You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May, 2007.
it’s difficult trying to stay up and stay warm.
i can’t focus when it’s too cold and now that i’ve switched on the heater, it’s so warm and comfy i feel sleepy. to be exact, i’m comfortably seated in the lazy chair, away from the table, right in front of the heater. the other side of the room where my desk is doesn’t get heated air as well, so i had to make some changes to my seating arrangement.
it’s also difficult trying to stay focused yet entertained.
everyone who have worked with me before knows that i have to be kept entertained and have frequent breaks in between periods of work. the problem is, i was so deprived of entertainment last week, i’ve been overcompensating. so now i’m overly entertained and totally unfocused.
yawn, i have a sudden craving for lor mee. the kind with crispy bits of dunno-what on top of super thick gravy. and must have those fragrant, deep fried tau kee or whatever it is.
- basking in the tropical sun will be a good change, despite it being sweltering hot and humid. i kinda miss real sunshine and skies that turn dark after 6.30pm, not at 5pm.
- having real conversations where i’m not learning more about the other party before i plunge into a deeper friendship.
- stuffing my face with lots of unhealthy yet exciting local food.
- social life will mean more than msn conversations, email essays and hi-and-byes in school.
- having the luxury of reading newspapers that are already paid for.
- downloading stuff like crazy and youtubing without caring about stupid quotas.
- going out in the night and still seeing lots of normal people on the streets.
- piling things into supermarket trolleys without having to think about how much they are gonna cost.
- watching silly channel 8 dramas that are oh-so-singapore.
- doing nothing (except for socialising) for an entire month and not feeling guilty about it.
- abusing the brother by insulting his level of intelligence.
- reclaiming my room and making sure it is still safe and sound.
for the past few days i thought i was adding sugar when i cooked.
to my horror, the french toast i made this morning was extremely salty. since i had no food left, i had to eat them with lots of jam and wash it down with juice so that it wouldn’t taste so bloody salty. it was a breakfast from hell.
thankfully i haven’t been cooking a lot these days.
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the lecturer wants us to answer questions raised in case studies written by our classmates. sometimes i don’t even understand what they are trying to say.
a classic line, “Soaking the coffee, he has to addict himself in the great-pressure work.”
and this is just casual description before the real thing begins.
the housemate has left.
her mum has dragged her back home cos she gets too stressed studying. she made the decision to bring her back just two days ago and now, they’ve left. and i thought i was the impulsive one.
i’ll be having a new housemate, i think.
keeping all fingers and toes crossed i’ll get a nice and normal one this time round.
less than a month ago i was trying to figure what the hell ning was. and i pretty much got away without knowing what it was and how it worked.
or at least i could get away with it for the e-marketing course.
now i have to know what it is for my e-commerce course.
in case unenlightened soul is interested, ning is yet another version of social network. when will i ever be freed of social networks and technology?
sometimes i really detest technology. always keeping people on their toes cos it changes every other second. technology can move along without me, i’m happy with the level of technology i have now.
oh my god, the neighbour-in-black just told me about this, the closing down of unsw asia.
fortunately i’ve escaped here and didn’t waste yet another year for the course to start, cos they’re offering alternatives only for students enrolled in 2007 sessions, which would have excluded me.
heng ah. i can’t imagine how i’d kill myself now if i had chosen to wait for the 2008 course to start.
it’s amazing how they can just shut down so fast, though in a way, it’s not that surprising. when i told people i enrolled in unsw asia, they were like, for that amount of school fees?! in singapore?! i guess that’s why the enrolment wasn’t enough. but still, it’s unsw, it’s singapore! just close down like that ah?
i kinda feel angry and sad for the affected students. there may be some out there who were waiting for their course to start in 2008 and now, this happens. it’s a major screwup.
for an institution of such scale and reputation to have conducted market research before entering the education market here and yet close down within a year, i think there’s something very wrong. it’s either things just didn’t work out even with (or because of) government intervention or their market research team was really screwed up.
when i was nagged at to sign up for 
a million years ago, i deleted my account in about a month’s time.
i was fed up with the way unknown people would view my profile, decide that since they knew my friend, they wanted to add me to their circle too. it was as if everyone was judged based on the number of friends they had and the kind of testimonials that were written for them. how the hell can it be possible that a person of my age would know more than 700 people?
now, it’s payback time. i’ve signed up for seven social networking sites over the past two days.
all in the name of completing a bloody report.
the lengths i go to for school.
oh yeah, this creep used my email to sign up for friendster and i’ve changed the password so she’s logged out of “her account” now. muahahahaha.
