to eat chicken-rice-type chilli sauce with bittergourd again. It makes the sauce taste like its two very distinct components: chilli, and a ton of white refined sugar. Yucks.

Saturday, and I'm tiredly raving with (read fast) blood loss caffeine overdose lack of sleep, work stress from zapping 12 papers I have to read by next Wed, accidentally ignoring my dear Chem TA while trying to not collide with some other guy, and the chilli-sauce-bittergourd shock. Trying to soothe rui online. Trying to find out what Slam Dunk is. Getting inexplicably quizzed over the phone by Jax who is curious to know who the guy I met yesterday is. Whoa, kick me now, just kick me.

I am going back to the canteen to read my papers, it should be fairly clean by now since the lunch crowd has left.

Bye.


Friday, March 19, 2004

 
On the importance of Primary Literature.

If you are a kid who has never been exposed to the fact that your teachers consult something in common before preparing their notes and the things they tell you, where in other words they don't state their references during class time, or their references are only textbooks,

you would have completely no concept of what is known as Primary Literature.

The Original (Data) Source. The hotbed of discussion with statistics and other experimentally derived hard data. The place to go if you really want to learn or do something. The place where reputations are made or destroyed. One of the Places to be, if you want your name immortalized.

The people who learn about this Primary Literature thing the earliest, in elementary or junior high school, are the luckiest. They have the most time to go about delving into it before getting thrown into the real world. It's even related to schoolwork - you can use the Primary Literature for certain subjects and your teachers will love you while your less enlightened classmates will hate you.

It doesn't mean that you're really smart. You know you're just faking that aura, by knowing something that the rest of your age group doesn't know yet. Or maybe you don't, and you really think you're really smart. Well, whatever.

The point is that because the Primary Literature is a place of constant change, in fact a place where constant change in current knowledge is wholeheartedly embraced, like "Take me! Take me! Get some data and get off your butt and add your lab's knowledge to mine!" kind of embraced,

you might always think that knowledge of the non-abstract explainable kind becomes outdated as soon as the textbooks hit the shelves. Well I'm sorry I have to say that from a certain point of view, e.g. the Primary Literature active researcher's, knowledge in textbooks becomes outdated before they hit the shelves. Ta-dahh. Er. But before I digressed into that, I

was saying that from where you are, in ignorance of the character and nature (inside Science joke) of Primary Literature, you might think that absolute knowledge is useless since it's so inexplicably fluid to you. And you would be quite right. You might get put off Science or Humanities or anything else that directly requires method and experiments. You might get into religion or giving private tuition or go into music or going one-on-one with young hunky guys as a personal gym trainer or learn to be friendly and smile politely as a frontline service person, where experience matters more than absolute knowledge, where individual personal perspectives matter more than collective perspectives or "absolute" Primary Literature form of knowledge.

You would not ever have had the chance to know the various speculations on why things tick according to natural laws, why financial markets can be predicted, why your computer works as it should due to the hard work of engineers and computer programmers, why large groups of people get around to agreeing intelligently on certain common things.

But you might know very well how to interact with all kinds of people, how to deal with transient things, how not to take things to heart, how to handle life, how to love. Simply because you spend less time doing lab research which inevitably fails frequently leaving you with a "what the hell have I done these past few months except make tons of mistakes which maybe a better smarter researcher won't make, and my boss is breathing down my neck while I'm already trying my best to make the experiment succeed", and more time just being observant of and thinking about the things you -can- see, in the world which you live in. Which do you prefer?

Wouldn't you rather have had an informed choice in the first place?

(The Internet is an unreliable alternative resource because some ppl update once every five years, and another consideration is that some sites are done very very obviously by elementary school kids who have no idea even how to organize their information into some kind of logical flow, let alone search for really hot up-to-date material to show on their website.)

