need private time

i think i've not been functioning at 100% for at least a good 6-7 months.

i've been in a daze, i can't field conversations (not that i've been good at it before) as easily, my current schedule is really jam-packed, non-stop working, driving lessons (I JUST BLOODY FAILED MY FIRST TEST TODAY BECAUSE OF A PEDESTRIAN AND A U-TURN $%^&%^ WASTE MY $160!!!!!! 2 IMMEDIATE FAILURES I'M SO DUMB GAAAAAH. PISSED THAT I SPENT $160 ON NOTHING.) or meeting up with other people for important matters (such as catching up after a long while and 21st birthdays).

really, what i want now is to stay home for a week. and get all of my lost money back. 

some things are draining me more than they are helping me.

i'm alright if i have to work from 8am to 8pm, really (as long as the work is not a bore nor too stressful). but i really need my rest.

oh, i finally bought lady gaga's album at $11.90 (singapore version). it's pretty well arranged.

pain in the ass

i've a small cyst-like thing on my left butt T_T

i've no idea what it is. was thinking it could be acne (EW ACNE ON BUTT) so i'll be waiting to burst it once and for all.

in the meantime i need to endure slight pain when i sit down... 

:(

office whisper

*i'm in the office now. it is very silent here, more silent than usual, because most are away from their desks, either having lessons or eating lunch i suppose.

i don't really think blogging during office hours is an offence, is it really? honestly i've absolutely nothing to do. just completed my last task for the day. so blogging and surfing the net now really does not lower my work productivity.

anyways. been meeting some very nice kids (paternal instincts at 21 years old? i don't want to change nappies. haha). let loose my temper, finally. but the ensuing silence didn't last for long as i really can't be angry at a class which has a couple of nice boys (amongst the less mature ones).

sidetrack: but i think many of my peers HAVE thought about their long term future, with regards to their family life. pretty scary to think about that, because i don't feel like an adult, yet.

the daily things constantly remind you about that. that you're still on life support from your parents. you're still schooling and not yet working. your parents' attitude towards you has changed little since ns. they still nag when you come home late.

the shocking revelation that you're still getting skinnier or fleshier in the wrong areas when you see your naked body in the mirror, and you wish you had more time and determination to correct that. you spend your free time blogging, facebook-ing, playing video games instead of reading the economist or the straits times [i really just don't have an interest for most hard news around the world. that's sad.].

so, it's really true, that being an adult is just being more responsible. which honestly speaking, i was and still am. maybe my development isn't as extreme as others. but i know i've changed (ever so slightly between stages) from primary school to secondary, junior college, army, and now.

also chatted with an unlikely teacher, unlikely because she's never taught me before but somehow recognises me for being part of her memorable 2004 batch. she's really quite nice, we were chatting about that troubled guy in my sec 4 class, and she felt he might not have been in the correct environment to nurture him the right way. and that there are many of such people in the world (gay/lesbian, not psychotics) but are normal in all ways and they're just human. so we should respect and treat all of them normally (well, the fact that he harrassed us probably did change the way everyone around him treat lbgts).

that teacher was the one who boiled all those tea eggs for the entire cohort (orders from the venerable mdm wei). poor teacher, under mdm wei, but she felt she had learnt much during those 2 years. haha. so that's really nice.

my schedule has been turned upside down because of certain recent events, including camps, work and h1n1. so much that i put aside my university administrative work for so long that i would have missed the deadline for the submission of my tuition fee loan, had a friend not unintentionally reminded me when he talked about what had happened to him in the previous few days. Geez.*

get away!

i dislike:

self-righteous people who give zero consideration to others' opinions

people who aren't close to me and (almost always) start conversations by talking about themselves

people who ask the same questions repeatedly (3 times or more) in 1 meeting (very low retention rate)

people who assume that they're forever on good terms with me and take me for granted

pesky people

***

interestingly, university people are really nice people :) 

***

people, money and time give me too much stress... argh.

inadvertent

i slept at 3+am last night and woke up at 7.30am today. and i have not slept yet until now! 

and i'm still somewhat awake! amazing. wow.

i'm beginning to adapt myself to my future sleep pattern, without even trying to!