that’s a flask of boiling hot water i’m hugging and man, it feels darn good.i know, i know. switch on the heater right? but i don’t like heater-air!
can’t help saying something stupid, “winter’s coming, i can feel it!”
man, this is embarrassing, but i can’t help posting it, it’s so funny. or so i think. at least the msian and wenwen’s gonna laugh too, i’m pretty sure.
all thanks to wenwen, who posted about what a terrific buddee i am.
then i scrolled down a little, and saw this:
and thought to myself….oooh they took photos in their hall (yes, i still recognise hall 1 rooms very well) after exams? without me too! and i was all ready to whine about not being in the photo.
then i scrolled down a little more.
bloody hell, i’m just very vertically challenged.
p.s: that was me in year 1!!! oh my god, i’m gonna destroy all my old photos. hand them over now, all of you!
the house is equipped with smoke alarms!
for as long as i have been living here, i’ve always thought the circular plastic thingy attached to the ceiling of the stairways was a burglar alarm or something. the house is fitted with a security system, or so the sticker labels on all windows and doors claim.
just five minutes ago, i heard the housemate’s mum running down the stairs. banging in the kitchen. then the shrilling alarm. i was wondering what weird electrical appliance was making the din, microwave alerts don’t make such noises, right?
the burning smell and smoke in the kitchen gave me my answer.
we had no idea how to stop the damn alarm from deafening us, until the clueless culprit began pressing on the switches randomly.
ahhh, so the innocent switch with a piece of paper covering it to prevent me from switching it off accidentally, which the landlady told me was the switch to the lights outside the house (she bluffed!), was the magic button.
now, why is the smoke alarm fitted in the stairways and not in the kitchen?!
lately there has been quite a few unknown numbers appearing on my phone. being the miser who is on the verge of bankruptcy, i never answer these calls cos auto-roaming very expensive you know? besides, my friends would sms me instead of calling me since they know i’m stuck here down under.
just a while ago, there was this call which was from a private number. private number is of a different category cos quite a few of my close friends have private numbers. so i hesitated for a while and answered the call, in case it was an SOS call.
male caller, speaking in mandarin: “HELLO?!!”
me: “yes, who is this calling?”
male caller: “IS AH GAO THERE?”
(gao as in hokkien for dog.)
stupid old ah bengs.
it rained after midnight yesterday. the sound of the rain hitting the ground and the smell of moisture after a period of dryness was so familiar. rainy days are hard to come by over here.
it made me unusually happy.
i was so damn tired after getting 2 hours’ sleep over two days, that i slept upon reaching home and checking my email. still in the shirt i wore to school, with makeup still on.
and for 18 hours i slept without feeling hungry or heading for the bathroom.
now i’m dizzy from hunger and a sudden surge in battery power.
why does the sun seem unreasonably bright today?
the vodafone website is really, really slow. for a website that has so few images, it sure takes too long to load. all i want to do is to top up my prepaid card cos i have been living with zero credits for more than a week.
yeah i know i’ve kinda disappeared from the surface of the earth. no more phonecalls, no more msn, minimal emails. i can’t help it. i keep getting more sleep than intended and i have to finish my essays, you know?
there was this lecture yesterday, where the lecturer went through the basics of writing an essay. he even gave tips on how to construct a paragraph. you know, the general rule of thumb where you should start with the topic sentence, followed by stuff to support the topic sentence and the ending sentence to sum it up. something like that.
it reminded me of what i was taught in secondary school. the infamous history teacher who was known for being particular about english standards taught us the same paragraph thingy. out of curiousity i checked the four written paragraphs of another essay i was working on. sheesh! that history teacher sure did a damn good job of drilling that paragraph thingy into my head, cos all the paragraphs i’ve written followed that rule!
i remember another english teacher had even weirder ways of making us learn. each time she returned us our comprehension assignments, she would make us do corrections. she pointed out that it was senseless in making us rewrite the model answer, cos the questions wouldn’t come out in ‘o’ levels, so what’s the point of learning those model answers? makes sense.
so, for each answer that wasn’t perfect, she made us evaluate why we didn’t come up with the perfect answer and how we should avoid the same mistake. god, that was the worst corrections i’ve ever done! i remember there was once i made this silly spelling error and i sat there for a really long time wondering how to write an intelligent evaluation.
but it was effective. i made sure i did each comprehension exercise properly, just to avoid those damn corrections.
oh yah, back to yesterday.
the lecturer brought up referencing too. so he mentioned he once read this report, where the author (a student) used some materials from some websites. so in the reference list, the first website reference came out as “taken from a website”.
the next website reference?
