my home is in empty spaces.

Last night in a frenzied burst of diligence I finished an assignment (One only! *cries*) and looked up only to find that it was 12 midnight and I was locked in the lab.

Luckily the computing ppl are not as filial or social as I had imagined when looking up and down the empty corridor because aha! there was one who was going home at that unearthly time too. And he let me out of the lab.

And I ended up bunking at a friend's hostel (v comfortable hee) cos I didn't want to pay taxi fare to go home when I knew I'd be back today earrrly.

I must do One more assignment. And then One more assignment. And then One more assignment. And then the assignment of all assignments.

Wish me LUCK (caps).

You know the Honours project has taken over your life when you think "Oh I must write my thesis soon" and the word "thesis" suddenly morphs into something else much similar visually and very much related to my project work. Ahhhhh!

Maybe I am really on the way to finishing all my assignments, little bit by little bit. This is like building a gravel path with your bare hands.

3 hours' sleep last night, and the world is now spinning.

So many things, both joyful and sad, and all entertaining, have happened since last Friday afternoon that I can't remember them all now =) and so can't write them down, to affix here.

But they were all good.

Life is rich when you're writing thesis and fighting time itself.

Today is the day that Jesus died for us. And two days prior to this, I went for Mel's VCF musical where I also got a very cheery miniature book on Science and the Christian faith. Both book and musical were the best evangelistic material I'd ever had the pleasure of encountering.

You know, when people ask me if I am Christian, my true answer's not a straightforward answer. The short answer would be, No, which satisfies most of the people doing the asking (the church-hopping holier-than-thou let's-bring-religion-into-the-dragging-conversation type).

The longer answer would be, I have always believed. But equally strong is my belief that organized religion ruins a lot of people's faith - I don't like what I see in the people who go to church, because which church they go to suddenly becomes a major issue. If you don't go to Wesley, you're not cool or rich. If you go to the louder services, you're not serious about the faith. If you're Anglican, why does your church allow divorce? If you're Catholic, why do you worship the Mother of God in addition to God where all the others don't? If you're Protestant, are you passionate about Martin Luther and American history as part of your religion faith? John Calvin and the Methodists. The Lutherans. The etc etc. If you this, then you that.

I detest all that stereotyping. And probably, I avoid going to church except on major occasions like Lent, Good Friday (which is today), Easter, Christmas, because I'm afraid I'll either end up like those people or kill them all and repudiate God and his Son and the Holy Spirit completely. Neither are desirable.

So I just keep the faith, and don't go to church, therefore will not get baptised and therefore am not officially Christian.

John 3:16. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

This doesn't say anything about going to church, or choosing which denomination, or getting baptised.

It's 4.35 pm and I'm wearing dark colours today and thinking about Jesus. Easter soon. But now the sky is dripping its tears and school is deathly quiet, and I choose to think about His sacrifice. There's a time for everything. If there were no death, there would be no resurrection.

You know that things are not going well with your friends when, despite looking fine and all that, they are too cross-eyed and drained to recognize what size their PCR band is, and have to ask for help on that.

Hey, don't worry. I consistently put dirty running buffer into the top compartment of SDS-PAGE at least twice, wasting all my precious GST pulldown sample, before realizing why I was getting total crap.

Just. Sleep. More. And be happy be happy be happy happy happy if not just scream at your friends that's part of why we're here lah....

I can't believe some people have enough motivation to go find out how different diesel exhaust particle (DEP) extracts from engines run at different torques have different antiandrogenic activities. PMID 14751679. You can see my eyes rolling on the floor like marbles now. I kowtow in worshipful incredulity.

She says she would not change her mind, nor reconsider. So be it then, I have better things to do than to persuade her otherwise.

Yeah so nobody knows what that little quip above was about. I'm sorry I do this so often (yes, some things here are so insignificant that I don't even bother to remember them or talk about them in real life after blogging it) and scar your eyeballs with unfulfilled curiosity. But it's just convenient for me to put it here cos the blog thing helps me affix a date to some events, so that months later I can wonder "when did that happen? oh it's been months? was that the time I was rushing my Honours project like crazy" and actually find out easily.

Thanks for your continued patience. =) And now I must return to work.

N says that I am eloquent. I shall prove it in this entry today. But first, let me describe this little kid in a pale blue Y-back top, chirping his little lungs out trying to lure our local canteen cat out of the bushes =)

He's about four years old. He was holding an empty Milo can, and in a momentary fit of pique when unsuccessful in attracting the cat, he dropped the can onto the ground and promptly forgot all about it.

The can is glowing an accusing green at me right now, since I'm the nearest human who's aware of it. I shall go pick it up and throw it away. Be right back.

------

I didn't expect to see him. Or it could have been a trick of angles and evening light. But I think not. Something about the way he walks, how he turned his head to look at things, how he can look straight forward when walking a curved path, rang discordantly. Characteristically. And it's interesting how I never picked up all these traits as indicative character traits before, because they are.

They really are.

I never expected to see him here again.

He has become so far off my radar that such a possibility was not up for consideration. So I was momentarily surprised. Surprised enough to go near and watch this ghost a little more, intrigued by the resemblance. Perturbed by how I -knew- he was there and all it required was a little confirmation of the reality.

Closer, closer....

Curiosity warred with anger. I wanted to say, to the world and to no one in particular, desist, die, begone accursed one. Needless to say, I didn't.

It's amusing how this is the ugliest most unkempt set of clothing I have worn this semester, and today of all days I see this ghost. But it doesn't matter; I do not need to impress him, nor threaten him, nor have anything to do with him. The one I knew does not exist. And more likely than not, he never will. Never, ever will.

-----

The four-year-old kid has gone home now, it seems.

Thought for the day: When something happens too often to be coincidence, despite all verbal claims to the contrary, it is not coincidence. Hah!

