Hummus Farmer

I was just zoning out while munching on hummus and pretzel chips when a question suddenly popped into my mind (mainly because I was hyper-aware that I hadn't yet consumed a substantial amount of fruit and veg today): "Is hummus a vegetable?"

And the answer is no: hummus is not a vegetable because it consists of protein more than anything else. Boo.

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Will be leaving for another internship interview in a bit, this time in the Dumbo area in Brooklyn. Quite a trek. But then again, one needs all the experience that one can get. 

Workspace 2015

Was going over my stats work this afternoon in the living area when I got up to answer the door (it was the UPS man). When I returned, I realised that my work space had been laid out kind of nicely, and that this could well be the last time I ever prepare for an examination or test again.

While one might be tempted to wax lyrical about such an aspect of one's life ending, never to repeated again, I realise I don't care enough for the whole idea of examinations to be nostalgic. So there.

The Weather

It's mid-Dec here in NYC, and the weather is worryingly warm. It has barely dropped below freezing, whereas from the end of October last year the weather dropped near to freezing. This feels very unnatural, and hence unpleasant, and one really wonders if this is what they have meant definitively all along by "climate change". 

Last night I was talking to Rufus while in the Morton William's Supermarket across from the main Columbia campus about how it was crazily unlikely that there'd be a white Christmas this year, or if it would even snow at all this year (the PA system was playing I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas), when a nearby store worker said "Thank God! I hope not!" Although I know what she meant, the idea of it not snowing at all sent shivers of fear down my spine - surely all of this erratic weather is not a good thing.

Internship Season

It's internship seasons and I've sent out 6 different applications. I went for an interview tomorrow, and looks like I have 2 more scheduled with two different other organisations. What kind of bugs me though is how all the emails have spelt my name with a -y instead of an -ie. GAH.

Immunisations

As of today (although I need to go back for additional booster shots), I am immunised against:

1) Tetanus, diphtheria and petrussis
2) Typhoid
3) Hepatitis A
4) Chicken pox (they need to check my blood work just to be sure though)
5) Cervical cancer
6) Meningitis
7) Measles, mumps and rubella
8) Polio
9) Hepatitis B
10) Influenza

I've also been jabbed 4 times within an hour today with the various vaccines and blood drawing(s), which must surely be some sort of record in my life. Fun stuff.

In other news I've also finally gone and cut my hair, because I have an interview for an internship tomorrow and I don't want to look unkempt. My hair now feels very strangely short, and to my chagrin I feel like I look more younger to boot. Ho boy.

20 minutes

For the first time in a really long while, I've managed to run for 20 minutes at a go without stopping.

I also intended to clean the bathroom tonight, but needless to say I'm way too exhausted to do that now. Zzzzz.

Cooking Time

I like cooking. I'm not quite sure if I love it, but I'm sure that I at least like it enough to look forward to the times when I'm mentally committed towards planning, buying groceries and cooking a meal. The best bit of course is at the end when the meal is ready to eat, but the time taken to consume it is so much less than any of the other individual components involved in the entire process. Anyway if I find a new recipe I'm keen on, I am usually far more excited to cook than when I've made something that I know is tried and tested. I also feel way more excited about cooking if I know I can eat the end products together with someone, and see their reactions (although I always brace myself for a negative one, especially because I have the bad habit of not actually tasting my food as I am cooking).

Recently however I was wondering what I was doing with all my time. I have the same amount of time as I had last year (24 hours in a day, 7 days a week), but seemed to have 'no time' to work on my IP/thesis even though I'm taking half the number of credits that I took for the Fall and Spring semesters in the previous academic year. I was thinking about this and realised it's probably because I now spend at least an hour everyday travelling back and forth between school and home, and that every time I cook a meal, I spent at the very least an hour and a half, not including the time taken for grocery shopping (upwards of at least 45 mins!). Laundry too takes me longer because there are no machines in my building, at least 2 hours if you include the time it takes for me to fold everything on the tables in the laundromat (which I realised are a great height for folding things on without having to stoop over). Even seen Shirin in the midtown/LES area takes me at least 15 minutes longer than before because of additional travelling time on the subway. In essence a lot of things take more time this year compared to last year, although in sum I am more happier overall to be living in my own place and feeling like I am accountable for things.

So anyway this is my excuse for why I have not completed my IP/thesis yet. Eek.

Mice

It's 12:04am in the morning, and I can hear a weird light tapping sound from the corner of one of the walls in my room. There are apparently mice in my flat, according to Marina my roommate, and  last night I actually saw one myself. Unfortunately by then I had thrown away two of the glue traps that Kerry, my apartment superintendent, had laid in our kitchen, because I had stepped on them.

