Gym

Last Friday, during an exceptionally rowdy class, a student asked me (in one of those daft, provoking manners), how many months pregnant I was -____-" I went back, and fumed to my family the next day during a Dinner-Birthday celebration about unmanageable students. Then my Uncle piped up, "hey, your face is getting quite round now!"

So anyway yesterday I signed up for a gym membership. I also signed up for a personal trainer, since I know I am so utterly unmotivated and unmovable, only monetary pain will spur me to go. As a result, I now have an appointment for Friday 11:15am, and at the same time am in denial of how much money I just plonked down.

I keep thinking of payday tomorrow, damnit. I really need to start saving better :x

Puberty

Somedays, I just can't wait for puberty to hit the students - like a rude slap with a fish - just so they'll get all awkward and shut the hell up in class GRWARGHHHHHHH.

Bring Back, Take Away, Fetch To and Fro

It seems all my epic stories always start innocently. I've never been the sort to go out on wild drunken parties where people dare each other to do daft things and when something happens people go 'Oh come on I saw that coming!' Instead my weird epic stories (just like fainting on the tube) always happen because I'm incredibly clumsy. So anyway preamble aside, I have yet another silly story to tell, and it all started two days ago.

Jon arrived in Singapore on Saturday night for a 3 day layover, and one of the things he really wanted to do was go to the zoo. I hadn't been to the zoo in close to 10 years, and since they had those new Giant Pandas and adorable Red Pandas (which I've discovered a new love for) I agreed to go with him. The zoo was located in the middle of nowhere, and in order to save money I suggested going there by bus, rather than taking a taxi. 

After a tasty breakfast of Nasi Lemak at Adam Road Hawker Centre, Jon and I hopped onto 171 for a mini tour around Singapore, before getting off around Mandai Lake. Just as we were crossing the road to get to the next bus stop, I espied from afar a familiar red-looking public bus trundling down the road from afar. 

"Oh My God Jon!" I yelled, "That's our bus!" and so with that, both of us started running, while waving frantically at the bus. I ran faster than Jon. All looked well, except I was wearing my shitty pair of black flats, that I had already fallen down in once. As we ran, I kept thinking "Don't fall!" to myself. So, 5 metres away from the bus, just as it stopped to wait for us for a few seconds, I fell. The fall wasn't that bad, except everyone at the bus had seen and I felt embarrassed. On the bus, a tourist lady was talking to her little one and talking about me tripping, and I smiled at both of them to show I was OK.

Only after we were safely on the bus, did I stop to finally take a look at my knee. My left kneecap looked slightly grazed, to which I was relieved. Compared to other accidents I had, this was relatively minor. And then I froze, because I realised the only reason why it was minor was because my fall was onto a patch of grass. I then wondered if my old grass allergy was still alive and kicking within my system. When we got to the zoo, I washed off my knee cap with the tap in the Kangaroo exhibit, and then promptly forgot about it in the excitement of seeing live animals.

Flash forward to the next day, that is, yesterday. It was Jon's last day here, and he wanted to eat Dim Sum before jetting off to bad-Dim-Sum land, Australia. I woke up and discovered a small patch of hives on my left leg. After showering, I showed it to Jon, talking about how it seemed I was still allergic to grass (hadn't had an attack since I was about 15). Then I went off to work for a while, making arrangements to meet him for lunch.

Come one o'clock, I met Jon at ION Orchard to eat lunch at Imperial Treasure, which my Grandma swears by. When the food came, we were both very happy. I even ordered a big plate of veg because we'd been eating unhealthy stuff over the past few days. The ha gao was tasty, prawn chee cheong fun excellent, and we were both enjoying ourself - not really talking because the food was that good. Around the 3/4 mark of the meal, I started to feel a bit funny. My eyes suddenly got insanely itchy and I kept sneezing, to the point that my nose was running and I couldn't breathe. I started complaining to Jon. I made a joke that perhaps terrorists had released poison gas into the air conditioning system and I felt the effects first. 

After paying, I went to the bathroom to blow my nose. It was then I looked at myself in a mirror, and I realised my left eye bag looked like it had been a victim of insect bites. I freaked. I walked out and asked Jon how he hadn't noticed that, and he was like "Oh yeah."At that point, I still couldn't breathe, and decided I had no choice but to call in sick. I brought Jon to Nippon-Ya to buy a small present for my Grandparents, and in the shop there were many mirrors. I kept looking at myself, watch my eye swell to epic proportions. I couldn't breathe through my nose anymore.

