So I've decided to create block days for myself cause I'm quite stupid and I totally need more studying. Inspired by my friend who's had block months since November. I'm not saying who she is since this could be like 1% not good, but her mum and teacher has blocked her off from CCA and everything else, so she could completely focus and do the same. So yes, according to my calendar up there, I'm going to block myself off everything completely, for those 3 days. Exciting. I'll go out of house (possibly Chinatown) and I will be rejecting all offers to go out (unless it's really a cant-miss-event, but don't try to tempt me okay), I will not be using the computer, and I will only be studying. Yes, I will be skipping training on those days too. R-paper's going to be a real good excuse. I'll be doing hardcore Chemistry on those days, so I'll leave the homework to the rest of the free January days. And I told myself that since I'm going to be studying, if my grade is not C/above I'll be dropping chem to H1. I know the goal seems crazy and it scares you a little, but if I'm going to have time to study and still not score, what makes you think I will in the A levels? Oh yeah and to all my friends: go on and study hard okay, 80% of people who tell you that nobody's studying right now are lying, so be motivated and work hard with me yeah, come over to my side I have cookies!

Anyway volleyball chalet tomorrow, Phoenix countdown on 31st! Yes okay awesome so looking forward to them. Oh yeah today was volleyball J1 vs J2 friendly, and we won! Admittedly the J2s haven't played for a while and are not top-form today, but then our star captain was sick and didn't come, so it kind of evens out. We won 3-2, with last set 23-25. Even after Ernest Puey tried tactical attacks by sending us a threatening message to tackle our team spirit. HAHA @ Ernest!

Ernest Puey 28 Dec-2009 16:07

Just a friendly reminder that tmr u girls are gg 2 get trashed so pls rmb bring ur helmets. Spare batteries not provided.

Like, great show. My brother's been watching this since one year ago but I've just started cause I've finished Skins... and well, I'm bored. Hate to admit it, but yeah I'm bored. Awesome though, Barney's hilarious. Like as if his name's not hilarious enough.

Went out for an annual DHS wushu outing yesterday, Melinda's house was seriously a bad idea cause she had like 3 dogs and 5 rabbits and... (wait for it)... stray cats which will occasionally come into her house for food. Now, who said Hell was the worst place to go? I refused to get off her bed, while the rest toy around with me (like literally) and made a big joke out of my phobia. They took Pepper's (only un-caged dog in the house) favourite toy and attempted to throw it towards me so Pepper would like... charge to me. Several times. Which was really annoying and un-fun but they weren't completely lifeless and moved on from my phobia after a while. So I forgive them. I'm just never stepping into Melinda's house again. Ever. Cross my fingers, swear to Buddha, holy son or father whatever, everything. No offense. Plus everyone knew of my phobia but none of them told me Melinda had so many pests in her house till I was on second floor and I saw the dog myself. Thank god we left for airport after an hour or two. OMG yeah and Melinda has a gym in her house!!! It's like 3 times my room I'm so jealous but next time I'll rather have an entertainment room than a gym in my future big house. And my senior said that chocolates were poisonous to dogs? Okay, riddle with prize: can anyone tell me, chocolates are to dogs, so what are to cats? I'll take a trip to the supermarket and the next day Serangoon's going to be cat-free :)

I've been getting in touch with nature so often that I almost thought this was morning jog #4. But anyway, it's extremely ironical (and disconcerting) that I could pull myself to wake up at 6am to go for a jog, when I've never managed to wake with an alarm at 9am to study.



I Googled for jogging spots yester-night, and found this place called Sungei Serangoon which sounded not bad. I was almost sure I'll be there today, till I checked the street directory and found out Sungei Serangoon wasn't exactly near Serangoon. Fastest way there would be by NE line to Sengkang, then another LRT stop to Kangkar. The total journey time would take about half an hour, and I estimated that by the time I got there, the sun would already be out and I wouldn't last long, since train service only begins 6.19am. In the end, I changed my route to somewhere nearer I saw on the same street directory map.



Sungei Kallang! Lorong Chuan's a stop away from Serangoon, so that seemed like a great idea! Turns out, in Singapore, running along a canal stream isn't always the best idea. At Lorong Chuan, I had to make huge detours to try and follow the stream, it went under the Australian International School, an expressway, and that's when I gave up. I don't think I'm going to try and run along un-tried river streams in Singapore anymore, cause unless I run inside the canal itself, I'll probably get nowhere. Plus in the first place, I only managed to get out of house at 6.45am, so I could have taken route one.

In any case, I walked along the expressway to try and locate a path beside the canal, but it was a good experience. Dangerous, yes. No walkways, you're walking right beside speeding cars, but the breeze (from the wind, and the cars) is so strong, like half of what we felt atop Marina Barrage that day - but Marina Barrage was crazy wind - pigs could fly. So the wind was excellent, strong, but not till your cheeks are vibrating. For the poets - the sound of speeding cars, so loud it covers your thoughts. Pretty enjoyable.

Walked back to Serangoon (I officially realise Circle Line stops are really close to each other) and had 2 pieces of prata kosong and a cup of Teh Tarik. I know it completely nullifies the workout from jogging - if I have even jogged enough - but not like that's the purpose of my jog. Completely awesome breakfast on an early morning. I think I'm too reflective for my own good. Think my mental age's like at least 25 years old, and ever since I started watching Skins, it has grown exponentially. Too mature, too reflective, it's scaring me as much as it's scaring you. Heck that, I wanna go on a long exotic backpacking trip before I'm 22. Any BFFs wanna volunteer? Like a trip to somewhere totally un-city, 5 days of backpacking, 20 days of immersing into the new culture, living life there. That would be great, I swear.

Makes it feel a little more like Christmas, but I wish he would stop singing with his girl-voice though.

I finished season 3 of Skins, I wish we had small towns and rivers and forests and mountains in Singapore too. Image above's screen-caps of scenes in the season finale. Beautiful huh. Plus I really want a private shed, like Freddie's. So yeah, that further substantiates my future plan of migrating overseas to lead a simple life in a small town, if I don't earn enough moolah over here in Singapore.

Plus Christmas this year doesn't feel like Christmas. I've heard that from at least 3 different people at different times, and I completely agree. Lack of atmosphere, lack of christmas jingles, lack of warmth and everything else. I can't pinpoint it but yeah. This year I'm feeling nothing. I've been going out for "Christmas" gatherings the past few days, so my mum's kinda mad at me even though our family doesn't even celebrate Christmas. Oh I'm completely free tomorrow. I know it's supposed to be (a Merry) Christmas but I think I'm going to study instead. I had fun everyday anyway, who needs a festive season to celebrate yeah? For that I'm really thankful for friends :) It's Christmas in a few hours, so I wanna tell everyone who's reading this that if you're my friend, I fucking love you okay. Phoenix BBQ/Perle's birthday and blogskins.com annual outing below. I know you're judging us, but we're cool and most of us know each other already so that's... safe. Plus childish, self-rating primary school kids don't go cause they will be afraid we'll push them down the Marina Barrage slope, so the outing was pretty good.

I just woke up for training, anyway posted this up to the site last night. The Blogger Times. I'm kind of sleepy right now, but would like to tell you about yesterday. Think it's like the suay-est day of my year. I plan to list them down in order rather than a paragraph cause that way it's more obvious how suay I was.

