Today I cut my wrist while moving files. It seems ironic that my wrists will finally have a scar not of my own volition. I also tried writing again today but was dissatisfied with the results, hence this short paragraph will have to suffice, for I am no Sylvia Plath.
I don't know why I can't think properly tonight. I feel like a plate (maybe metal) has been inserted down the front of my brain. I feel scatter brained and find sustaining a long string of thought hard. I'm not sure if it's just tonight or a resulting of a low drawn out degeneration of my mind's faculties due to extreme disuse. And I'm not even serving NS ): Yet however a string of thought has been lingering in my mind, albeit disjointedly.
Today someone confessed to me that he liked me (if you're reading this I hope you're not horribly offended I mentioned it here :x). He said knowing that I was happy now was good enough for him, and that perhaps one day if fate would have it we'd meet again and something would hit off. I thought this was a rather good thing to say. Anyway this led me to thinking rather about how alarmingly temporal affections and emotions are (quite the opposite of what he meant I'm sure) because I remember falling madly in 'love' with people, feeling that my life would be over if the person rejected me, yet somehow I survived in the end. There was no grand Love In the Time of Cholera-esque epic enduring love where I slowly pined away my life over one single person (as of yet). Instead it was all over either tearfully when I heard the person got attached or when the feeling slowly faded away.
I suppose this is rather practical thing to have, the ability to suck it up and move on with your life rather than recklessly throwing it away over someone who might not feel the same way about you/is unable to love you back because of circumstance/is unable to be with you because of circumstance, yet somehow it seems (dare I say it?) unromantic. I kind of wish I could do that, the whole fall-in-love-and-never-change-emotions things despite the fact that such a concept is wildly impractical and will almost always lead to massive deliberating heartache. Think Rose who lost Jack in the Titanic.
Anyway to you anonymous person, again I apologise if I've offended you. I hope that you too will be able to move on and find the right girl that I know is out there waiting for you. And perhaps yes, we might meet again 20 years down the road in an airport terminal - though I won't be sipping coffee because I hate it. Au revior.
Today I was out with Stephanie, Ianthe and Jia Hui. We wanted to go to Fosters initially to enjoy the Devonshire Tea set which came with scones and sandwiches, but the place was closed for a private function. Fail. We ended up at NYDC when I had an iced Earl Grey with Vanilla ice cream, a poor substitute, but nontheless a good cooling one.
After that JH left and the three of us ended up at Sushi Tei where I ordered 2 main courses because I was still hungry after one. I ended up being really fully 3/4 though the second one. Why the hell am I eating so much now?! I feel a bit annoyed. This bodes badly for my wallet.
On another note I brough Laika out today for photos. Mistake. I should have just used the old point and shoot because an amazing number of people don't know how to hold the SLR correctly so that it doesn't shake. Group photos were amazingly frustrating to come by because of camera shake. Fail.
I ate so much yesterday, yet I kept feeling hungry ):
I had some really good pasta (Big D's) at 2:30 pm, then really good chicken rice from Maxwell Market at 4:30 pm, then subway at 7:30 pm. By 10-ish I got a bit hungry and nibbled on some snacks that others ordered and by the time I arrived home at 2:00 am I was so voraciously hungry I had 2 tuna sandwiches.
Bad bad bad ):
"Oh dear oh dear 19 and not any wiser"
I survived yet another birthday. Yay. Thank you Dexter for tonight, I couldn't have asked for better company or a better night.
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Over the past few days the other intern, Nicolette, and I have been wandering around the CBD. Yesterday we walked from Lau Pa Sat to One Raffles Quay then around The Arcade area for 30 minutes+ ostensibly in search of chocolate ice cream in a cup for Nazmi. Today we ended up walking around for about 30 minutes too to buy a birthday cake for me. We walked from the CPF building then backtracked to One Raffles Quay where Cedele was located. In the end we got a really good (but heavy) chocolate and pistachio cake.
Throughout those jaunts, Ulysses kept playing over and over in my head.
I can't believe it's my birthday again, soon (-__________________-)
...(actually that's a lie, I can) thinking about the future and things that used to excite me to no end now fill me with a gently rising wave of dread and heart sinki-ness. I cannot bear to think too far ahead because it reminds me how much of a constraint time has now become. Yet these are the sad thoughts that accompany me to sleep as I attempt to drift off every night, hoping there'll be dreams of you.
Today I was at Giant with my family after lunch. At the cashier's counter, my brother had wandered over to the fire red hose reel and was absentmindedly standing around and touching the reel in his typical blur manner. As I walked over to pull him back to where the rest of the family was, I noticed a Malay woman and her husband in the neighbouring cashier's counter smiling at him.
When they finished paying for their purchases they came over to where my brother and I were standing. It turned out they had a son too who was 'like' Ryan. As they pointed out a small boy in a brown cap standing with other members of their family, it transpired that both their son and Ryan went to the same MINDs school and that she had seen Ryan about before.
After they said goodbye and left, I was filled with a strange sensation: that no matter how much trouble my brother causes my family, I wasn't alone.
I'm getting tired again. I wonder how long this one'll last.
I felt much better today so I ended up going to support Wang/Hadi/Cao/and all tonight (or yesterday night) at the very dodgily located Prince of Wales pub in Little India. Because of the occasion I decided to bring Laika out for a spin. This made me learn something very important I never realised before: I need to be thick skinned.
All around the CBD/Orchard when I walked, I saw good shots. From the 3 construction workers walking in a straight line in their matching neon vests and boots, to more construction workers hiding under the shade of a building a few minutes shy of noon to finally a random guy (maybe he was a construction worker too) crouched over sleeping in a quiet corner of Orchard Road - they would have been good or at least fairly reasonable shots if I took them... but I didn't dare. Oh dear. Nevermind, I shall have to learn it pretty soon.