We took a cab to the doctor's. In the waiting room, I started to become highly amused at the whole situation. The nurse recognised me, because I had been there so often. I liked how she was totally nonplussed at my eye, but the rest of the patients in the waiting room kept looking at me sneakily. Jon said he even saw one making a face in reaction to the sight of me. For some reason, that just made me more amused because I could now troll people by just being there.

The doctor took one look at me and jabbed me with anti-histamines. Then he made me linger around for a while to monitor my situation as I started to get more and more drowsy. Jon started playing Monsters Ate My Condo on his phone. I played with a interactive BMI poster, it said I was in an OK range. Jon said BMI was bad because it didn't take muscle mass into account. He said by its standards, he was overweight. I noticed that one of the pictures in the other waiting room was a cross-stitch of the Great Wall of China.

After I was given the all-clear by the Doctor, I went to the counter to pay. I overhead the Doctor talking to his Dad on the phone about email accounts, and LOL-ed. His Dad was the family doctor before his son took over, but we hadn't heard from him in years. At the counter, I started doodling on the paper while waiting for the nurses to tote up the bill. I drew one for Jon, and drew the above uploaded picture for myself. My grandma came to pick us up.

I went home, scared my maid, and then went to sleep. My parents came home from work, but by then the swelling had decreased considerably. Still, my mum was freaked out. During dinner we discovered that everything had prawns in it, except for the plain rice and the pork. Even the soup had been boiled with prawns. Later wandering around, I spotted a TV show featuring Prawn Noodles, which I love. OH WELL. I hope this allergic attack was only triggered because of the abundance of histamines in my body as a result of falling in the grass.

So thus ends my epic story. I called in sick today because I woke up and I was still really groggy after a night of sleep. I slept after eating a bit, woke up around 3:30pm, and now I'm feeling drowsy again. I'm looking forward to going back to work tomorrow and being productive.   

Pygmy

Last night I finished reading Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk. It has to be one of the oddest, most strangest stories I have ever read. Although some online comments (I like to read online comments after I finish an interesting/odd book) talked about it being comparable to the style of Trainspotting or Clockwork Orange, I daresay the vernacular used in those were far more effective and coherent. Pygmy read like a Mao Zedong speech run through both Google translate and a Yoda-speak translator. The vernacular was also a little trite, and I fail to see how it added enough to the book to justify it's existence.

Still, criticisms inside, it was the nihilistic and enjoyable plot I expected it to be - with lots of interesting surreal happenings. I ended up finishing the book in less than 48 hours. Definitely memorable if nothing else.

Also, I think the cover illustration is brilliant, parodying those ye olde Chinese communist propaganda posters. In fact, I think it's directly aping this fellow:

On another note, I am meeting CNE for lunch tomorrow before he jets back to the United States. Hooray.

Why Are You Running?

I realised about a day or two ago that at the age of 22, I've only lived about a quarter of my expected life span, and found this fact incredibly depressing. That means I still have majority of my life left to go, and that I haven't even passed the halfway mark of completing this whole rat race that is living. It means I still have many years of pretending-to-know-what-I'm-doing left. Damnit.

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Today was my off day, and I went to cut my hair. Even though Chinese New Year's is about a month away, the salon I went to charged me $5 extra for a CNY surcharge. At least at the salon, they had yesterday's New Paper there, and I managed to read a particular article one of my colleagues mentioned about a Primary 5 word list. The article in particular mentioned how ridiculous the list was, and as I read it I was half chuckling and half feeling depressed about how absurd the whole thing was. 

I knew about 21 words of the whole list, and I think I have a pretty good vocabulary level. The ones I weren't sure of were diurnal, navvy and supervening. As to why I even needed to know some of the words on the list, I don't know but I do. Which brings me to the whole point about how bloody stupid this whole affair is - what's the point of young children needlessly chugging down bombastic words that they'll barely be able to use? I can scarcely think of a context where osseous or indict will be needed in a composition. After all, all primary school compositions tend to be about shit catching fire anyway. A random disaster happens? It's a FIRE! Weird sound in a library? It's a FIRE! Stranger trying to open your front door? He's a FIREMAN and there's a FIRE! The only possible scenario I can think about, where words from that list would be applicable, is a child writing about firefighters digging through a fire-ruined structure and finding the osseous remains of bodies gathered around a blocked emergency exit. This results in an investigation and eventual indictment of a powerful figure of gross negligence, whose thoughtless actions caused the fire and unwarranted deaths. 

I'd pay to see a Primary school kid write that. Hell, I'd even pay to see a Secondary student write that. I get can't over how incredibly daft the whole thing is, bah.