1. I woke up at 6am with terrible calf aches from Sentosa the previous day. And when I say terrible I really meant terrible.
2. I went up the bus, and even though there was another Victorian sitting in front of me (uhm it's 7am, quite a miracle someone else is going to school okay) I overslept my bus stop, even past the loop back.
3. I walked 2 bus stop distance back to school, arrived in the hall and first thing I saw a chair, I sat down and took a rest. Junrong told me there was bird shit on the chair. I dunno why it was like mass bird pooping orgy on the chair, the patch of shit was big, thank god it's half dried.
4. I went to wash up and pang sai, first person I saw outside the toilet was PE HOD Mr Tan, and I got sent to have my hair cut. At 8am. Didn't realise shops don't open till 10.30am, only when I got to Roxy Square.
5. I called Ian, asked which shop was the best, and waited outside Parkway Parade's Giant with a box of donuts.
6. I went back to Roxy Square at 10.30am, waited till 11am when I found out that barber doesn't open on Mondays. Tuesdays to Sunday, just not Monday.
7. Had my haircut at this weird shop with a 60year-old uncle my barber. Swear it screwed up my hair, his equipments were like a thousand years old, the scissors needed 3 cuts to be able to break my hair, by the end of the cut my hair looked like I had fucking bad split ends. Trust me, I was extremely extremely pissed, but thank god further in the day my bad luck ended.

pseudomeaningful@tumblr. I know I just blogged like 15 minutes ago, and there's still some durian waiting for me downstairs, but just a quick sharing yeah. I think I'm kind of obsessed with blogging. Saw this through Tzuhsiang's tumblr immediately after I wrote her birthday paragraph. I reckon that the tumblr has quite a good concept, like what someone who feels a sense of belonging in an online community would do. Yes, I get that feeling about childish primary school kids in blogskins.com who create multiple accounts (and I'm counting the accounts in dozens) to rate and comment on their own submitted blogskins just for an SOTD title. It isn't even that great anymore. The site's increasingly dominated with childish Singaporean babies who act that way, and a handful of the best blogskinners have deleted their accounts or abandoned the community because of that.

Anyway back to the tumblr. Yeah it's built on a creative concept, plus what I like about them is their tumblr layout's great as well, simple design, shapes and colours. But uhm it's like they criticize things that others post in a manner which might happen to sound rude to me. I mean, imagine what those people who post up the original tumblr-posts would feel! And it's like when you're going to criticize and search for... (I dunno) a few entries a day? You might be really trying too hard. My advice is to tone down on the number of posts, spend more time on creating those which are more epic and they'll be more popular. Don't know what's with their fancy about choice of fonts and positionings, I could predict those comments half the time. Further, they are criticizing that things are stupid, and of course - pseudomeaningful, but it's not like they make sense all the time. Here's an example which I happened to cross.

Spread Love Like Violence.They commented:

I wouldn’t recommend using the same tools. Try explaining to a woman exactly WHY you’re using a shotgun to tell her you love her. She’ll be really scared. And confused.

And if you allow me to use their words against them, "I’m struggling really hard to try to make sense of this thing, but I’m failing horribly." I could guess from first look that the image portrayed a negative emotion towards seeing the world, like from a pessimistic perspective. They took the words as "Spread Love Through Violence", but from my guess it was more of a "Spread Love Instead of Violence", how violent crimes seem to be so prevalent but why love isn't. Why is the world committing everything bad, but good things seem so rare.

[EDITION]: I just added an image into the blogpost, and when I visited the actual flickr photographer's page to make a copy of the image for repost, I saw comments on the image (and guess what, they were actually 100% positive) and found out it's from this song, Secret Crowds by Angels and Airwaves. I've double checked with the lyrics of the song, and it turns out I'm almost entirely correct while pseudomeaningful@tumblr is almost entirely wrong. Time-out, I win them hands down.

I've a few totally unrelated things I want to post about today.



Firstly, what the fuckz. The image above is a screenshot of my sent mails in Hotmail. Some bug got into my email address and sent those spam cheater mails I hate to receive to email addresses of people starting with "jla". Don't know how it got in, but I swear I've never ever clicked any shit spam links that people gave me on MSN/ Facebook/ Hotmail or such. I've not stupid, I don't believe if you saw my naked photo on the net, saw one of my friends kissing someone else, neither do I want to stalk other people and find out what they are doing right now. Technology is scary, someone else could probably read all my email content, keep a collection of my passwords and steal my 1 million Neopoints on Neopets.

Next thing, I just came back from a full day at Sentosa, it's been a really long time since I've played actual beach volleyball for the entire day, kinda gets me reminiscent about post-EOYs last year. Actually it was pre-EOYs as well. Results didn't matter so much then, and nobody was hanging loose on the thread in retaining. We even had EuLong4MaurSand like 2 weeks before the EOYs. Miss you guys, me and Sandra realised that after Tzuhsiang stopped hyping about beach volleyball we stopped going to Sentosa with the rest of them. And why didn't any of you come today, thought only /th wasn't free! I walked across the pool of water atop Vivocity with Alisa and Cheryl, it was kinda fun, though it sounds like much of a cheap thrill.

Oh uhm I spent quite a lot today, $25ish. Plus my last expenditure of the day was expensive milk tea from a PRC-owned Sweet Talk in Vivocity, which made everything seem even more sucky. Don't like PRC-owned Sweet Talks, an exception would be Cup Walker at both Kovan Heartland Mall and Seng Kang Compass Point, which have excellent PRC staff and serve great milk tea. Maybe it's just Sweet Talk. Anyway that shop sold milk tea for $1.60, didn't have pearls and had four-fifth cup full of ice. I was about to type three quarters, but I realised that the ice was three quarter-full after I finished the drink, so it must have been more than that. It's like those workers are so cheapskate they can't be bothered to make the next batch of pearls, even though I swore they sold like at least 50 cups after they ran out of pearls. Oh but on the bright side, my mum bought a pint of Häagen-Dazs green tea ice cream and another rum and raisin just yesterday. Plus I got home today and some really nice durians just popped right in front of me. I heart good food. That was gay.

A few more things to talk about, but I'll just run through them briefly aights cause I want to sleep soon. Uhm I'm 98% done with the newspaper blogskin I was talking to you about, would be finalizing some things and posting it up soon. While I was pooping in the toilet half an hour ago I got an inspiration to do up a completely forest themed toilet in my future dream house, which includes a stone basin, those marble rocks and a small titled pathway to the bathtub, plus a bamboo tree of all others.

Finally, I forgot to dedicate a birthday paragraph to Tzuhsiang on 15th December, so I'm doing it now. Sorry it's a tad late but I haven't been blogging. Go take a look at her tumblr it's pretty interesting. And anyway had fun that day celebrating your birthday, wish Liqin invited me to make your bento together cause I think making bento-s are kind of fun. And woah we talked all through the entire day that day from lunch till 10pm?! Kinda unbelievable but yet really awesome. HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY. Oh yeah and to Teo Szeying too who was my group project buddy in Secondary 1/2, we don't talk a lot now and she's probably not reading this too, but her birthday's in 2 days so happy birthday too! And cool beans Tzuhsiang your birthday's an exact week before Szeying's!

GIANT POLITICAL SQUABBLE IN FACEBOOK

So, a quick, lousy gist would be Joel Joshua Goh complaining about Singapore, PAP and it's current political system, while several other contenders including Andrew Tan, Huang Wenshan, Ryan Joseph and foreigners jump into the long train of arguments. I don't have absolute interest in politics, it's been on my mind since June 09-Promos period but ever since I stopped caring. I was studying and complaining about Singapore at the same time, my pea-brain couldn't take that much of a load, so I followed what a Singaporean would do - study, for future interests, cause the political problem could be solved easily. I either feel satisfied with loads of money in my pocket, in Singapore, or I migrate, right?