***

found out many hours ago an nsf officer just died from an accident. he was from the bmt company next to mine, so he was under some of my friends. i don't know him, by the way.

can you imagine, a life, with a soul brimming with the desire to be freed from 2 years of being shackled, with aspirations and dreams and the expectation of living til 80 years, smattered in a mere hour. 

what was he thinking during the last moments.

his family. loved ones. his friends. his dreams, perhaps. struggling to live for everything.

the third death of someone somewhat related to me that has affected me personally (mj's not included). all in less than a year.

it's totally unfair! he's too young, and have many people who knew him.

i wish the grieving the strength to carry on and come to terms with their loss...

extrapolating

i'm in the midst of an acute rash of gatherings and social things.

so much that i want to selectively declare sick! lol. no not for rag ('an-ewe-ess' rag), not for gatherings, but for certain other things...

i want to post a pic of the new jazz shoes (HAHA) that i bought just for rag.

anyway, about social things. i've seen quite a couple of people my age, dressed to the nines. with nice pretty evening dresses and office wear, for the girls. and long sleeved shirts and expensive watches and polished sharp-ended shoes and cufflinks for the guys. standing around while puffing a cigarette and joking away.

and then, i watched their mannerisms.

OH NO I CAN IMAGINE OURSELVES TWENTY YEARS FROM NOW.

when we turn middle-aged (gasp) and are more affluent and take to wearing office wear instead of preppy/casual shorts and a (polo?) tee. and some of us pick up smoking. others who have a bad sense of humour will continue to do so. 

and we joke about stupid and lame, army lingo-inspired, business or family-related things. 

and then, as we mingle around ourselves, and laugh and bare yellowed teeth, and teenagers look at us with astound [i think that's ungrammatical, is it?] 

WAH LAU THEY ALL SO UNCLE/AUNTIE!!!!

will i grow up to be at least dignified, if not cool and accepted wholesomely by every one of all age groups?

from what i am now. i'll probably be this meek "friend's dad" who asks his kids' friends nosey questions like "oooh, how are you? what cca are you in? how is *insert kids' names* in class ah?"

OBASAN!

and then, in the presence of other friends, does foolish, silly things to make every one laugh.

CHILDISH!

i can't imagine myself as a 40 year old. although i realise time has been running VERY FAST since 2008. maybe because i've been doing more things that i like starting from that year.

what am i doing now

for the past couple of weeks i've been slowly digesting lucretius' de rerum natura, which translates into on the nature of things. for some reason penguin publishing repackaged an english translation of the poem (6 volumes in all) as sensation and sex

geez.

anyway, there's some rather smart scientific deductions in the book, made by pure logical reasoning and basic observations. he had predicted brownian motion way before it was truly discovered (wow). 

but some of it is, to me, fallacious. maybe i'm skeptical because many of his deductions are false, but he began many arguments with rather unsound assumptions. his discussion on the mind, body and spirit and how they work is laughable. mainly because he did not have the scientific tools or knowledge to infer such complex things.

sample:

the same reasoning proves that mind and spirit are both composed of matter. we see them propelling the limbs, rousing the body from sleep, changing the expression of the face and guiding and steering the whole man - activities that all clearly involve touch, as touch in turn involves matter. how then can we deny their material nature?

but i concede that the above was at least, based on observations so he's not irrational.

another one:

my next task will be to demonstrate to you what sort of matter it is of which this mind is composed and how it was formed. first i affirm that it is of very fine texture and composed of exceptionally minute particles. if you will mark my words, you will be able to infer this from the following facts. it is evident that nothing happens as quickly as the mind represents and sketches the happening to itself. therefore the mind sets itself in motion more swiftly than any of those things whose substance is visible to our eyes. but what is so mobile must consist of exceptionally minute and spherical atoms, so that it can be set going by a slight push.

actually a lot of the deductions are coloured with fascinating, albeit untrue, poetic language. 

now for the fact that the eyes avoid bright objects and refuse to gaze at them. the sun, indeed, actually blinds them if you persist in directing them towards it. the reason is that its force is immense and the films [lucretius' idea of the surface particles which are emanated from an object] it gives off travel with great momentum through a great depth of pure air and hit the eyes hard, so as to disrupt their atomic structure. besides, a bright light that is painful often scorches the eyes, because it contains many particles of fire whose infiltration sets them smarting. 

ok, that was a bad quote for 'poetic language' =.= but, yeap. very tainted with roman mythology and beliefs. which i suppose, must have been normal and logical for its time. 

or maybe we're living in a world that's too logical, too scientific, too exact to appreciate the beauty of the unknown, that we dismiss anything unscientific as untruths.

hm, i haven't finished reading the book yet, actually. i'm at part iv, i think. his discussion on what causes us to sense is rather accurate. and the exciting part about sex (i suppose it's exciting? haha. tsk, the publishers decided to rename the poem for a reason, right.) is up ahead.

FUMING MAD but luckily it's over

while waiting for my hair to dry by fan, i shall do a quick blog post here.

OMG DON'T GO TO CDC UNLESS YOU'RE ABSOLUTELY SURE YOU HAVE H1N1!!!

the waiting time there is RIDICULOUS!

i spent a grand total of EIGHT HOURS there!? 6pm to 2+am roughly. considering that i kind of managed to rush the personnel to complete my procedures faster (there were a lot of people there who ended up sleeping on the seats when i left - luckily they were very comfortable seats - they must be hapless or indifferent to their own fates [the latter.] )

my goodness.

ok, if you want details, feel free to contact me...