I finally got my DSLR, a Canon 450D. I love how light the camera is and how the grip is just right for my small hands, plus the cheaper price was a very attractive factor :p (that and how I have access to lots and lots of expensive lens owned by my dad and his friends). I got it from John 3:16.
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Today was quite a terrible day for me at work. I kept on making lots and lots of mistakes. For a bill and the 2 attachment letters I must have taken close to 10 re-dos before I finally got the damn thing right. I'd do silly stuff like type GST as $700 instead of $70, forget to add the bill number, that kind of shite. It was incredibly frustrating spotting the mistakes and having to re-do everything. I blame this on the fact that I'm currently not feeling very well now, dry sticky throat and sniffly nose and all.
Still, I had a good weekend. I guess this is the trade-off for not sleeping from Saturday to Sunday.
I never anticipated how stressful it is applying for university overseas. I thought it was just score good grades, apply, cross fingers and see whether you get in. Now that I have apparently passed that stage, I thought everything else would be far less stressful. WRONG. I need to:-
1) Take passport photo
2) Certify grades
3) Courier grades to LSE
4) Apply for new passport
5) Apply for student visa
6) Look for accommodation
all within a limited time period, and at the same time hope to squeeze in other necessary things that I want. Blah.
I haven't felt this stressed in quite some time.
I don't really like stereotyping (okay so maybe I do, sometimes) but lately working in the CBD I find a very common stereotype - the modern SPG. She's usually seen next to a very bored and mildly good looking ang moh, trying to sound oh-so-interesting and speaking in a high voice that tries to play up how girlishly good looking she is (nevermind that she either looks like a cave troll or a total slut) with an odd accent. Her clothes, tight buttoned blouse, tight dark coloured pencil skirt and high black shoes with the thinest of stabby heels, are pretty typical too.
The one I met today was talking at this bored looking ang moh guy who shot me a shruggy look when I turned to look at them as I crossed to go to Lau Pa Sat. The snatches of conversation I got were of her complaining about the other girls in the office and going "Oh my God! It was so like what the hell do I do now?".
I LOL-ed.
Last night was a very interesting night. I'm sorely tempted to say more but I might get lynched/tarred and feathered by the people who were a great source of amusement to me last night. Still for all my initial misgivings, the night turned out much better than expected - for starters is was no way in hell anything like the last party I went too in November last year that left me feeling all disgusted. It was good too getting to meet new people and being forced (grudgingly) out of my comfort zone.
So thank you everyone who made last night possible.
I finally finished reading Things Fall Apart today. Before that I was reading the rather thick A House for Mr Biswas for what must have been a month. I don't think I've spent that long reading a book in the past one year+!
Things Fall Apart was alright I suppose. I constantly wondered what was going to happen at the end, wondering if something exciting and dramatic would happen. Instead it was terribly anti-climatic. That and I used to laugh whenever the words 'foo-foo' came out.
A House for Mr Biswas however was incredible (so thank you Arj for recommending it to me!). It was one of those books I didn't want to read because I feared reaching near the end. That and the fact that the ending made me sad, and when I was sad I couldn't sleep at night. But anyway the book was really slow in the beginning. It was just endless LOL-ing at the unfortunate Mr Biswas. It became so bad that almost everytime he started a new endeavour I thought it'd epically fail and fear it. It wasn't really till the ending parts of the books when Anand's character started to grow in prominence that I got hooked. It was really his role as the poor unfortunate son of Mr Biswas that caught my heart, not that of Mr Biswas. I even cried a little at the part where they're unable to go into the movie theatre because Anand forgot the price and they brought too little money.
On another note when I was out with Estelle today I bought Virginia Woolf's Orlando. I think I'll read that next, her style of prose really caught my eye because it kind of reminds me of how I write, a little. I'll have to finish reading it more to see if there really is such a correleation.
I got this e-mail from U. of York today:
As you can imagine I wasn't very pleased with having my e-mail address somewhere there in the mess of e-mail addresses. I was surprised that York messed up so spectacularly by displaying all the e-mail addresses of their applicants, talk about compromised security -_-
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I've never had such a tiring stressful week (of 2009 anyway) before, yet filled with so much intensity and joy. While I used to enjoy work a lot more, as of late it's become rather tedious and frustrating, like having to do things like checking documents and drafting lists of documents.
Yesterday I rushed through this epic long bill (with every detail itemised!), then did 2 letters, did a list of documents while checking through the originals and drafted a writ of summons and an affidavit plus while having to go through the relevant documents to draft them (I actually didn't mind this alot because it's quite a high profile case about a runaway lawyer). Throughout I was cranky and snapped at various people who came to my desk looking for food (because my desk is a famous food haven). It was not a very good day.
If it wasn't for the smses I was getting from the A-level people (and especially Dexter) I would have gone stir crazy. I guess this makes me want to evaulate what I find important in life, because a short while ago I had gotten used to the idea that I needed something productive to do in life to make it meaningful for me. We'll see.
There's a trope (if you can call it that) from Dexter Season 1 (background: a tv series about a Sociopathic Serial Killer who kills unrepentant criminals) where he 'meets' the Ice Cream Truck Killer and they have a intellectually creepy game of killing people. Dexter is completely exhilerated because for once he knows there is someone out there like him, someone who will never be turned off by his dark nature, yet at the same time he becomes a little bit scared at the knowledge of someone like him out there.
I feel a bit like that now. It's been on my mind all day.
I'm not very good with new foreign objects. I am also now in possession of a new Nokia E63 because my dad had a $100 off voucher. This doesn't really bode well.
I am also burping a lot because I skipped lunch yesterday for the filming. My voracious appetite is also now gone and I feel really bloated. Urgh. I hate having such a sensitive stomach.