I read (almost) the entire note and subsequent comments for at least a good 2.5 hours, when I should be mugging, so if you're about to call me a typical Singaporean couch potato, I've sacrificed enough, for Buddha's sake. Oh interjection, I did only 4 hours today, cause I slept 12 full hours and came up at 2pm. Couldn't expect me to study the entire day could you? Anyway the normal person who's a victim of dumbed-down education would look into details, start wiki-ing about Operation Coldstore, Lim Chin Siong, the (original) founders of PAP, media control in Singapore, the links between Temasek Holdings-GIC-SPH and the Lee family, my mind wandered off into something else, cause it was so deeply fried it couldn't take in anything else. I've already came across 50% of those before the Promos anyway.

What I did instead was I looked at others' profiles for another half hour before coming over to this blog post. I made a connection between intellectuality and being fashionable. Most of the people who made most sense are fans of luxury fashion brands. Which possibly points me to one of them cause I'm a fan of Fred Perry, albeit the fact that it's not completely a luxury brand. Just kidding about [fashion-intellectuality observation] that though a part of it might just be fact. So no prizes for guessing I'm more of a psychologist than politician huh. Oh and something else - Huang Wenshan's a Dunman High alumni. Just a fun fact, like that matters.

You could read the article if you're really interested, cause if you're not, I've bets that you'd probably give up halfway through reading it.

Because today's a new day, I'm going to type a new post instead of adding updates on to my previous. I'll plan my time for tomorrow (since surprisingly, again, there's neither volleyball nor wushu training), and since today failed, tomorrow would be double the rigour. I finished planning the layout for my newspaper template, it sounds even more interesting than my current blog layout, which isn't a good thing. It's complicated to do though, I'm going to be using table codes most probably, and I never use tables, so I'll take a while to get the hang of it. Amitabbha, I hope I don't meet up with any sort of html constrictions while I'm creating the layout. I'll flip.

I estimate 12 consecutive hours to finish the layout, or 14 hours if I break it up into more days. Different days, different moods, different style, so I don't usually like to take a break from designing then continuing another day. Which is why I usually complete layouts at wee hours in the morning. Okay, so I'll make sure I clock at least 5.5 hours of studying tomorrow before even touching the computer. I SWEAR/ Maybe I'll get out of house to study (given that studying at home is like 5% productivity), but since I dunno who I could ask out to study, I'll probably go Chinatown alone, or Serangoon Macdonalds alone. On second thoughts, make that 7 hours.

I blogged 3 times today, obviously because I was home the entire day. Now I really wanna go out of house tomorrow. Chinatown it is.

Despite the morning jog, I ended up not doing much (studying). Yeah I spent the entire day I had blogging, stoning in front of Facebook waiting for new/interesting updates, listening to new albums, as well as (the most productive part of my day) reading up on CSS/HTML. I should have taken computing I swear, CSS/HTML's really interesting. Lots of cool stuff. I was planning to create this new blogskin (not for myself) cause the first skin I did prompted another one and another one and such. Anyway I wanted a newspaper inspired look. I brain-stormed all features of a newspaper, all was going smoothly when suddenly I realised that newspaper has those (GEEK TALK ALERT!) split up columns which belonged to a main body, so I had to find some form of CSS to break the usual box up, but with a flow. I'm still on it right now, but it doesn't seem easy, if there was even any code to create it. CSS3 has this, but CSS3's still beta and hardly any browsers are CSS3 enabled right now.

Anyway back to what I mentioned in the post header, I've added a search bar into my blog, so stalkers could type your names in to see what churn out, my friends could search themselves to reminiscent about the old times, you could do a word count of how many times I've used "fuck" when I didn't want to, or you could really just ignore it. An attempt to add some chim-ness into my blog template, to be more unique cause right now online blogs are becoming a growing representation of the individuals huh. So you could also say I'm trying to build up my personal image of being more unique. Whatever,


EDIT:
I SWEAR I'M HAVING A DESIGNER'S CREATIVE JUICE BURST RIGHT NOW. Finding out more about ways to code my newspaper layout, I've got like loads more ideas. I'm writing them down in the idea book of layouts that I've been using a year ago, but since stopped. Oh no it's getting late must sleep early otherwise pimple outburst worsen but I want to design templates now how now brown cow.

I've triumphed, won the sleeping monster and managed to get up at 6.15am for my (holiday)monthly jog. I know I always make jogging sound so wonderful, but in actual fact, it really is. Especially to those who enjoy running, cause a year ago I hated running. No need to go to the usual jogging spots at East Coast or Reservoirs, but a close look/jog around a neighbourhood could actually bring you much surprises - hidden shortcuts, alleyways, areas which are tucked away from the main roads, gives you a feeling like you're out of your neighbourhood, or even Singapore.

Today I ran my usual route down the cemetery, but I gave up running after around 10 minutes. Probably cause the scenery's too much to miss, I put on my spectacles (yeah I brought it with me) and walked while ogling at all of nature. Nature here unlike green nature, but all things natural. After the 10 minutes jog, I followed this jogging uncle into a row of bungalows and stuff - cause if he's jogging into it then there must be something to see right? I saw parts and parcel of others' lives, waking up to brew a cup of coffee, a foreign worker brushing his teeth over the drain, packs of aunties. I walked past HDBs, and once saw this group of aunties sitting around in a circle, chatting. Dunno why but I could feel how much they were enjoying themselves, the smiles, the way they sit, the non-distance between each other.

I ran around looping Nefi and Girly - Asobi Seksu for the 10 minutes of my jog, first on the playlist up there, do give it a listen yeah? The next song Ottoman's good too. I've been looking for good Indie tracks for the past days, and I'm turning out with a handful of goodies I swear.

Anyway I was just thinking about it, and regretted not picking up the habit of jogging in high school. The holding campus at Buona Vista could definitely give a great jog. Much greenery, somewhat discrete and secluded jog spots, a place which I hardly know - meaning much room to explore. There'll be a time I'll go jog along a long river, downstream till I reach its source, or till I'm too tired. I'll be looking around for river streams these days, if you have any recommendations you could tell me - on that day I'll wake up at 4am and start running, don't like to run when everyone else is up.

No volleyball today, no wushu today, could this please be an efficient mugging day.

On a side note, today when I opened my wallet to retrieve some cash + my ezlink, my $5 note was stuck to a $2 note, and it stank. There was like this dried greenish substance between the two, which looked like dried snot. Wait, I swear it was dried snot. Damn disgusting, swear. I either got it from Roxy Square ban mian stall, that prata stall, or Liang Court subway. In any case, I'm not eating from any of them again. I hope. Honestly, I'd actually prefer the note to have came from subway than the ban mian stall auntie. FREAKGROSS. And if you're wondering what I did with it, I washed it (yeah plastic notes thank god) and dried it. It still stinks a little now, but I've kept it in Fred Perry and it's too bad to the next person who receives it.

I'm completely into US/UK music. I recently acquired taste for slightly more alternative music, like those on Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, which I'd probably not like a year ago cause I was still bubble gum poppy then. I've always had this part of me which was kind of wondering why I completely moved on from Mandarin music, but now I really just feel that a lot of those mandopop are... much less deep. Yeah, some classic ballads are still really good, but then right now a lot of them are just sounding alike. Or I probably haven't given them a chance anyway. Speaking of music, do listen to Scouting for Girls.