So, if you want to dabble in Primary Literature research, or know more things about how people make decisions that run the world, start young. Please. If I have kids, or went out to teach, I would drum this idea into their heads as early as possible, and not give stupid spelling tests. Who cares how you spell if you don't know how a major part of the world works?

 
met a friend of a friend today for the first time, over lunch. I've seen him before but not talked to him, he says he's also a friend of Jax. Okay. so,

when our other mutual friend was momentarily off buying drinks (goodness, we've been in Science so long and she still doesn't know that the heavenly Hazelnut Avocado from the fruit juice stall exists *happy grin*), I asked this guy, "so you know (Jax) lah". It went like this:

Me: so you know (Jax) lah. =)
Guy: yah.
Me: for how long? =)
Guy: since year 1 sem 2.
Guy: He's quite hot-looking, isn't he?
Me: (chokes) *laugh* Did you say what I thought I just heard you say? He's quite hot-looking?!!
Guy: No no. I said he's quite hardworking. Wah lau!

Some bloody Singaporean accents always trip me up.

Kudos to you, Jax. *laugh* Nobody thinks you're hot-looking after all... well done....

Thursday, March 18, 2004

 
another song

well, projecting a few months into the future, i might look back at this time's archive entries and think, "my blog's turning into a song list".

but, "whazzup whazzup whazzup man" with that, for now. =)

the time of fear always passes. the hour of 6 am always passes, and it's now 9.... -thirty.

the song that broke my heart during a cappella practice. (when i was still singing.) it's curiously but remotely poignant now. because, as E said so long ago, it's a song about the attraction of -first love-, which has been studied and shown to fade with time, even if the couple stays together in a loving relationship for life.

I look at this song now, and think that you can see it in many different ways, depending on how naive your sunglasses are at the moment you read it. Well I have a few sets of varying naivete, think the one I was wearing a couple of years back has lost itself to time and greater knowledge n experience. =p Enjoy.

Here, There and Everywhere
duet form

To lead a better life
I need my love to be here
Here

Making each day of the year
Changing my life with a wave of his hand
Nobody can
deny that there's something there...

There
Running my hands through his hair
Both of us thinking
how good it can be

Someone is speaking, but
she doesn't know he's there

I want him everywhere
And if he's beside me I know I need never care

For to love her is to need her everywhere....

Knowing that love is to share
Each one believing that love never dies
Watching her eyes and hoping I'm always there

I will be there, and everywhere
Here, there and everywhere

Wednesday, March 17, 2004

 
for the five elements quizilla quiz, I managed to get them all without lying at all, simply by holding one of the many different mindsets I know I have, at the time I was doing the quiz.

Not bad.

Which of the 5 Prime Elements are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

In this order, water, air, earth, fire, ether.


 
this song suddenly came to mind.

sensual poetry in the guise of "sedate and boring" choir music.

Jonson is the person who wrote "Drink to me only with thine eyes" etc. Not that I knew this before I sang it.

Enough introduction. Think INNOCENT, ppl.

Have You Seen the White Lily Grow (song lyrics)
arranged for SATB by Irving Fine, in his fabulous Hour-Glass song cycle
original poetry by Benjamin Jonson

Have you seen (have you seen) the white lily grow
before rude hands have touched it?
Have you seen, (have you seen, have you seen) have you seen the fall of the snow
before the soil hath smutched it?
Have you felt the wool of beaver,
Or swan's down ever?
Have you felt..... the wool of beaver ever? Have you tasted the bag of the bee?

O... so fair
O so fair, o so soft
so soft so fair
So fair so soft so sweet so sweet is she!

Have you heard (have you heard) the white lily grow...

have you felt the white lily....

have you seen?



sensual music indeed.

meanwhile am thinking about the casino thing. similarly idealistic, but less beautiful. Did you read today's ST?

 
so. it's wednesday.

yesterday lunch met nice auntie LP who proceeded to give me ikan bilis and spill anchovy sauce all over my T-shirt. No no she didn't, really. We chitchatted and she said somewhere sometimes "you must be tough =p"

right ho.

