Populaire

Just got back from watching Populaire with Shu and Tiff. The movie was at 7pm, and around 11am I got notice from The Office that they wanted me to teach a class at 5pm. Oh boy did I pray to wriggle out of it! In the end I managed to get a 3pm class, and snuck out early from work, feeling utterly rotten. I figured I had lesson prep left, and I could do that at home anyway. Just like I plan to do in about 30 minutes time. I ran into Tiff at the train station at around 6:45pm, and we rushed to buy Burger King to eat in the cinema. Shu went to collect tickets, and we made it into the theatres a few minutes late... only to be inundated by more trailers HAHAHA. I guess they figured 7pm was a tight timing for the working crowd.

Populaire was lovely. Much nicer than The Great Gatsby. Certainly more intelligent and charming. I loved Deborah Francois in the movie. Everything, from her clothes to her cute ponytail, was amazing. Ahh, to be French, beautiful and quirky. The male lead however, Romain Duris, reminded me of Sarkozy for some odd reason. That kind of killed any sex appeal he was supposed to have, for me. Also realised this was the first movie I watched with Shu and Tiff since coming back to Singapore. Woo.

It's currently Week 36 since I started working. Sometimes I feel like I know what I'm doing, other times I feel like I'm utterly hopeless and a shit at my job. I wonder if this on-and-off self-doubt/double-thinking is normal, or healthy?

Spiders and Kennedys

Recently a spider has taken up residence in my bathroom. It seems to be fairly nocturnal, because I only see it at night. Then again that could say more about my waking hours than the spider's actual habits, but I never see it in the afternoon. When I first saw it, it gave me an unpleasant surprise because it was awfully large - about 5 cm in diameter - bloody huge for a house spider. BRRRRR. That time I managed to scare it off by tossing some extra water I had in a cup in its direction. After that I kept seeing it around. About after a week I got used to seeing it hanging about on the ground. It would stay completely still if I was around, which suited me fine. I have no desire to squish things as long as they do not come towards me.

One day however while on the loo, I started counting its legs and somehow counted 6. This led to some minor soul/brain searching as I tried to figure out how I had confused it for a spider, followed by dammit-I'm-sure-it-was-a-spider. The next time I went to the bathroom and saw the spider, I counted its legs again and this time got 7. So it was a 1-leg-less spider. I wondered how it lots its leg.

When I finished showering today, I spotted it hanging off the wall near the shower curtains. Never actually saw it anywhere but on the floor before, so that kind of gave me a little shock. Still it's strange how people get used to things. I guess it has partly to do with the fact that I think spiders are far more acceptable than other sorts of insects, and how all this one does is stay still or scamper away from me. I doubt I'd ever have this sort of odd relationship with URGH a cockroach.

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Tuesday as usual is a day spent preparing for Wednesday. I worked till a little bit past 7:45pm and then headed off home. My side of the office was empty when I left. After coming back and talking to Joaquin, then eating dinner and showering (where I saw the spider hanging on the wall), I finally sat down and started planning my lesson for tomorrow.

This time it's a short piece on Caroline Kennedy, and I started digging around for more general knowledge to feed my students with, especially on JFK's death and how dramatic Lyndon B. Johnson's swearing in ceremony was (99 minutes after JFK's death, on Air Force One!). I finally watched the Walter Cronkite clip of him announcing JFK's death, and as I listened I just left incredibly sad. I can't imagine what it must have felt like to live in America at the time and feel so scared and uncertain after a political leader's sudden death.

Feeling quite easily emotional nowadays, urgh. I hope my students don't get on my nerves tomorrow :x

Pomfets

Yesterday I had lunch with my Guo Mah and parents at a Teochew restaurant in Bendeemer. As my father pointed out, the place was filled with families bringing grandparents out for lunch, and we were no exception. My Mum ordered a pomfret fish for lunch, and when it came out it was huge and tasty. I mentioned that this particular pomfret was cooked exactly the way I remember it to be when I was growing up, steamed with ginger, tomatoes and some sour plum thing, and how we no longer ate it at home. My Mum said it was because my Dad didn't buy it anymore because it's now far more expensive than when I was growing up. Then something sort of clicked in my mind even though I knew about the upsurge in price before: I was eating soon-to-be-extinct fish. I started to feel real guilty.