Mugfest mood passed, if it even managed to hit me hard enough. I'm taking things more easily right now, kinda like the sea after tsunami? But yeah, I'll still be telling myself war starts 1st January 2010.

Click here to view. I have finally "unleashed my blogskin into the blogskins.com community", haven't done this in years so I guess it isn't too awesome. But anyway that means I could try and start studying soon now, I hope. You wanna help me click on the link and do a rating? Okay, study.

I know right, it's a little sudden since it's already 10 days into the month. But anyway I really need this right now to remind myself about how much of a screw up my holiday's been so far.

1. Sleep early, eat healthy. Ever since my brother ended his A levels he's been having really screw up sleeping habits, and it's influencing me. Staying out and reaching home at 6am, waking up at 1pm, sleeping at 2am. I've been extremely un-good. Stayed over at Changi airport that day sending Kelly/Suwen/Nicole off to OCIP in China. Oh speaking of that I'll be posting up some photos we took that day outside Changi Airport at 7, really good sunlight then. And then there are a lot of late nights in the past 2 weeks, a lot of last buses home and such. Today was a good example, but we had some good laughs over dinner + shaker fries. God I forgot to blog about sending OCIP kids off, that day was fun! Anyway yeah, I'll sleep after blogging.

2. Eliminate distractions, get your ass down to studying. Computer's a good example of a distraction. I completely cannot study at home, cause I'll either be sleeping or using the computer. Another major distraction on my mind is creating a blogskin. I did that for the past 2 nights after training, a blogskin on Skins, didn't turn out as I expected but still not too bad I guess, going to post it up soon after I get time to finalise the colours and such. Why the hell am I still making blogskins?! Especially when I haven't touched them for almost a year! But at least that's one distraction down huh? Next biggest distraction is itch to play vball at Sentosa - I'm still waiting for a reply from Eugene/Sandra.

3. Time management. Kinda ties in with the previous one, I need to get a hold of my life. I have now trainings every week Monday to Friday, and it's killing. The only day I could actually study is Saturday in the entire week, cause I can never ever study at home and if I wasn't given one full day, I wouldn't have the motivation to study. So I need to rearrange my time, plan my trainings, plan when to study. Because I'm prolly going to be that busy till next year starts at least, I've plans to hold a set of chemistry notes on bus rides to/from school everyday from now. Read till you sleep, which is actually highly likely. But I've realised I hardly read the notes properly, like 80% of things don't sink in. I thought chemistry could be like physics- you only need to get the big picture to understand everything else. Turns out I'm wrong. Wait, it might not even be true for physics, since I've just managed to scrape off an E with a hell lot of divine intervention.

JIAYOU to me and all else right now in the battlefield against the As. Oh you know what, I just realised that everyone is already studying, R-papers or not. I thought people would slack off once they don't have to take R-papers. Bummer. I thought I could use the holidays like extra time to catch up with everyone else.

8th day of mugging month. I don't know how I'm managing my time. Calling December a mugging month isn't exactly working on the psychological side, cause I still seem to be taking this as a holiday. I've completed 2.5 chapters of TYS so far, and I started on that before December. And note that it's just TYS, no tutorials, no understanding. I spent an entire week on chemical energetics (I). Note to self: Yeah I'm sure by blogging about it you'll be any more guilty and start to go hardcore. (sense the sarcasm)

And uhm, just had a mini volleyball guys/girls dunch(?) after friendly matches with Xin Min Secondary, which both teams lost to. But anyway we were just chatting about orientation and I dunno why but I get a feeling next year's not going to be really good. Some of my friends who completely deserved it didn't get in, a few are planning to quit, and in the first place some of the really enthusiastic ones didn't even apply cause of commitments and R-papers. Which sucks a lot. And there's someone in my OG who's quite... un-fine. Sorry I'm being evil. But I think it's realistically-evil, I'm not the only one feeling that way.

Oh anyway VJC's friendly-ing with DHS on 17th, I'm pretty excited about it, despite many things. I left last year a mess, quite regretful. So anyway fyi I applied to VJC from DHS IP, which was "illegal" - pretty much, I guess. And well, it was awkward. I was training with DHS for a month or two, and then I received confirmation and I fucked up. I told like... 2 people and a teacher from the team, cause I'm extremely awkward at farewells, especially when it's not a right thing to do. The last training I attended, the J2s (at then J1 end) didn't even know. I told my teacher-in-charge, a few people and the captain, then hurriedly left. Screwed up didn't I? Think coach was training me for libero cause I always had different training from the rest, but I didn't even inform him I was leaving. So on 17th I'm going to be quite awkward. The seniors and teachers are completely okay with it, but the coach... I think he doesn't even want to see me anymore. Plus he's the only other person in the world I personally know who's a November 18th too. Maybe there's Mickey Mouse too, but wait - he doesn't know me. So, a piece of Bolong's unglamorous history to you. I suck at goodbyes.

Blogging two times in one day is just desperate. I don't know why, motivation's lost in the vast land of Egypt and I'm stuck here in little Singapore. I quit the computer at 3pm and now it's 4pm - I'm back up here. I had a packet of prawn crackers while watching Pineapple Express (mentioned below) and then I wanted to have a bowl of cereals before I started work.

Anyway I walked into the balcony and walla, what did I see? A bright pink flower sprouting out from that pot of ugly cacti my grandmother had before I was born. I always told myself I made friends with that pot of ugly cacti since I was young. It never pricked me, I could stroke its pricks like an owner and a dog. We were special. Maybe it just had weak pricks. I grew older and I stopped talking to it, then this day I saw that pink flower, after a heavy downpour in Serangoon, petals with crystal clear droplets of rainwater. Feels... miraculous, like a gift from heaven, like rainbow after storms. I have never even noticed the stalk growing out of the cacti, but poof, flower! Sorry, I'm incoherent right now, but yeah, feelings.

Got distracted with the DSLR, and spent half an hour catching images in my balcony - colourful clothes-clippers, raindrops, green trees and unexpectedly this Bangladeshi sweeping dried leaves. So that concludes 2nd day of Mugfest month a failure. I'm leaving for training soon, but yeah I kinda enjoyed taking those photos.






Shit I'm in love with my new blog, I'm spending way too much time here.

Just watched Pineapple Express. Freakin great gore humour. I hardly ever laugh so hard at movies I watch alone at home - you know, no one to laugh with you, makes you feel a little weird. Anyway this was awesome, seriously. Best. Laugh. Ever.... I. Think. I was supposed to wake up and hit the books this morning cause December's my official "hardcore R-papers revision" month and I've spent the 1st day of the month at training and reading (story)books and watching Gold prices for my mum. And looking at new phones and checking Facebook and wasting my life away on boring things. Anyway my point of that was the movie was worth my morning. Go watch it if you haven't, it's plain comedy and not much take-aways but it's really worth the laugh.

And uhm, I've recently seen a lot of DHS Vietnam OCIP photos and thoughts and comments on Facebook, which makes me regret not going for OCIP. In the first place I don't have that 2 weeks to spare cause there's training 5 days/week and I've my Rs but it seems cool. I'm a dick for new experiences - I mean I dig new experiences, and I'm probably never going to do OCIP anymore in my life cause we'll all grow up to be bastards who think that time=money=really important. And that sucks yeah.