I stepped on the first glue trap first thing in the morning yesterday, when I got up to make my tea. When I sat down on the ground to remove it from my slipper, part of my zip-up hoodie became attached to the glue trap too. When I managed to rip it off me, the glue trap became weirdly warped in shape, so I threw it away.

I stepped on the second glue trap after I had finished doing my laundry in the morning (also yesterday), and was preparing my lunch. This time was far worse however, because I had been wandering around the house in a pair of socks. My socks got really really stuck to the glue, and even when I managed to yank them off, a gummy residue remained on them. I then tried to remove the gummy residue with nail polish remover, which kind of worked, but also made the remnants of the gluey residue stick to my hands. In frustration, I threw the glue trap away.

So last night, when I was out in the living room talking to Rufus who is visiting from KL, and saw a mouse dart down out little corridor and under our fridge, I groaned because we now clearly had a mouse and 1 superintendent-laid trap left. Oh well.

Not that I would've known what to do if the mouse really got stuck to a trap anyway. I still have memories of the mouse and screamed itself mute when I got stuck to the carpet from an old, overturned glue trap, outside my 3rd year London apartment on Marchmont Street. Urgh.

cincuenta y dos

Today my dad turns 52. He loves to remind me of the fact that when I was born in March 1990, he was just 26 years old (my parents married when he was 25 in June 1989), and that I need to "get a move on" if I want to match/parallel his record, especially now that my cousin is getting married next year in April right before she turns 26. Although I know he says all of this in a tongue-in-cheek way, wtf.

Of course using that weird logic of his, if I had maintained the status quo by turning my mother into a grandmother (as per my paternal grandmother) at age 50, I should've already had a child 4 years ago. Also if I follow my own mother as an example, I just need to get married before I turn 28 to "beat" her. Better still if I follow Uncle KL's example which is somewhere in the 30s.

I'm not actually sure what the point of this all is, the setting up of nonsensical and totally arbitrary age benchmarks. But I guess it gives people the comforting illusion that all of life proceeds in the same one path sort of a way (which it most certainly does not!) and that one needs to hit benchmark A to get to B, then to C and D, and so on so forth.  

Anyway I'm the first one in both my immediate paternal and maternal families to get a Masters degree, so there, I've gone and wrecked the idea of similar benchmarks. 

Español Clase

Singapur es un pais muy pequeno y ciudad estado. Esta en sudeste Asia y en el ecuador. La poblacion aproximado es 5,4 milliones y la clima todo el ano es muy humedo y caluroso . La lengua oficial es malayo, tamil, ingles, chino mandarin, pero hay muchos dialectos. La flora oficial es la orquidea, se llama "Vanda Miss Joaquim". La bandera colors es roja y blanca. La moneda es Singapur dolares. 

Memory

On a rainy Thursday last week I headed to the Union Square area to have dinner with Shirin. On the way to meet her, I decided to kill some time by hanging out at Strand bookstore, nevermind the fact that I don't actually need any more books and should be spending more time reading stuff for my thesis instead. I ended up buying 3 books for about $24, and then went to meet Shirin at Otto's. The next day I met Jonathan to watch a movie and spend the weekend together, and when he asked me what books I had purchased the previous day, I realised I couldn't remember anything. I couldn't even describe the covers or titles, and only remembered them as novels on the slim side of the spectrum because they weren't very heavy, which I found quite frustrating because I used to pride myself on having a really good memory. Instead I am left with what feels like white fluffy cotton balls as brain matter, trying to grasp at things I know I have forgotten, and memories that have lost their vivid emotional resonance.

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For the record, these are the 3 books I purchased:
1) There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories by Ludmilla Petrushevkaya
2) So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
3) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? by Henry Farrell

Grape Tomatoes

Today while trying to move my overloaded shopping basket from the top of the Trader Joe's checkout line, I dropped a box of grape tomatoes and a sack of baby potatoes. To my immense mortification, the plastic grape tomato box fell open, sending the little grape tomatoes running helter-skelter. I'm not sure how to describe what happened next, but it involved a woman with her family pretending to be shocked and going "oh you threw tomatoes at me!", a Trader Joe's staff appearing out of nowhere and trying to collect all the tomatoes, and me sheepishly trying to lug the basket over to my cashier. Later, the same Trader Joe's staff member that picked up all my spilled tomatoes appeared and offered to get me a new box of grape tomatoes, which I gratefully accepted.

The pasta I intend to make with those grape tomatoes better be delicious.

*I should add that this all happened during Rush Hour, around 5:20pm when Trader Joe's was probably one of the most crowded spots in the entirety of Manhattan, save the train/subway stations.