The guy who said he was "not avoiding" me did the nice circular path thing again today, in precisely the same situation. I get really angry with people who lie to me just to save themselves trouble. It shows they have infantile minds because anyone who knows me in any way at all will know that this does not work on me.

500 mg amoxycillin + 125 mg clavulanic acid in a single pill adds up to one big pill that's the size of a small beetle. Amazingly I managed to swallow it regularly for the first few days, until Fri nite where my brain abruptly all of its own tiddly will registered the size of the thing and refused to let it go down.... but yes, it's all done, the last dose went down this morning yay! So this is a blog post to celebrate that. Haha. I feel happy. So I will be good and go to school to work on my project/thesis later. What a wonderful way to spend a peaceful antibiotic-free Sunday.

I've received an astounding amount of new information today from several people, and I need to assimilate it all.

=)

Btw, some of my friends are getting agitated all over again about Sadasivan's latest foray into linking AIDS(HIV?) cases and the male homosexual population of Singapore. Now, anybody who quotes an unnamed epidemiologist's kopitiam talk in the hallowed halls of Parliament and uses that to build some kind of approximation of real trends, is a twit, no matter how old he is. My 14-year-old friend, my pet fish, and my dog also know that. So no worries. The borderline ones get repulsed by such stupidity, the sane ones stay sane (and angry over his sloppy academic argument, but that's ok), and the twitty ones believe him and get twittier. Let the twits congregate and entertain themselves in unlawful fashion in Singapore. (I'm talking about illegal assembly; what were you thinking of?) Hopefully they won't overrun the good ol' place with their unsubstantiated openly aired prejudices. Empty vessels, hah.

Freshly plastered wounds do get inflamed as easily as a raw untreated wound. I must remember that, yeah. It won't do to learn something as painful as that and then forget it when I need it again.

No I am not talking about only my ear.

$60 first consultation, $40 "simple" ear-cleaning service, $5 GST.

Who says ENTs don't earn a lot?

In addition, 3 bottles Sofradex ear drops $18.18 from NUH pharmacy. It's cheaper than in school!

What else am I eating? Didn't want to start the amoxycillin 250 mg given to me yesterday when I went to see the school doctor. Went back today cos of fluid discharge and unbearable pain leading to restless sleep last night, and told him - he was like, "What? Why didn't you eat the pills?!" and I said "Well you seemed so skeptical yesterday about the thought that I had a ear infection (cos my ear looked clean) that I thought you might not be prescribing for the right thing....". He was like, "Hmmm". Then he gave me something called amoxycillin 500 mg + clavulanic acid 125 mg, which is a single pill, and a stronger antibiotic too.

Apparent Pseudomonas (green) infection. Yech.

Free association quiz. Taken from a friend's blog. Now multi-tasking.

school = brown.
coffee = tasty.
vanilla = sweet.
yellow = sunshine.
pink = girls' clothes.
popcorn = buttered.
summer = foreign lands.
moon = hazy, the air's been quite polluted lately
memories = complete blank, everything is about current work now
sushi = food.
sorry = something i say when i apologize
enemy = don't have.
dog = no pets, please.
country = United States, courtesy of Twacie =)
love = ahh.....
cameras = digital ones. yay.
bed = soft.
holiday = something i long for.
movies = the woodsman. sounds creepy enough to watch.
chocolate = sticky.
shoes = high heels.
music = moulin rouge, just watched it on tv.
bra = okay lah.
green = my favourite colour.
ball = chocolate, strangely enough.
rock = U2.
kiss = yum.
life = sucks.
honey = sweet and aromatic, yum.
Harry Potter = book.
hurt = blood.
friends = my dearest in all the world.
Christmas = peace and goodwill.
prom = waste of my freaking time.

Ta-dahhh.

There's no way I can say this without the people I know in real life knowing exactly who I'm talking about, because I only tackle one at a time. Just humour me and don't refer to him in any identifying way when commenting, okay?

What can you call someone who's sauntering very slowly around you in a nice circular path, radius 10 m, and who doesn't call out to you although you were only SMSing at that time and sitting alone, and who says he is "not avoiding you what"?

Gosh, this is totally insane.

Utterly fascinating. From a book:

"The resolution of the reflections are also limited by the size of the crystal. We can simply state that the larger a crystal is, the more repeating scatterers there are in the path of the X-ray beam. This translates into higher intensities for all reflections, and thus more data that can be collected. This brings us back to the initial problem in X-ray crystallography, that is, to growing crystals. Crystallographers will go to great lengths to grow larger and better crystals, including going into space. Crystals grown in the microgravity environments of the U.S. space shuttle or the Russian MIR space station are typically more ordered and up to 50% larger than those grown on Earth. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that extraterrestrial crystallography will become a routine method of growing macromolecular crystals in the near future."

Things are so busy now that I want to do everything at the same time but I cannot ^ cos what I have to do all individually require huge continuous blocks of time for it to be effective. stressed stressed.

It feels like a thousand million years since last week. Really =) which is no bad thing, but I want a break....

This is a rant.

I don't always care about what you care about. I don't always give all my energies and attention to you, and certainly definitely not when you're being a depressed black hole. I do not share your personal preferences. I do not like gerberas nor furry toys nor chocolate particularly well. I expect you to not rely on me to live your life for you such that you feel you can comment on my decisions when uninvited to do so. I especially dislike people who project their own deepest fears onto me such that they keep asking me whether I'm all right and assuming totally insane things about me when it's strangely enough themselves who are so not all right they can't even see how they're being irritating even after being told off. I am not you and I am perfectly happy that way. I am also perfectly happy to like you although I am not you, and this is how I get along with all my friends.

Are those reasons enough for you to hate me?

Then go ahead and know your own paper-thin shallowness.