So I've decided to create block days for myself cause I'm quite stupid and I totally need more studying. Inspired by my friend who's had block months since November. I'm not saying who she is since this could be like 1% not good, but her mum and teacher has blocked her off from CCA and everything else, so she could completely focus and do the same. So yes, according to my calendar up there, I'm going to block myself off everything completely, for those 3 days. Exciting. I'll go out of house (possibly Chinatown) and I will be rejecting all offers to go out (unless it's really a cant-miss-event, but don't try to tempt me okay), I will not be using the computer, and I will only be studying. Yes, I will be skipping training on those days too. R-paper's going to be a real good excuse. I'll be doing hardcore Chemistry on those days, so I'll leave the homework to the rest of the free January days. And I told myself that since I'm going to be studying, if my grade is not C/above I'll be dropping chem to H1. I know the goal seems crazy and it scares you a little, but if I'm going to have time to study and still not score, what makes you think I will in the A levels? Oh yeah and to all my friends: go on and study hard okay, 80% of people who tell you that nobody's studying right now are lying, so be motivated and work hard with me yeah, come over to my side I have cookies!

Anyway volleyball chalet tomorrow, Phoenix countdown on 31st! Yes okay awesome so looking forward to them. Oh yeah today was volleyball J1 vs J2 friendly, and we won! Admittedly the J2s haven't played for a while and are not top-form today, but then our star captain was sick and didn't come, so it kind of evens out. We won 3-2, with last set 23-25. Even after Ernest Puey tried tactical attacks by sending us a threatening message to tackle our team spirit. HAHA @ Ernest!

Ernest Puey 28 Dec-2009 16:07

Just a friendly reminder that tmr u girls are gg 2 get trashed so pls rmb bring ur helmets. Spare batteries not provided.

Like, great show. My brother's been watching this since one year ago but I've just started cause I've finished Skins... and well, I'm bored. Hate to admit it, but yeah I'm bored. Awesome though, Barney's hilarious. Like as if his name's not hilarious enough.

Went out for an annual DHS wushu outing yesterday, Melinda's house was seriously a bad idea cause she had like 3 dogs and 5 rabbits and... (wait for it)... stray cats which will occasionally come into her house for food. Now, who said Hell was the worst place to go? I refused to get off her bed, while the rest toy around with me (like literally) and made a big joke out of my phobia. They took Pepper's (only un-caged dog in the house) favourite toy and attempted to throw it towards me so Pepper would like... charge to me. Several times. Which was really annoying and un-fun but they weren't completely lifeless and moved on from my phobia after a while. So I forgive them. I'm just never stepping into Melinda's house again. Ever. Cross my fingers, swear to Buddha, holy son or father whatever, everything. No offense. Plus everyone knew of my phobia but none of them told me Melinda had so many pests in her house till I was on second floor and I saw the dog myself. Thank god we left for airport after an hour or two. OMG yeah and Melinda has a gym in her house!!! It's like 3 times my room I'm so jealous but next time I'll rather have an entertainment room than a gym in my future big house. And my senior said that chocolates were poisonous to dogs? Okay, riddle with prize: can anyone tell me, chocolates are to dogs, so what are to cats? I'll take a trip to the supermarket and the next day Serangoon's going to be cat-free :)

I've been getting in touch with nature so often that I almost thought this was morning jog #4. But anyway, it's extremely ironical (and disconcerting) that I could pull myself to wake up at 6am to go for a jog, when I've never managed to wake with an alarm at 9am to study.



I Googled for jogging spots yester-night, and found this place called Sungei Serangoon which sounded not bad. I was almost sure I'll be there today, till I checked the street directory and found out Sungei Serangoon wasn't exactly near Serangoon. Fastest way there would be by NE line to Sengkang, then another LRT stop to Kangkar. The total journey time would take about half an hour, and I estimated that by the time I got there, the sun would already be out and I wouldn't last long, since train service only begins 6.19am. In the end, I changed my route to somewhere nearer I saw on the same street directory map.



Sungei Kallang! Lorong Chuan's a stop away from Serangoon, so that seemed like a great idea! Turns out, in Singapore, running along a canal stream isn't always the best idea. At Lorong Chuan, I had to make huge detours to try and follow the stream, it went under the Australian International School, an expressway, and that's when I gave up. I don't think I'm going to try and run along un-tried river streams in Singapore anymore, cause unless I run inside the canal itself, I'll probably get nowhere. Plus in the first place, I only managed to get out of house at 6.45am, so I could have taken route one.

In any case, I walked along the expressway to try and locate a path beside the canal, but it was a good experience. Dangerous, yes. No walkways, you're walking right beside speeding cars, but the breeze (from the wind, and the cars) is so strong, like half of what we felt atop Marina Barrage that day - but Marina Barrage was crazy wind - pigs could fly. So the wind was excellent, strong, but not till your cheeks are vibrating. For the poets - the sound of speeding cars, so loud it covers your thoughts. Pretty enjoyable.

Walked back to Serangoon (I officially realise Circle Line stops are really close to each other) and had 2 pieces of prata kosong and a cup of Teh Tarik. I know it completely nullifies the workout from jogging - if I have even jogged enough - but not like that's the purpose of my jog. Completely awesome breakfast on an early morning. I think I'm too reflective for my own good. Think my mental age's like at least 25 years old, and ever since I started watching Skins, it has grown exponentially. Too mature, too reflective, it's scaring me as much as it's scaring you. Heck that, I wanna go on a long exotic backpacking trip before I'm 22. Any BFFs wanna volunteer? Like a trip to somewhere totally un-city, 5 days of backpacking, 20 days of immersing into the new culture, living life there. That would be great, I swear.

Makes it feel a little more like Christmas, but I wish he would stop singing with his girl-voice though.

I finished season 3 of Skins, I wish we had small towns and rivers and forests and mountains in Singapore too. Image above's screen-caps of scenes in the season finale. Beautiful huh. Plus I really want a private shed, like Freddie's. So yeah, that further substantiates my future plan of migrating overseas to lead a simple life in a small town, if I don't earn enough moolah over here in Singapore.

Plus Christmas this year doesn't feel like Christmas. I've heard that from at least 3 different people at different times, and I completely agree. Lack of atmosphere, lack of christmas jingles, lack of warmth and everything else. I can't pinpoint it but yeah. This year I'm feeling nothing. I've been going out for "Christmas" gatherings the past few days, so my mum's kinda mad at me even though our family doesn't even celebrate Christmas. Oh I'm completely free tomorrow. I know it's supposed to be (a Merry) Christmas but I think I'm going to study instead. I had fun everyday anyway, who needs a festive season to celebrate yeah? For that I'm really thankful for friends :) It's Christmas in a few hours, so I wanna tell everyone who's reading this that if you're my friend, I fucking love you okay. Phoenix BBQ/Perle's birthday and blogskins.com annual outing below. I know you're judging us, but we're cool and most of us know each other already so that's... safe. Plus childish, self-rating primary school kids don't go cause they will be afraid we'll push them down the Marina Barrage slope, so the outing was pretty good.

I just woke up for training, anyway posted this up to the site last night. The Blogger Times. I'm kind of sleepy right now, but would like to tell you about yesterday. Think it's like the suay-est day of my year. I plan to list them down in order rather than a paragraph cause that way it's more obvious how suay I was.