Hand-washing Clothes

I forgot just how insanely tiring and strenuous the act of hand-washing clothes is, until just about 45 minutes ago when I decided to finally start hand-washing the three handmade traditional blouses I had bought from both Romania and Mexico. The Romanian blouse felt impossibly delicate, and was quite expensive, while the Mexican blouses were so vibrantly coloured that I knew the colours would definitely run if I threw them into the washing machine with my other clothes (and I like my white coloured clothes a lot, thank you very much). So now I sit in front of my computer, taking a break, with one blouse still sitting in my bathroom sink soaking in water. My shoulders ache a little because I hardly use any upper body strength in my day-to-day life (oops), and I cannot help but marvel how every Saturday morning at home in Singapore I used to always see the family maids (namely Felicidad and Merlina) sitting on tiny stools and hand-washing the delicate laundry items without much rest. Kudos to them and their upper body strength.

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On Sunday I went to church for the first time since June. I went mainly because every Sunday I feel the slightest twinge of guilt at how lazy I am (a staggering 0.05/100 on my guilt scale!), and the fact that this week I felt two very important things had occurred that I needed to give thanks to God for. One was the fact that I had managed to come back to NYC safely after the massive shitstorm that leaving Oaxaca/Mexico City was, and the other was that I seem to have met someone that at long last (at least for now, because goodness knows how this statement will probably later come back to bite me back on the ass, HARD) I can imagine spending the rest of my life with. And of course even thinking of a statement like that stresses me out, because I know the consequences of being hurt oh-too-well, and even thinking of anything of that sort makes my heart clench in abject fear. All I can do of course is cross my fingers and put my faith in God, that at least someone out there knows WTF is going to happen to me in the future.   

Oaxaca #2: Dias de los Muertos

I spent the last week in Oaxaca, Mexico, for Dias de los Muertos. It's the 2nd time I've been in Mexico, and the 4th time I've travelled alone, and it's been the most disastrous trip I've ever been on in my life. I feel tired thinking about the 4 shitty things that happened, and maybe will write about them when I feel less exhausted. Chang Hong is also visiting me now, so that's taking up some of my time. We're going see the Rockefeller Centre's Top of the Rock in a bit.

Instead, I shall post a selection of photos of my trip, with a terrible commentary:

 Kids collecting money along Calle Macedonia Alcala

Tiniest (and cutest) Coke bottle I've ever seen, 200ml. Several tourists asked me about it after they saw me carry it around. 

Festive Volkswagon van 

Mendoza-Mendoza, the carpet weaver/seller at Mercado de Artesanias. Ended up buying a less intricate version of that carpet.

Creature being driven around, presumably later to participate in a parade. 

One such parade, down Calle Macedonia Alcala 

Niche wall along the Pantheon General 

The next bunch are images from Images from Xoxocotlan and Pantheon Cemetery:

 

Favourite grave of all - completely non-traditional 

Sights like this made me feel a little sad, and completely intrusive. Took a photo like a creep nonetheless.

 Mariachi Band

It's hard to illustrate just how crazy packed and festive the cemeteries were, with families gathered around graves drinking and dancing, while tourists totted DSLRs around and tripped over graves. Was offered several shots of mezcal, beer and a dance by a whole bunch of locals who were partying by the graves of their loved ones. My concession was that I always asked for permission to take photos first.

Altars and decorations in the San Pablo Cultural Centre

 Widest tree in the world in Tule

Kids dancing at Hierve el Agua

 Zocalo, Oaxaca

 Another pretty altar in a library

La Soledad Church

Overall I have no regrets that I went, but the 4 crappy things that happened to me on this particular trip will stay with me for some time. I'm not going to leave the USA for a while now! Happy staying put here in my little flat and conventional existence.

Return Policies

Spent almost 2 hours 'trapped' in the F21 store at Herald Square today because I found out that F21 only allows in-store exchanges for items returned after 30 days. Usually I shop online only at Gap and was used to their generous return policies, so finding out that that F21's was 30 days was a nasty surprise. So I ended up walking around the store twice over, buying things that I otherwise would not have purchased, like skirts. The mean number of times I wear a skirt in a month is approximately 1, and 0 when it's winter time. So essentially unpractical stuff I liked. I would much rather have money back, but I guess I have something nice to wear for dates/cousin's engagement party. Oh well. My fault really, but still an annoyance.

Had dinner with Shirin at the K-Town food court after that. I ordered the Bulgogi from the K Barbecue shop, and it was really good. Strangely didn't feel that hungry though, but between the two of us we managed to finish almost everything, leaving only the rice. Then we wandered around Manhattan Mall briefly because it was raining outside.

Tomorrow I leave for Oaxaca. I'm feeling kinda nervous, the way I always do before I go anywhere, especially when I travel by myself. I worry that I'll forget something critical, or oversleep, or something to that effect. Still I can't wait to head to the main market next to the zocalo and have some Mexican chorizo with those corn tortillas. Mmm.