[ed: i had already typed a full length tirade against youknowwhat, but i decided that it wasn't nice nor appropriate. especially when there were quite a few really nice nurses helped make my stay there better.]

quarantined part 2

i've not done anything very useful yet. was thinking of seeing the doctor but i've procrastinated. thanks partly to friends asking me online about my situation lol.

today, i plan to draw and draw and draw. and maybe i should compose or play the piano once i get inspiration.

quarantined till wednesday only YAY! i *might* be able to retain my relief teaching post. i hope what i'm down with now is not h1n1. i've no fever yet, just slightly heaty - temperature's not above 37.0 degrees. but i feel my eyes burn when i close them, and have that slight disoriented feeling when i shake my head. my nose's slightly blocked - that's normal for me - but the mucus is thicker than usual. hrm.

my body has been holding up pretty well, i think. i've lemon juice, orange peel honey, homemade chrysanthemum tea, green bean water, plain water, and vitamin c pills to thank (:

i hope to complete a couple of sketches by the end of my quarantine. thats only 3.5 more days geez. 

i went to a friend's birthday party last week, and was simply BLOWN AWAY by his mom's paintings. she even won a prize for one of them. oil on canvas. simply marvelous. especially the ones she hung around the house. you would have thought that the paintings were bought. really life-like. for example, the painting of a house and a tree overlooking a body of water - the reflections on the water was drawn so stunningly well! 

and from what i gathered from my chat with her, she's not really formally trained in it. 

omg.

if i could relive my life, i would have joined a sports cca, and practice music and art so damn hard...

... then maybe i won't have the engineering/mugger face!

quarantined.

maybe this is an effect of quarantine...

I HAVE CRAVINGS FOR ALL THINGS SAVORY!

ham, cheese, sio bak, steak, fried chicken, oily fish, chocolate, DARK CHOCOLATE, fish crackers, DURIAN, fried sotong, tang yuan, TAIWAN PINEAPPLE TART, FRAPPE, cookies, chocolate cake...

my appearance has changed quite a lot since my secondary school/jc days, i realise. in secondary school i was quite thin. in j1/j2 put on a little more fat (because of eating two servings of food at every break time - ri's kampung istimewa and defeathered chicken yumyum too bad they're not there anymore) but still very slender. then came army and cookhouse aunties who pour you extra large servings of food over zealously. that's when i started becoming rather fleshy. i blame the sispec cookhouses for serving good food. comparable to the best-est mixed rice stalls at hawker centres.

then i decided that i was too fat and finally started toning my body in bunk during my return to bmt. since i could help myself to the food, i controlled my diet (although food at rocky hill is rather good. not as good as sispec, but still quite decent). went down 3-4 kgs! was very lean by the time i ord-ed. at that time i was running almost every day. was really quite thin at that time. but i could not beas thin as i was after bmt field camp. woah i want that body back! legs were at its thinnest then!

now, due to many gatherings and birthday parties, my health has taken a turn for the worse ): i'm now around 61kg (that's a decent weight) BUT i have extra flesh all around me! if i don't do anything about it my love handles shall be large and rotund. and i'll have larger moobs and bearish tummy. not the care bear sort which is round and firm, but the sagging kind where you will get a belt-like crease where your pants are normally worn and all the excesses overflow from that point up.

AND MY IPPT WINDOW IS OPEN!

shall look in the fridge for anything good. after this post...

today's my 3rd day of quarantine. quite well spent, generally. i just cleared my room. i'm going to really whack drawing drawing and more drawing from now. and photoshop (ugh. the dread of beginning to learn something.)

need to find a way to return my library books while still being at home.

trying not to think about the money lost in tuition now...

i think i need to find a replacement tutor for some of the students soon. expecting to drop at least half of them by beginning of august. that's in 1 month's time. takers, anyone?

ok wait, i must get food now... seriously. i've been told that you should eat the most at breakfast and least at dinner, so i just eat about 3/4 rice bowl of rice. and just enough sides for the rice. then, i will invariably get hungry at 11pm onwards. another hunger pang is at 1am. and then, sports people say dinner shouldn't be too light because the body will go on for half a day's length without food. 7pm to 7am, wow that's a long time. and these people have no qualms about eating supper. so which is correct? i believe knowing the correct answer is the secret to keeping my fats off. 

...

yum, i've eaten another persimmon. it's one of my most favourite fruits. the texture is so wonderful, there's crunchy bits yet juicy and gooey!

food. why can't i be slim and eat a lot? sigh.