The fish was still nice, but it had somehow lost some of his flavour after that conversation, and I didn't really want to eat it anymore. The though of eating something to extinction made me feel kind of disgusted, like we humans were so satisfied to stuff our faces that we'd kill of an entire species. URGH. Now this is a strange thought for me mainly 'cause I never bothered about those sharks fin boycotts before. In fact, I throughly enjoy sharks fin soup. Now after this whole strange pomfret thing, I'm wondering what my reaction would be next time I'm faced with a bowl of sharks fin soup.

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I watched The Great Gatsby with Gail tonight. My feelings towards the movie can be summed up as: WTF. The soundtrack was grotesquely jarring, the script and directing IN YOUR FACE (really, ending every one of Jay Gatsby's line with 'old sport'?/zooming in on that damn green beacon at every chance?), the party scenes like a club in 2013 and immensely distracting multiple cut scenes in the beginning of the movie. Plus I wanted to throughly slap Carey Mulligan because she portrayed how irritating Daisy Buchanan was, so well. There were times I just burst out laughing, especially when the rapping soundtrack started in the beginning. For all the hype, I felt this movie to be disappointing. Boo.

Rules of Civility

Just polished off Rules of Civility by Amor Towles. I started reading it on a Monday afternoon (was it at the hairdressers?) and am now done with it on the wee hours of Wednesday morning. Towles' prose is beautifully understated - the whole show not tell thing done to perfection. His style reminds me almost of Kazuo Ishiguro in a way. I really liked how although majority of the story is done from a first person perspective, we are never actually told what the narrator is thinking, but instead simply how she reacts and responds.

When I first started reading it I thought it was simply a story about a girl who had to stand in the sidelines while her best friend wheeled in the man she loved, but the story is so much more than that, and brings up little nuggets of things to think about. It is is more about a year in the life of a girl in her prime, and the varied things that happen. I think this will definitely be one of the highlight reads of the year.

"And at the same time, I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallises loss."

Rose Petals

I made my montly sojurn into town today to cut my hair, and do some shopping. I had been putting off cutting my hair for about a month because I still felt annoyed at getting charged a Chinese New Year surcharge the last time, nevermind that I cut it in early Jan. Today I finally caved after realised my hair was getting messier and messier especially when I got flustered at work, much to the amusement of my students.

After getting my hair cut, I went to get some books. I bought Ian McEwan's Atonement cause this particular edition caught my eye:

I also got Su Tong's Raise the Red Lantern and Charlotte Street by Danny Wallace. The latter I bought mainly cause it made me think of THAT Charlotte Street right in the middle of Bloomsbury. I suspect it's the same one the book is referencing. I went to Charlotte Street often last time mainly cause of Oxfam, and always walked off with a ton of cheap books for under £10. Man I miss those days. 

Walking by Guess on the way to Kinokuniya just now, I noticed that they use mannequins that are quite different from other shops. The main difference is that the mannequins used by Guess have massive breasts. I'm talking about D/DD size cups here, which is quite disturbing when you notice it. I know Guess aims for the whole 'I'm a sex bomb' market, but does it have to do it in such an obviously tacky way? Their mannequins scream 'bad boob job'. Urgh.

At Ngee Ann City I also stumbled upon the new Laduree branch, and bought some macaroons. The first thing I did when I got home to was indulge in a Rose Petal one. It was light and fluffy, and creamy in the middle. So very tasty mmmm.

A Wednesday

To be very honest, I thought about posting many times over. Each time I dismissed the though because I felt (and still feel) tired. It was another long, exhausting Wednesday. As usual I made mistakes, because I felt rushed and stressed. And as usual despite all my misgivings, I survived it. I'm blogging however because I realised I have to write something out lest later when I lay my head on the pillow, it churn around over and over, and making me unable to sleep. Gah.

Today out of my 3 classes, I had to scold 2. First time was because apparently the kiddos ran to the male bathroom and decided to lock each other out. Sigh. That still wasn't so bad because I know! They're kids! They do silly shit like that. Hell, even people my age still do that. Just not in the middle of a lesson and in full view of other authority figures. So that was scolding number 1, which was draining.   Still class ended on a high note as I showed them some videos like the Red Panda getting scared, and some PSY & MC Hammer videos that were related to a passage we gave out.