Mexico Trip #2

Am headed to Oaxaca again for the Dias de los Muertos celebration this weekend. Will be leaving on Thursday and will arrive back on Tuesday, spending both days pretty much just travelling. I'm feeling quite excited - of all festivals in the world, this is the one I have always wanted to attend the most - but also quite unsettled because this trip is smack right in the middle of my school term. Then again, it wasn't like I didn't know this when I booked the trip, though dealing with the reality is of course something altogether different.

Haven't managed to work on my thesis at all for the past three weeks because I've been reckoning with being sick and then the mid-terms. Also realised yesterday when I submitted my mid-term paper for one of my classes that it was the last class paper I would ever write for my Masters Degree, which is a pity since I know it was definitely not my best effort :/ Still, I needed to finish the paper on time, and had no idea what the teacher wanted. Fingers crossed for when he grades it over the weekend.

Recently, someone new has entered my life (as of just last week Thursday!). I'm not quite sure what to think of things. I am happy, but also very scared and tired of negative human interactions and relationships, where people say things easily but don't mean them (and so I learn to be suspicious, to take everything with massive heaping ladlefuls of salt). And then how life comes in and adds more trouble to everything, and then everything becomes terrible.

The last time I was in Oaxaca in May, I remember being very upset with the last guy I dated. Funny that his initials are BS, because looking back that's how that relationship felt. I went into the church in the zocalo in Oaxaca and sat in the pews to cry and pray, because I realised then that things were inauthentic and wished it wasn't so (though I stubbornly continued to wrestle with my intuition for the next month).

This male is different, but I am still scared. I feel like I cannot trust myself because I don't know whether it is my intuition speaking, or my hopefulness (which is a useless, useless piece of emotion, especially when it comes to relationships), whether things are actually grounded in reality or a figment of my wishes. And so I tell myself not to trust anything, to be prepared to walk away at any time, because while I know myself and how I feel, I cannot claim to know the other person and how they really feel. But still I hope, I cross my fingers, and I pray.

Strawberry and Rhubarb Jam

Many years ago when I was in Nepal I fell in love with 3 different types of food there: the tomato flavoured potato chips, the dal bhat and the mixed fruit jam. To this day because of that jam, I think of Nepali breakfasts (or at least those they serve to tourists) as being the best in the world (even though I got the worst bout of food poisoning there and have since not eaten anything remotely Nepali).

On Thursday I was wandering down Broadway, along the Thursday Farmer's Market outside the main Columbia campus, and decided to stop and sample some of the homemade jams (Beth's, I think). When I tried their Strawberry and Rhubarb jam, all the taste memories came back to me and I realised this was exactly how the mysterious Mixed Fruit jam of Nepal tasted!

So of course I bought a bottle. And had the jam with toast and butter.

Now back to my mid-term paper reviewing Cambodian textbooks.

Influenza

Thought I was down with the cold for much of this week when I suddenly started getting feverish just over 24 hours ago, ugh. Turns out it's the flu, which I now will not confuse with the cold anymore (BECAUSE IT SUCKS THAT MUCH MORE!). In the past 24 hours I have been repeatedly dizzy, felt like a radiator, felt bored, and felt like collapsing into a uncomfortable heap somewhere. No fun at all. I've had to cancel my weekend plans as a result, because I can't wander too far away from the safety of home. Damned flu.

Mathematics

Every time I need to do mathematics as an adult I find myself amazed by just how not-bad my mathematics skills are, especially since I had spent the majority of my schooling life thinking I was bad at it. Mathematics was a subject I remember struggling with almost constantly in Primary and Secondary school, but especially after sitting for the GREs, tutoring in Math and now working on calculations for my statistics class, I find myself revising my estimation of my skills - maybe I was just really careless and not actually bad at all things numerical. Either that, or I am a clear success on the Singapore education system's part - shit at Math compared to my Singaporean peers, but pretty good at Math compared to the rest of the world. Who knows.

Fingers crossed that I don't lose this upbeat feeling about Math. 

5 Years

Last night on the 1 train back home, I realised that I have had my sports shoes (Brooks!) for over 5 years, and that it was high time I changed them. I remembered the approximate date because the pair of sports shoes I had before these broke after my first year in the UK, and I remembered asking my athletic roommate from Passfield Hall, Michelle, if I should get a new pair of shoes (stupid question, but I was being cheap).

So last night I finally ordered a new pair of sports shoes off the DSW website, a pair of grey saucony shoes. Very exciting stuff.

In other news, I managed to run for 15 minutes on the treadmill yesterday without collapsing. I then had a double chocolate chip frappe from Starbucks after, and promptly consumed back 2x the amount of calories I lost from the run. Seriously.