yesterday spent six hrs with friend staring at the computer screen, compiling and thrashing out final version of today's ppt presentation. grp project. work quality fr ppl varied tremendously, as usual. one person couldn't even defend her slide or state her source when we questioned her totally groundbreaking claim in her slide. bwahahaha.

nervous today, during pres. level 4 pure bio mod with all the level 4 pure bio honours students in the class, and i'm presenting. probably was mad to volunteer. so i got up there and promptly started to sound nervous. Well after that class I went ard asking my friends wat they thought and half of them said i sounded nervous, half of them said they didn't notice anything. And all of them said I had explained clearly. Good good. Loudest applause for -our- pres out of the 4 done today. *bhb* and that was -before- our prof announced that that was the last pres for today =p at least our six hrs of eyestrain yesterday weren't wasted.

last nite too someone said he loved me. yay. he smiled in this cute way at me too, over lunch today.

monday during pharmaco prac: my PRC groupmate starts muttering under his breath while staring at the lab computer, about how when one has fully understood the Tao, one may not definitely be able to explain it to the ppl around but one knows that one has understood. *weird look at groupmate*

yesterday: got introed to zen koans by someone as possible solutions for my dreams. what do i find, but "zen koans need to be experienced and understood, and cannot be explained to others...." (amongst other functions of koans, of coz)

Someone up There's trying to tell me something............. er..... what? sth impt for my immunocompromised state.

Monday, March 15, 2004

 
[Let the (violent) dreams die where they first arose - only in my deepest sleep.] Thursday March 11 entry.

I am going to break this rule to tell you my friends something about a dream I feel is important for raising awareness about your own protection. Forgive me if this offends your sensibilities. I am looking out for your interests too.

Last night I slept at 2. I was jolted awake by this horrific image at 6, and couldn't go back to sleep. Have taken a bath, and am now here telling you this:

My previous violent dreams involved only me and -him-.

This one involved someone I used to know who has recently declared partisanship for me. She is not involved in the matter in any way except for this offer of allegiance based on what I say in my blog. She does not know me personally. She has pretty much absolutely no links to me. All the more terrifying,

when in my dreamworld she sat down beside me and was gleefully smashing her own hand into a pulp, with great force and evident warped enjoyment.

I place this up for open public discussion because now it's not just me and -him-. It's also about your own protection. How much do you know how to protect yourself, while caring to the extent you feel is suitable?

Jax tells me I worry over nothing, because nothing has occurred. Yes nothing has occurred. Nothing has happened to my friends. Good. I want it to stay that way. I want you to stay healthy. For that I am writing this entry to remind you to do the things for yourself that you need to do. Forget the cost to me; I can take that far better than if anything untoward happens to your heart and mind as a result of my difficulties.

 



the lovely lady in red, the idiot wearing a blue long-sleeved silk top, and the other lovely lady in white. from last Saturday afternoon, near a muddy field, somewhere in Singapore. some organisation's 20th anniversary.

In no particular order, for those who know us, june, isabelle, and thecreampuff.

 
btw the % for each quality (I, N, F, J) is 50-60 only.
which probably explains why ppl who can't handle change in emotions/personality have problems dealing with me. but i'm perfectly fine with myself.

INFJ - "Author". Strong drive and enjoyment to help others. Complex personality. 1.5% of total population.
Take Free Myers-Briggs Word Test
personality tests by similarminds.com


so much for complexity.

tired. because.... (skip if you have had a long day)

I forced an alternative format through the thick heads of some proj grp members today, who wanted to strictly follow the point-by-point outline the prof gave for assessment of a journal paper. Yes, I practically shoved it down throats. Let me explain before anyone jumps too high.

The problem was that the prof's outline is very much applicable only to experimental papers (aim/hypothesis, experiments, results, discussion) and not to a review paper like what ours is. The structures of an experimental paper and a review paper are very different. One describes an experiment that contributes to the raw empirical data store known as "knowledge". The review paper then takes many bits of such painstakingly extracted data and synthesizes them into something resembling a theory, on the larger picture that all these different teams of people are working on in their tiny specialized way.