1. I woke up at 6am with terrible calf aches from Sentosa the previous day. And when I say terrible I really meant terrible.
2. I went up the bus, and even though there was another Victorian sitting in front of me (uhm it's 7am, quite a miracle someone else is going to school okay) I overslept my bus stop, even past the loop back.
3. I walked 2 bus stop distance back to school, arrived in the hall and first thing I saw a chair, I sat down and took a rest. Junrong told me there was bird shit on the chair. I dunno why it was like mass bird pooping orgy on the chair, the patch of shit was big, thank god it's half dried.
4. I went to wash up and pang sai, first person I saw outside the toilet was PE HOD Mr Tan, and I got sent to have my hair cut. At 8am. Didn't realise shops don't open till 10.30am, only when I got to Roxy Square.
5. I called Ian, asked which shop was the best, and waited outside Parkway Parade's Giant with a box of donuts.
6. I went back to Roxy Square at 10.30am, waited till 11am when I found out that barber doesn't open on Mondays. Tuesdays to Sunday, just not Monday.
7. Had my haircut at this weird shop with a 60year-old uncle my barber. Swear it screwed up my hair, his equipments were like a thousand years old, the scissors needed 3 cuts to be able to break my hair, by the end of the cut my hair looked like I had fucking bad split ends. Trust me, I was extremely extremely pissed, but thank god further in the day my bad luck ended.

pseudomeaningful@tumblr. I know I just blogged like 15 minutes ago, and there's still some durian waiting for me downstairs, but just a quick sharing yeah. I think I'm kind of obsessed with blogging. Saw this through Tzuhsiang's tumblr immediately after I wrote her birthday paragraph. I reckon that the tumblr has quite a good concept, like what someone who feels a sense of belonging in an online community would do. Yes, I get that feeling about childish primary school kids in blogskins.com who create multiple accounts (and I'm counting the accounts in dozens) to rate and comment on their own submitted blogskins just for an SOTD title. It isn't even that great anymore. The site's increasingly dominated with childish Singaporean babies who act that way, and a handful of the best blogskinners have deleted their accounts or abandoned the community because of that.

Anyway back to the tumblr. Yeah it's built on a creative concept, plus what I like about them is their tumblr layout's great as well, simple design, shapes and colours. But uhm it's like they criticize things that others post in a manner which might happen to sound rude to me. I mean, imagine what those people who post up the original tumblr-posts would feel! And it's like when you're going to criticize and search for... (I dunno) a few entries a day? You might be really trying too hard. My advice is to tone down on the number of posts, spend more time on creating those which are more epic and they'll be more popular. Don't know what's with their fancy about choice of fonts and positionings, I could predict those comments half the time. Further, they are criticizing that things are stupid, and of course - pseudomeaningful, but it's not like they make sense all the time. Here's an example which I happened to cross.

Spread Love Like Violence.They commented:

I wouldn’t recommend using the same tools. Try explaining to a woman exactly WHY you’re using a shotgun to tell her you love her. She’ll be really scared. And confused.

And if you allow me to use their words against them, "I’m struggling really hard to try to make sense of this thing, but I’m failing horribly." I could guess from first look that the image portrayed a negative emotion towards seeing the world, like from a pessimistic perspective. They took the words as "Spread Love Through Violence", but from my guess it was more of a "Spread Love Instead of Violence", how violent crimes seem to be so prevalent but why love isn't. Why is the world committing everything bad, but good things seem so rare.

[EDITION]: I just added an image into the blogpost, and when I visited the actual flickr photographer's page to make a copy of the image for repost, I saw comments on the image (and guess what, they were actually 100% positive) and found out it's from this song, Secret Crowds by Angels and Airwaves. I've double checked with the lyrics of the song, and it turns out I'm almost entirely correct while pseudomeaningful@tumblr is almost entirely wrong. Time-out, I win them hands down.

I've a few totally unrelated things I want to post about today.



Firstly, what the fuckz. The image above is a screenshot of my sent mails in Hotmail. Some bug got into my email address and sent those spam cheater mails I hate to receive to email addresses of people starting with "jla". Don't know how it got in, but I swear I've never ever clicked any shit spam links that people gave me on MSN/ Facebook/ Hotmail or such. I've not stupid, I don't believe if you saw my naked photo on the net, saw one of my friends kissing someone else, neither do I want to stalk other people and find out what they are doing right now. Technology is scary, someone else could probably read all my email content, keep a collection of my passwords and steal my 1 million Neopoints on Neopets.

Next thing, I just came back from a full day at Sentosa, it's been a really long time since I've played actual beach volleyball for the entire day, kinda gets me reminiscent about post-EOYs last year. Actually it was pre-EOYs as well. Results didn't matter so much then, and nobody was hanging loose on the thread in retaining. We even had EuLong4MaurSand like 2 weeks before the EOYs. Miss you guys, me and Sandra realised that after Tzuhsiang stopped hyping about beach volleyball we stopped going to Sentosa with the rest of them. And why didn't any of you come today, thought only /th wasn't free! I walked across the pool of water atop Vivocity with Alisa and Cheryl, it was kinda fun, though it sounds like much of a cheap thrill.

Oh uhm I spent quite a lot today, $25ish. Plus my last expenditure of the day was expensive milk tea from a PRC-owned Sweet Talk in Vivocity, which made everything seem even more sucky. Don't like PRC-owned Sweet Talks, an exception would be Cup Walker at both Kovan Heartland Mall and Seng Kang Compass Point, which have excellent PRC staff and serve great milk tea. Maybe it's just Sweet Talk. Anyway that shop sold milk tea for $1.60, didn't have pearls and had four-fifth cup full of ice. I was about to type three quarters, but I realised that the ice was three quarter-full after I finished the drink, so it must have been more than that. It's like those workers are so cheapskate they can't be bothered to make the next batch of pearls, even though I swore they sold like at least 50 cups after they ran out of pearls. Oh but on the bright side, my mum bought a pint of Häagen-Dazs green tea ice cream and another rum and raisin just yesterday. Plus I got home today and some really nice durians just popped right in front of me. I heart good food. That was gay.

A few more things to talk about, but I'll just run through them briefly aights cause I want to sleep soon. Uhm I'm 98% done with the newspaper blogskin I was talking to you about, would be finalizing some things and posting it up soon. While I was pooping in the toilet half an hour ago I got an inspiration to do up a completely forest themed toilet in my future dream house, which includes a stone basin, those marble rocks and a small titled pathway to the bathtub, plus a bamboo tree of all others.

Finally, I forgot to dedicate a birthday paragraph to Tzuhsiang on 15th December, so I'm doing it now. Sorry it's a tad late but I haven't been blogging. Go take a look at her tumblr it's pretty interesting. And anyway had fun that day celebrating your birthday, wish Liqin invited me to make your bento together cause I think making bento-s are kind of fun. And woah we talked all through the entire day that day from lunch till 10pm?! Kinda unbelievable but yet really awesome. HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY. Oh yeah and to Teo Szeying too who was my group project buddy in Secondary 1/2, we don't talk a lot now and she's probably not reading this too, but her birthday's in 2 days so happy birthday too! And cool beans Tzuhsiang your birthday's an exact week before Szeying's!

GIANT POLITICAL SQUABBLE IN FACEBOOK

So, a quick, lousy gist would be Joel Joshua Goh complaining about Singapore, PAP and it's current political system, while several other contenders including Andrew Tan, Huang Wenshan, Ryan Joseph and foreigners jump into the long train of arguments. I don't have absolute interest in politics, it's been on my mind since June 09-Promos period but ever since I stopped caring. I was studying and complaining about Singapore at the same time, my pea-brain couldn't take that much of a load, so I followed what a Singaporean would do - study, for future interests, cause the political problem could be solved easily. I either feel satisfied with loads of money in my pocket, in Singapore, or I migrate, right?