Incidentally, they're taking me off teaching Primary school kids and making me teach more Secondary students. One wonders why indeed. 

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After I went to cut my hair, I did the whole trendy hang-out-at-Starbucks shtick. The last time I hung out any coffeeshop like that was months ago when I was preparing for my final exams in London, and I remember getting excessively irritated with a loudly bragging man next to me. It was a Sunday, and the Kingsway Starbucks was oddly crowded. This time of course I was at the Liat Towers branch, and it was no less crowded for a Monday afternoon. 

I initially wanted to sit outside, but it looked awfully dark under the awnings, so stuck inside I was. It cold, but at least I could see things without ruining my eyes. I managed to get a table against the wall, next to a guy who was coding stuff on his Mac, and contemplating setting up a twitter account. Yes I am a busybody, and yes I was bored. I used the Starbucks gift card my mentor gave me for Christmas and plonked myself there for about one and a half hours, getting the full bang of the bucks-I-didn't-pay-for. I read through the lesson plans for the upcoming week, and made little annotations here and there. Towards the end when I was done and bored (and because it was raining), I started reading Pygmy, a book I had just bought from the awesomely old school Ana Book Store. The book is strange. 

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Last night I finished reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I had started reading the book earlier in the day, and was satisfied for a brief few moments with myself when I managed to complete reading it in a day.

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I had tasty white carrot cake for lunch, but I suspect the excessive use of oil is currently giving me indigestion. Urgh.

La llama es blanca

Last night I finished reading The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and spent the next 30 minutes online reading analyses to see if I missed anything, cause it seemed a bit odd to me and I wondered if I had missed something. Turned out I hadn't, and Muriel Sparks is known for being an extremely subtle writer. She takes the whole 'show not tell' adage to the next extreme, heh.

Had to drag myself out of bed today. Really felt like I didn't want to face people/the world and instead wanted to live in my bed for the day. Of course I couldn't really do that, and just ended up at work pretty late.

Today for some reason, they were giving out free scoops of ice cream at work. They had a whole proper industrial size freezer full of them too, with HR going about distributing them. I had a banana flavoured scoop and it was tasty, but left me feeling kinda gross after because it was too sweet. Then later when I was rushing off and went to collect my dinner, HR asked me again if I wanted more ice cream. I peered into the freezer and realised it was still almost 80% of ice cream, but left without taking one as I was rushing to another branch and had no time. I wonder what did they with the extra ice cream in the end.

As mentioned, today I had to rush between branches to teach. However when I arrived at the branch-I-hate-because-it-is-far, and saw that there were no students waiting for me, I got an odd feeling. True enough, after 25 minutes of waiting, I had been good old-fashioney stood up by 3 students. So I rushed all the way there, on a $24.80 (well to be fair it's not me paying for the cab) cab ride, for nothing. I ended up working on a handout about Alexander Pushkin and Eugene Onegin, and talking rubbish to colleagues instead.

Tomorrow, we're having a small send-off lunch for WY, the girl who sits in the cubicle on my left. Boo.

Books

I just finished reading Please, Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin. The book is split into about 4 sections, and I must say the last section was queerly written with far too many shifting perspectives for my liking. Still not too bad a read - no regrets from me - it made me think about my maternal grandmother.

Before that, when Joaquin was around, I was reading The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving. Not too bad (oh that phrase again!), but still couldn't beat Owen Meany in my opinion. Plus the fact that I read the bought over such a long period of time with great pauses sort of killed it for me, because I often forgot what I last read.

I was trying to recall what I read before the John Irving book, but I can't remember anymore. In all probability it has probably been drowned out of my memory owing to the craziness that was work in December. I recall a day where I had to sneak out of class to eat a Subway sandwich by the lift lobby -___-"

I dislike being unable to recall things.

Dino Stickers

Everytime I went out with Joaquin over the past week and a half (and I'm sure he'll attest to that) I was always on the lookout for stickers. I bought stickers from Tesco in Malaysia, a random show in Holiday Inn in Johor Bahru and the above lovely stickers from Popular in Bras Bersah. Plus one night I spent hours looking at aliexpress.com and trying to order stickers. Needless to say, I think on top of my already existing few hobbies (reading, keeping journals, postcards) I have found a new one, collecting stickers, just like when I was a 6 year old girl - except this time there are no sticker books and I collect them only to give it away.