This means that review papers are by nature more speculative. Also, how good a review is doesn't necessarily mean that it has a lot of solid experimental data backing it. Sometimes, like in this case, the overall thought structure is good enough, because as said in the review, the more detailed experimental data for this larger concept structure doesn't exist, yet. So yes, this review's a bit flaky. In fact it's the flakiest review I've ever seen. But it's worth looking at because it takes fragile tantalizing clues and puts them together into a coherent though not well-supported structure that ppl can then discuss and try to direct their research towards.

I actually had to take the prof's questions and attempt to answer them before ppl started realising that maybe his format was not so good for our paper after all. And it's my groupmate's proposed format that was sounding much better, not mine. So I was actually very free to push for it without sounding too pushy. At least it worked.

For this some ppl in the group will definitely make me pay..... whatever the teacher says, goes? No, it doesn't. Please.

At least I am not alone..... before I started shoving, 5 others out of 10 in the group agreed with my groupmate's more logical plan. But we needed a unanimous decision on which plan to follow before starting to split the work. So I shoved, for one person especially. And in the end, things get done. Our project's due on Wed morning.

Why?

Sunday, March 14, 2004

 
simple transfer of a comment I posted on a friend's blog, regarding LiveJournal.

we were comparing the merits of Blogger vs LJ.

"Note: possibly beware the frills, it's so much easier to misrepresent someone on LJ cos of those.... friends-only entries and screened/deleted comments, anybody?"


Friday, March 12, 2004

 
the baby-moral-tax debate is going strong all over blogs.

this came especially recommended *grin*: TalkingCock's take on it. enjoy. It is actually a remarkably good plan compared to the latest attempts to morally compel people to have babies for the sake of the country.

Morals have no place when your child is crying because you couldn't spend enough time with him, or worse, because you didn't spend enough time with him due to maintaining financial security or other reasons, he gets thoroughly indoctrinated by the MOEbots* into being a good productive cog in the gears of Singapore Inc.

*not my original word. credit must be given where it's due - it came from -him-.

Thursday, March 11, 2004

 
No evisceration. No evisceration. I shall not carry the violence over into online or real life. Let the dreams die where they first arose - only in my deepest sleep.

Wednesday, March 10, 2004

 
zwunderful

met this guy today who is such a wonderful bitch but yet has no evil intent nor evil consequences of his bitching.... what he has is artistic integrity. same age, has worked in advertising, now a professional musician and unapologetic NS skiver.

when talking to him I feel like a loser traditional product of the singapore education system, straitlaced and academically robotic. He is nice without being patronizing.

 
dreams

the crow soars high and the eagle runs
they grow worse, and more personal. too much so to air over the public domain of blog.
I don't want this place to be a repository for my nightmares every time they occur, anyway.

i wish these dreams would just leave me alone! Some of them were peculiarly violent.

currently anyone who tells me again that it is simply a matter of self-control not to dream, as well as not to feel sorry about them, will get themselves eviscerated. Ahz. ever gotten attacked in the sleep by your own mind/heart before? going to take a bath. need it.

I am going to do happy things like argue with people who actually know how not to sabotage their own conclusions. Not easy to find - i realise this the more ppl I know and the older i get.

Be well. Don't be like me.

Monday, March 08, 2004

 
I discovered this poem through another of his works ("Prayer Before Birth"), listed on a blog I read sometimes:

THE SUNLIGHT ON THE GARDEN - Louis MacNeice

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.

Saturday, March 06, 2004

 
Cool. (yucks.) I just slashed a guy across the face today. (yucks.) Verbally. (but still?) Funniest thing is that I feel no regrets.

But there were probably alternatives.

So, I ask here,

what do you do when you ask a friend some facts about her group presentation today, quietly after class instead of arrowing her group during the class q&a session (social convention for friends), she is in the midst of explaining to you while abruptly she goes off to talk with some friends and you stand quietly by, some distance further away, waiting, and this guy whom you don't know, while walking past you to join the group of friends, looks you in the face and says to you, "wah lan ah, still asking" ?