The next was my second class, of tweens. The problem with that class is that every time I scold them, it lasts for perhaps that lesson alone and then they clean forget everything. In essence they drive me nuts with their lack of respect or willingness to shut up and learn. It is very discouraging on my end, week after week, to come in and bear the brunt of their attitude problems. The best bit is that I know they don't mean it maliciously, it's just that they are naturally very playful kids who hate doing work - all stuffed together in one hellish classroom setting.

Unfortunately it's hard not to be upset by them as well, because it is very dispiriting to have to deal with the same problem all the time with no headway. This scolding really drained me, because in a sense I also felt it personally. Last night till past 1:30am I was still doing syllabus planning, and I had planned something extra on the Rama Plaza collapse for their level. I was excited at the prospect of teaching them about the global supply chain, how everything from their $10 H&M t-shirts to worker's rights was linked. I wanted them to think critically about the situation, to open their eyes. To an extent it did work, because when I conducted this portion of the lesson it was after the big scolding. I saw that they were interested. However it was too late for me, and I was dragging myself through it. They had killed my motivation to want to work hard for them.

Luckily my last class was much better. They're a jovial, bright bunch. Initially I had to scold them quite a bit because they loved running to the bathroom, stampeding like animals and disturbing the nearby classes. I managed to wean them off that bad habit after about a month, and today's lesson went swimmingly. I even managed to get a usually mischievous student to cooperate by bribing him with a red triceratops sticker (that he could be bribed by a sticker surprised me and his classmates) that he had somehow fallen in love with. To be fair it was a cute sticker. I even showed them silly videos like the Slow Loris being tickled and they LOVED it.

Ahh teaching. I supposed all in all, you need to take the good with the bad. On the other hand however, why does the bad have to be so bloody bad? 

Nerds

It oddly just hit me how nerdy my office is, while looking through the lesson plan for tomorrow. The Synthesis and Transformation questions were all inspired by characters from Archie comics, while a Grammar Question has a 'Mr. Lannister' in it. It makes me smile a silly smile. 

Test Anxiety

Most recently my students had to read a passage titled Test Anxiety and answer some questions. Some of the funnier suggestions included giving students motivational pencils to encourage them to do better. Regardless, as I was teaching it, I was going "HEH HEH HEH" in my mind as I was thinking about how I didn't have exams/tests anymore. Then I remembered, I did. And the smile slid from my face, and fell to the floor with audible PLOP.

Yesterday was my Basic Theory Test for driving. Although the passing rate is quite high, I was as usual disproportionately panicked about it. It didn't help that my Dad kept making snide remarks, saying that if I didn't pass the Test it meant I didn't have a brain/was dumber than XXX (insert stereotypical dumb person here). He was, and as is always, very very encouraging. So anyway I went to Bukit Batok Driving Centre feeling stressed out and did the test. When the invigilator (in a traffic police uniform funnily enough) said the passing grade was 90% and up (that is, 45 out of 50 correct), I almost wanted to slide from my seat and hide under the table.

Daft panicking aside, I passed, and boy did I feel relieved. I got 47/50. Instead ironically, the one I almost failed was the eye sight test afterwards. Apparently my eyesight has deteriorated, which means I might need to get a pair of glasses just for driving. This is the part where I laugh incredulously at life and my fate, because 4 years ago I went for a $3,000 surgery to get rid of my glasses. PFFFT.

Today I went out for dinner with Steph, Ianthe and JH. The last time I had seen them was probably in Oct, if not near Dec last year :/ Quite scary how time flies... and how bloody complacent I am. I am the sort that is content to be at home most of the time, because I have some mental block against any perceived strain and/or being stuck in a crowd. On the other hand that's quite silly because when I do drag my lazy ass out of my usual Work/Home combination, I do enjoy spending time hanging out with my friends. But because I am so lazy, the thought of actively seeking people and arranging a meeting flitters about my mind for about half a second before I think "NAH I'll be tired."I am an old grumpy shut-in way before my time.