I read (almost) the entire note and subsequent comments for at least a good 2.5 hours, when I should be mugging, so if you're about to call me a typical Singaporean couch potato, I've sacrificed enough, for Buddha's sake. Oh interjection, I did only 4 hours today, cause I slept 12 full hours and came up at 2pm. Couldn't expect me to study the entire day could you? Anyway the normal person who's a victim of dumbed-down education would look into details, start wiki-ing about Operation Coldstore, Lim Chin Siong, the (original) founders of PAP, media control in Singapore, the links between Temasek Holdings-GIC-SPH and the Lee family, my mind wandered off into something else, cause it was so deeply fried it couldn't take in anything else. I've already came across 50% of those before the Promos anyway.

What I did instead was I looked at others' profiles for another half hour before coming over to this blog post. I made a connection between intellectuality and being fashionable. Most of the people who made most sense are fans of luxury fashion brands. Which possibly points me to one of them cause I'm a fan of Fred Perry, albeit the fact that it's not completely a luxury brand. Just kidding about [fashion-intellectuality observation] that though a part of it might just be fact. So no prizes for guessing I'm more of a psychologist than politician huh. Oh and something else - Huang Wenshan's a Dunman High alumni. Just a fun fact, like that matters.

You could read the article if you're really interested, cause if you're not, I've bets that you'd probably give up halfway through reading it.

Because today's a new day, I'm going to type a new post instead of adding updates on to my previous. I'll plan my time for tomorrow (since surprisingly, again, there's neither volleyball nor wushu training), and since today failed, tomorrow would be double the rigour. I finished planning the layout for my newspaper template, it sounds even more interesting than my current blog layout, which isn't a good thing. It's complicated to do though, I'm going to be using table codes most probably, and I never use tables, so I'll take a while to get the hang of it. Amitabbha, I hope I don't meet up with any sort of html constrictions while I'm creating the layout. I'll flip.

I estimate 12 consecutive hours to finish the layout, or 14 hours if I break it up into more days. Different days, different moods, different style, so I don't usually like to take a break from designing then continuing another day. Which is why I usually complete layouts at wee hours in the morning. Okay, so I'll make sure I clock at least 5.5 hours of studying tomorrow before even touching the computer. I SWEAR/ Maybe I'll get out of house to study (given that studying at home is like 5% productivity), but since I dunno who I could ask out to study, I'll probably go Chinatown alone, or Serangoon Macdonalds alone. On second thoughts, make that 7 hours.

I blogged 3 times today, obviously because I was home the entire day. Now I really wanna go out of house tomorrow. Chinatown it is.

Despite the morning jog, I ended up not doing much (studying). Yeah I spent the entire day I had blogging, stoning in front of Facebook waiting for new/interesting updates, listening to new albums, as well as (the most productive part of my day) reading up on CSS/HTML. I should have taken computing I swear, CSS/HTML's really interesting. Lots of cool stuff. I was planning to create this new blogskin (not for myself) cause the first skin I did prompted another one and another one and such. Anyway I wanted a newspaper inspired look. I brain-stormed all features of a newspaper, all was going smoothly when suddenly I realised that newspaper has those (GEEK TALK ALERT!) split up columns which belonged to a main body, so I had to find some form of CSS to break the usual box up, but with a flow. I'm still on it right now, but it doesn't seem easy, if there was even any code to create it. CSS3 has this, but CSS3's still beta and hardly any browsers are CSS3 enabled right now.

Anyway back to what I mentioned in the post header, I've added a search bar into my blog, so stalkers could type your names in to see what churn out, my friends could search themselves to reminiscent about the old times, you could do a word count of how many times I've used "fuck" when I didn't want to, or you could really just ignore it. An attempt to add some chim-ness into my blog template, to be more unique cause right now online blogs are becoming a growing representation of the individuals huh. So you could also say I'm trying to build up my personal image of being more unique. Whatever,


EDIT:
I SWEAR I'M HAVING A DESIGNER'S CREATIVE JUICE BURST RIGHT NOW. Finding out more about ways to code my newspaper layout, I've got like loads more ideas. I'm writing them down in the idea book of layouts that I've been using a year ago, but since stopped. Oh no it's getting late must sleep early otherwise pimple outburst worsen but I want to design templates now how now brown cow.

I've triumphed, won the sleeping monster and managed to get up at 6.15am for my (holiday)monthly jog. I know I always make jogging sound so wonderful, but in actual fact, it really is. Especially to those who enjoy running, cause a year ago I hated running. No need to go to the usual jogging spots at East Coast or Reservoirs, but a close look/jog around a neighbourhood could actually bring you much surprises - hidden shortcuts, alleyways, areas which are tucked away from the main roads, gives you a feeling like you're out of your neighbourhood, or even Singapore.

Today I ran my usual route down the cemetery, but I gave up running after around 10 minutes. Probably cause the scenery's too much to miss, I put on my spectacles (yeah I brought it with me) and walked while ogling at all of nature. Nature here unlike green nature, but all things natural. After the 10 minutes jog, I followed this jogging uncle into a row of bungalows and stuff - cause if he's jogging into it then there must be something to see right? I saw parts and parcel of others' lives, waking up to brew a cup of coffee, a foreign worker brushing his teeth over the drain, packs of aunties. I walked past HDBs, and once saw this group of aunties sitting around in a circle, chatting. Dunno why but I could feel how much they were enjoying themselves, the smiles, the way they sit, the non-distance between each other.

I ran around looping Nefi and Girly - Asobi Seksu for the 10 minutes of my jog, first on the playlist up there, do give it a listen yeah? The next song Ottoman's good too. I've been looking for good Indie tracks for the past days, and I'm turning out with a handful of goodies I swear.

Anyway I was just thinking about it, and regretted not picking up the habit of jogging in high school. The holding campus at Buona Vista could definitely give a great jog. Much greenery, somewhat discrete and secluded jog spots, a place which I hardly know - meaning much room to explore. There'll be a time I'll go jog along a long river, downstream till I reach its source, or till I'm too tired. I'll be looking around for river streams these days, if you have any recommendations you could tell me - on that day I'll wake up at 4am and start running, don't like to run when everyone else is up.

No volleyball today, no wushu today, could this please be an efficient mugging day.

On a side note, today when I opened my wallet to retrieve some cash + my ezlink, my $5 note was stuck to a $2 note, and it stank. There was like this dried greenish substance between the two, which looked like dried snot. Wait, I swear it was dried snot. Damn disgusting, swear. I either got it from Roxy Square ban mian stall, that prata stall, or Liang Court subway. In any case, I'm not eating from any of them again. I hope. Honestly, I'd actually prefer the note to have came from subway than the ban mian stall auntie. FREAKGROSS. And if you're wondering what I did with it, I washed it (yeah plastic notes thank god) and dried it. It still stinks a little now, but I've kept it in Fred Perry and it's too bad to the next person who receives it.

I'm completely into US/UK music. I recently acquired taste for slightly more alternative music, like those on Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, which I'd probably not like a year ago cause I was still bubble gum poppy then. I've always had this part of me which was kind of wondering why I completely moved on from Mandarin music, but now I really just feel that a lot of those mandopop are... much less deep. Yeah, some classic ballads are still really good, but then right now a lot of them are just sounding alike. Or I probably haven't given them a chance anyway. Speaking of music, do listen to Scouting for Girls.