(That should be punctuated as "Wah LAN ah, still ASKING?!")

I don't see how the word "still" comes into play since I haven't publicly asked any questions at all during all the presentations for this module.

So I just brought my head up, strode/danced closer to the group and the guy, smiled and said to the guy "Sorry LAH, what can I say" with perfect arsenic-creampuff 'qie' charm, my friend finally noticed I was still there and tried to finish off her explanation in a few lines but not successfully. I smiled at her while understanding that she wanted to spend time with that group, nodded, said "See you next time" (with no 'qie' arsenical ooze and no intention of that either), gave that guy a "you don't exist" blank dirty look and turned to stride back out the corridor.

Guess I'm feeling guilty because this jerk is a friend of my good friend, and I actually don't enjoy slapping ppl in front of all their friends unless they do that to me first.

fair provocation? don't know. The main fact that I'm not too concerned about that in this particular situation means I can be quite a bitch sometimes.

------

alarm clock went off today and i snoozed for an hour more in bed. (the half-awake state leads to dreams, sometimes quite significantly prolonged, in my case.) and dreamt that i was there in my parents' bedroom and my mum was sewing, with things scissors cloth scraps threads scattered all over the place, and the sky began to lose its white brilliance. thought it was rain, right? nope, the sky turned this grey colour first, that looked like rain. Then it continued changing colour, to deep reddish-brown, and grew more mottled with purples and greens and the reds of blood, like a disturbingly fatal haemorrhage beneath a person's skin, that refused to break through and bleed cleanly. this colour suffused the sky and was almost malevolent (I was watching, horrified.) if not for the fact that I was thinking that this colour only lived in the 2-dimensional plane, which is NOT my world. my mother then turned to me, said the weather had changed, and asked if i wanted snowshoes. and somehow that was when i felt -his- silent presence in the dream.

uh huh.

and -this- is when i woke up realising it was only a dream but shivering anyway and realised that I had only 10 min to get to lecture instead of 1 hour, and turned my mind to our group presentation this morning.

i should be happy that i know for sure that my mother is the kind who can accept and deal practically with the idea (or fact) that it might actually snow in Singapore. but -that- wasn't the weather change that was occurring. It actually felt more like an invasion of Hades into the world, that somehow my mother didn't see. uh huh.

blood haemorrhages.....

Friday, March 05, 2004

 
xiang.... jian jian dan dan ai
boo!.

 
more miscellaneous stuff:

hard snare drums in Jian Dan Ai, by Jay Chou.
Well these beats are good (=absorbing, in this case).
Not so good on repetition, but that's ok. It's like a chocolate high - your tongue gets numb after a while but you still like it anyway. For a while more.

 
a level results out today, and friend not happy.

sighz.

 
Rant coming
\
oh lord
juz bcos i spell wel n talk gd duzzen mean nuthin'. Choir ppl, you know we change tones like nobody's bzness. Idiots!!!!

-----
"arsenic-laced cream puff" - Jax, wrt me.
before that i was saying "he's such a jerk." referring to Jax's friend, who has done unimaginable things to Jax.
and "my dear darling's such a jerk." referring to -him-. just for the look on Jax's face.
\

Jax is now terrified by my new biker chick persona, asking me, "So when are you going to get a Malay Harley-Davidson leather jacket 10 krpm guy for a boyfriend?".

Grrrrrrrr

 
saved by the lecturer in biophysics tutorial today

I suddenly realised that I'm not very smart in that class
it's just that the rest are "dumber"
bcos they didn't study chemistry for the most recent 2 years like I did,
they didn't quite make a habit of reading journal papers like I did (I do it for the kick),
and they didn't get around to establishing a good relationship with this particular lecturer like I did.
So it ended up that I enjoyed this particular tutorial with this particular lecturer although I had completely no idea how to thoroughly understand CD in just 3 days, and he knew it (but thankfully didn't make a big issue out of it). And the others just suffocated in their own self-imposed shy silence. Hrmmmm. There is a crucial lesson in this somewhere, likely more than one.

now I must go be a simple data-mining worm again
this time for coral reef project

I don't think anyone reading this has any idea where to get good info on the practice and dollar value of the coastal protection function of reefs? well.