Joaquin left last night, and I'm left feeling sort of empty now. Figuring out what to do with all the sudden spare and free alone time is somehow more mind-boggling that it ought to really be. On the upside it was nice being at work and organising papers that were lying all around. Felt that I could be in control of something at least. Plus I ended up teaching another class with students that I thought I'd sadly saw the last of the previous week - for some reason their permanent teacher (I'd previously taught them for 5 weeks) didn't turn up again today. We had a good time, as usual, though I had to rush them like hell this week. As a result though, I'm losing my voice again. Looks like my sinusitis from last week hasn't really disappeared.

Las Hormigas Culonas

Today is the first day of 2013, and aside from the revelry of the past few days/week, it felt just like any other day. 

For the past week Joaquin, along with the members of my extended family, have been here in Singapore - and it simply felt lovely. For the first time in many years, we celebrated Christmas as a whole family, just like how it was when I was growing up. Of course the nature of the gifts changed (from toys to a handbag), and the tree-decorating excitement was gone, but it still felt nice all the same. 

On the 29th December I headed back to work for a day and progressively kept losing my voice. By my second class at 4pm, I had pretty must lost my voice in an onslaught of mucus and phlegm so the kids and I ended up watching 20 mins worth of Mr Bean. They loved it, hurrr. Then I headed over to my Grandma's house on the convenient Circle Line to celebrate my Aunt's birthday with a nice steamboat dinner.

On 30th December, Joaquin and I met up with Tiff, HM, Shu and ZW to have lunch at a super packed Crystal Jade in Ngee Ann City. It was great seeing HM, especially since I hadn't seen her in months. The dim sum was great, but the price not so much. We had much fun joking with the waitress, especially since Tiff was around as usual. We were waving in silly ways to get the attention of the waitresses in the packed restaurant, and when the waitress came over she asked us why we were waving so frantically. Someone replied that it was because we were very hungry in a cheeky voice, prompting the waitress to lean over and cheekily proffer her arm to eat. Tiffany, not missing a beat, asked the waitress if her arm was clean and if it had been marinated. LOL. Later the waitress came around and joked with Joaquin, especially when his dessert of durian pudding came. 

We ended up wandering around Kinokuniya after lunch for a short while, before Joaquin and I headed back. I wanted to clean up and get ready for the family photo-taking session. At 4:50pm, we left the house and headed to the photo studio, where it turned out everyone else already was. Joaquin was tasked with trying to get Ryan to look at the camera properly, haha. After that, we all headed to Riverview Hotel to eat a Japanese buffet at Irodori, where we all pigged out on good sashimi. I'm sick of sashimi now. Joaquin and I ended up watching two documentaries that night about Korea. Nerdy.

On the 31st December, I brought Joaquin to see Haw Par Villa. He was highly amused and entertained.  It's truly one of those spots where the old Singapore can be seen, before it became all modern and shiny. There were scattered spots of tourists around, all looking about interestedly. Pity it wasn't better kept, as some plaques were rusted by the weather and impossible to read. The ten levels of hell was, as always, charming. After that we headed over to Holland Village where it was raining like mad. We went to the Hawker Centre and had a simple lunch, then I decided to get my nails done while Joaquin got a back massage. Then we headed back to rest before heading out for a nice dinner at Greenwood Fish Market. I had a fillet of orange roughy which was tasty (and upon googling a bloody ugly fish) and a molten chocolate cake with ice cream. Then we walked to The Old Brown Shoe along Bukit Timah Road for a quick drink before heading back to watch Unforgiven with Clint Eastwood.

Joaquin and I were still in the middle of watching Unforgiven when it was about 5 minutes to 00:00 of 1st Jan. We ended up going onto youtube and doing the countdown with the Taiwanese show that was streaming live. Lol. Then we went back to watching Unforgiven. Simple, but best New Year's Eve I've ever had.

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Today Joaquin and I went to the Kampong Glam/Bugis area of town. We went to the Malay Heritage centre and he popped into the Sultan Mosque to have a peek. The Malay Heritage Centre was quite nice, I was impressed. It was also newly opened (didn't know that) and today was free entry. We had lunch at Minang and then went off, walking through Bugis shopping centre, Bugis Street, Waterloo Street before taking a break at a small cafe. Then we went to Bras Bersah complex before heading to Raffles City shopping centre, then Chijmes and finally Funan. At Funan, Joaquin bought a stylus for me, hooray. We also stopped for a quick snack at Qiji. Then around 5:30pm, we headed back.

Joaquin ended up taking a short nap after we got home, and around 7pm we left with my parents to get Peranakan food at Beauty World Shopping Centre. We originally wanted to go to Ivins but it was too full. Still the food we had at Dulu Kala was good. We even had chili crab. 

It was throughly a good long day spent with Joaquin. 

Unfortunately, sigh, he leaves tomorrow night for Korea again :/