Mugfest mood passed, if it even managed to hit me hard enough. I'm taking things more easily right now, kinda like the sea after tsunami? But yeah, I'll still be telling myself war starts 1st January 2010.

Click here to view. I have finally "unleashed my blogskin into the blogskins.com community", haven't done this in years so I guess it isn't too awesome. But anyway that means I could try and start studying soon now, I hope. You wanna help me click on the link and do a rating? Okay, study.

I know right, it's a little sudden since it's already 10 days into the month. But anyway I really need this right now to remind myself about how much of a screw up my holiday's been so far.

1. Sleep early, eat healthy. Ever since my brother ended his A levels he's been having really screw up sleeping habits, and it's influencing me. Staying out and reaching home at 6am, waking up at 1pm, sleeping at 2am. I've been extremely un-good. Stayed over at Changi airport that day sending Kelly/Suwen/Nicole off to OCIP in China. Oh speaking of that I'll be posting up some photos we took that day outside Changi Airport at 7, really good sunlight then. And then there are a lot of late nights in the past 2 weeks, a lot of last buses home and such. Today was a good example, but we had some good laughs over dinner + shaker fries. God I forgot to blog about sending OCIP kids off, that day was fun! Anyway yeah, I'll sleep after blogging.

2. Eliminate distractions, get your ass down to studying. Computer's a good example of a distraction. I completely cannot study at home, cause I'll either be sleeping or using the computer. Another major distraction on my mind is creating a blogskin. I did that for the past 2 nights after training, a blogskin on Skins, didn't turn out as I expected but still not too bad I guess, going to post it up soon after I get time to finalise the colours and such. Why the hell am I still making blogskins?! Especially when I haven't touched them for almost a year! But at least that's one distraction down huh? Next biggest distraction is itch to play vball at Sentosa - I'm still waiting for a reply from Eugene/Sandra.

3. Time management. Kinda ties in with the previous one, I need to get a hold of my life. I have now trainings every week Monday to Friday, and it's killing. The only day I could actually study is Saturday in the entire week, cause I can never ever study at home and if I wasn't given one full day, I wouldn't have the motivation to study. So I need to rearrange my time, plan my trainings, plan when to study. Because I'm prolly going to be that busy till next year starts at least, I've plans to hold a set of chemistry notes on bus rides to/from school everyday from now. Read till you sleep, which is actually highly likely. But I've realised I hardly read the notes properly, like 80% of things don't sink in. I thought chemistry could be like physics- you only need to get the big picture to understand everything else. Turns out I'm wrong. Wait, it might not even be true for physics, since I've just managed to scrape off an E with a hell lot of divine intervention.

JIAYOU to me and all else right now in the battlefield against the As. Oh you know what, I just realised that everyone is already studying, R-papers or not. I thought people would slack off once they don't have to take R-papers. Bummer. I thought I could use the holidays like extra time to catch up with everyone else.

8th day of mugging month. I don't know how I'm managing my time. Calling December a mugging month isn't exactly working on the psychological side, cause I still seem to be taking this as a holiday. I've completed 2.5 chapters of TYS so far, and I started on that before December. And note that it's just TYS, no tutorials, no understanding. I spent an entire week on chemical energetics (I). Note to self: Yeah I'm sure by blogging about it you'll be any more guilty and start to go hardcore. (sense the sarcasm)

And uhm, just had a mini volleyball guys/girls dunch(?) after friendly matches with Xin Min Secondary, which both teams lost to. But anyway we were just chatting about orientation and I dunno why but I get a feeling next year's not going to be really good. Some of my friends who completely deserved it didn't get in, a few are planning to quit, and in the first place some of the really enthusiastic ones didn't even apply cause of commitments and R-papers. Which sucks a lot. And there's someone in my OG who's quite... un-fine. Sorry I'm being evil. But I think it's realistically-evil, I'm not the only one feeling that way.

Oh anyway VJC's friendly-ing with DHS on 17th, I'm pretty excited about it, despite many things. I left last year a mess, quite regretful. So anyway fyi I applied to VJC from DHS IP, which was "illegal" - pretty much, I guess. And well, it was awkward. I was training with DHS for a month or two, and then I received confirmation and I fucked up. I told like... 2 people and a teacher from the team, cause I'm extremely awkward at farewells, especially when it's not a right thing to do. The last training I attended, the J2s (at then J1 end) didn't even know. I told my teacher-in-charge, a few people and the captain, then hurriedly left. Screwed up didn't I? Think coach was training me for libero cause I always had different training from the rest, but I didn't even inform him I was leaving. So on 17th I'm going to be quite awkward. The seniors and teachers are completely okay with it, but the coach... I think he doesn't even want to see me anymore. Plus he's the only other person in the world I personally know who's a November 18th too. Maybe there's Mickey Mouse too, but wait - he doesn't know me. So, a piece of Bolong's unglamorous history to you. I suck at goodbyes.

Blogging two times in one day is just desperate. I don't know why, motivation's lost in the vast land of Egypt and I'm stuck here in little Singapore. I quit the computer at 3pm and now it's 4pm - I'm back up here. I had a packet of prawn crackers while watching Pineapple Express (mentioned below) and then I wanted to have a bowl of cereals before I started work.

Anyway I walked into the balcony and walla, what did I see? A bright pink flower sprouting out from that pot of ugly cacti my grandmother had before I was born. I always told myself I made friends with that pot of ugly cacti since I was young. It never pricked me, I could stroke its pricks like an owner and a dog. We were special. Maybe it just had weak pricks. I grew older and I stopped talking to it, then this day I saw that pink flower, after a heavy downpour in Serangoon, petals with crystal clear droplets of rainwater. Feels... miraculous, like a gift from heaven, like rainbow after storms. I have never even noticed the stalk growing out of the cacti, but poof, flower! Sorry, I'm incoherent right now, but yeah, feelings.

Got distracted with the DSLR, and spent half an hour catching images in my balcony - colourful clothes-clippers, raindrops, green trees and unexpectedly this Bangladeshi sweeping dried leaves. So that concludes 2nd day of Mugfest month a failure. I'm leaving for training soon, but yeah I kinda enjoyed taking those photos.






Shit I'm in love with my new blog, I'm spending way too much time here.

Just watched Pineapple Express. Freakin great gore humour. I hardly ever laugh so hard at movies I watch alone at home - you know, no one to laugh with you, makes you feel a little weird. Anyway this was awesome, seriously. Best. Laugh. Ever.... I. Think. I was supposed to wake up and hit the books this morning cause December's my official "hardcore R-papers revision" month and I've spent the 1st day of the month at training and reading (story)books and watching Gold prices for my mum. And looking at new phones and checking Facebook and wasting my life away on boring things. Anyway my point of that was the movie was worth my morning. Go watch it if you haven't, it's plain comedy and not much take-aways but it's really worth the laugh.

And uhm, I've recently seen a lot of DHS Vietnam OCIP photos and thoughts and comments on Facebook, which makes me regret not going for OCIP. In the first place I don't have that 2 weeks to spare cause there's training 5 days/week and I've my Rs but it seems cool. I'm a dick for new experiences - I mean I dig new experiences, and I'm probably never going to do OCIP anymore in my life cause we'll all grow up to be bastards who think that time=money=really important. And that sucks yeah.

emails: chew.bolong.2009@vjc.sg (main) / bolong02@hotmail.com (dominated by junk mail)
facebook: http://www.facebook.com/bolong
mobile phone: yeah you wish.