Thursday, March 04, 2004

 
[excised boring entry about textbooks and mandarin ducks, written in a fit of anti-work]

Wednesday, March 03, 2004

 
friends, friends. I can't rely on my friends forever to do things I should be able to do for myself, like eat.

------

Jax asked me curiously (and rather naively, I thought) today why I think that everyone I meet, especially unattached guys around my age, have an agenda. Er. Because they usually do? Even altruism is an agenda; they do it so that they can be themselves and feel good about their place in this world and in this life (am thinking of someone I know called PX). That's an agenda already. I never said that agendas and purposes have to be malicious to the other person.

I write this because it's usually easier to say right out what you really do and what you want, to the ppl you think have no malicious intent towards you, so that they can help you. And if they tell you what they want, you can help them in the future too. Mutual interests, here there swop swop, and don't count -too- stringently we are all friends lah with strong common values, and we will have enough time in our lives to balance everything out (this I pledge), anyway how to quantitate this thing.

And always free to tell the other to get lost for the moment if one's energy resources are far too low to help.

Will you catch me if I fall, YX asks on her blog. Yes.

Tuesday, March 02, 2004

 
misc events, totally unrelated to each other, of the past few days:

met a 50+-year-old who still believes in fulfilling one's dreams, and has managed to do that for most of her life. and she's related to me!

got surprise encouraging email from someone from long long ago.

played the piano successfully on Sunday - recalled a comment by the examiner in my grade 6/7/8? - "your best asset is your -----", and began to see again.....

LJ-hopping for sec sch friends - memory for email IDs helps a great deal.

have smses in Chinese from LW, unexpected. I would put them here to keep except that my laptop doesn't have Chinese lang software. nmind.

the Chinese Society concert that Jax brought me to on Mon turned out to be Emerge 2004.

and finally, very good I am not clinically depressed. (as diagnosed by the nice psychiatrist I went to see today, as suggested by my counsellor.) But then I knew that already - ever since I discovered someone's faithlessness and realised that all we had ever had was a tremendous horrible illusion on my part, aided by his deliberate concealment of truth and misrepresentation. Already gone through the "may he live impotent and die in hell" stage, now learnt from that experience and boh chup the rest.

Beginning to eat again. Will take a while to resume normal eating habits. Meanwhile going running soon, cya.

Reply to a dear friend: Maybe I will turn les, after all. HAHAHAHAHAhahahaha..............! No no no that was just to shock you. Misassumptions abound. Catastrophes drop in anytime. And happy Chinese New Year.

got offered tix to the Chinese Orchestra concert next Wed, $3. incidentally by someone I chatted with for ~10 min when we were hanging around a certain LT, and who mistook me for PRC (yes I have the accent). wonder if anyone would like to go.

 
an sms conversation with a friend one day:

Me: In evolutionary tree analysis, do they use gene variation, or protein structure variation, as indicative?
FrE: Gene lah. Protein structure is a little bit environment dependent to be a stable information source.
Me: How so?
FrE: Like when you crystallize proteins, you lose information about the proteins' original conformation, which is what's important.

True, true.

What I was thinking was that prot structure is deeply connected to prot function, and that since both struc and fn are phenotypes, they would be acted on directly by natural selection. So it seems more logical to look at these than to look at gene sequence, when doing phylogenetic trees.

Besides Fr's stated problems with prot struc characterization, I think that gene seq may be used instead simply because it's been able to be determined ("around") for a longer time? And simpler to determine than prot struc, though may be equally inaccurate? Nobody ever disputes how much DNA or RNA struc and packing may influence gene transcription or translation. e.g. ribozymes, yah?

Probably bcos nucleic acid structures are even less well-characterized than prot structures..... so they're conveniently ignored by the evolutionary taxonomists.

what do you think?

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