“taken from another website.”
oh my god, that was one hell of a blissfully ignorant joker!
i realized school isn’t as much a breeze as it was in the smelly undergrad days.
to digress a little, i currently label all undergrads as smelly cos they seem to have way fewer deadlines and too much time to spare. besides, in any course we take along with them, the lecturers will always have much higher expectations of us, regardless of the postgrads’ backgrounds. thankfully i’ve got background in business, so everything is easier for me than other postgrads who are new to this.
smelly undergrads.
oh yah, back to the point about school. nowadays my brains seem incapable of deciphering academic jargon or churning out pretty little reports and presentations or stuff with good ideas. i don’t see quality in my work anymore.
or rather, i don’t have confidence in my work cos the lecturers here have different demands and standards! in ntu all the lecturers seemed to have similar standards but over here, you give the same kind of quality, put in equal amounts of efforts but get vastly different grades from different lecturers.
on the other hand, the lecturer who gave me the average grades gave average grades to everyone else too. and his grades were limited to 6 points, 6.5 points or 7 points for the entire class. so maybe i shouldn’t worry too much. just that i wonder if i’ll still be able to score a bloody distinction at the end of it. gah.
it doesn’t help i’m incredibly bored and have amazingly short attentions spans when it comes to work.
i only noticed keira knightley after watching pride and prejudice, even though i’ve watched pirates of the carribean too. i just didn’t notice her in pirates. she left an impact on me after i watched pride and prejudice and when i watched pirates again yesterday, i was like, “oh, this is the woman in pride and prejudice!”
okay, i admit i suck at recognizing all those angmoh actresses. wait, make that all actresses in general. it took me a really long time to figure out ariel lin and this liu-something-something were two different people.
there is some resemblance, right?
but anyway, i think keira knightley emits this mega aura which is kind of unexplainable. just based on looking at her and her acting, ok? i used to like lindsay lohan too, after watching some of her movies. didn’t know she was such a monster in real life.
okay, back to work: internet marketing to baby boomers. hurhurhur. i am so damn creative in coming up with my own essay topic.
how can i ever forget to mention this?
flight’s booked, as of yesterday afternoon!
*waves air ticket and passport crazily
the canberra office of qantas is so conveniently located, just a street across school, as is applecentre which is located on campus, and the city centre which is just behind school as well. yeah, you get the idea that most of everything is located in the tiny city centre. everything else that is located outside the city centre is probably unimportant.
anyway, i’ll be basking in the tropical sun for a full month! before i return to full blast winter. brrr. i haven’t made up my mind to surprise and pounce on everyone (yeah, i know it’s an extremely cheap thrill) i know on the sunny island, or to make an early announcement so that i can start fitting in outings.
hmm, which shall it be?
my dad sent me an email! WOW!
haha that is something, for someone whose english belongs to the cannot-make-it kind, for someone who’s not well-acquainted with technology.
it’s scary how middle-aged people are tech-savvy nowadays. my dad has picked up emails and internet banking etc, the msian’s dad blogs, and the mum of an ex-colleague (who’s 32 already) youtubes!
i set my alarm at 4am, hoping to wake up and complete some work. and wake up i did.
there was someone knocking firmly and incessantly on the main entrance of my room and flashing lights outside. hoping that it was the housemate (and her twin sister who’s here to stay for a week) doing something weird outside or the owners who wanted to do-dunno-what, i stayed in bed thinking they might go away if they think i’m dead to the world. i don’t like facing people when i’m fresh out of bed.
fat hope. knock, knock, knock.
so i got up to open the bloody door and presto! three policemen (okay, one policewoman) at the doorstep!
and they took a looong time to tell inform me someone asked to speak to them. by the time the guy said “i’m sorry to inform you” i was already wondering if they were trying to inform me about an attempted break-in or something. so i asked them if they had any idea who called them, since there was the landlady and family, the housemate and i. kind of obvious it wouldn’t be me wanting to chat with them at 4am in the morning.
they tortured my poor sleepy brain a little more, going round in circles till they told me it was a pair of sisters. wah lau, say earlier lah.
so they trooped through my room in their shoes. and after about twenty minutes, they came back down without the housemate leading them out of the other exit. so they trooped through my room in their shoes again. and asked me if the housemate was usually coherent or was aware of her surroundings, etc. all along i thought i was the only one who thinks she’s weird and that it was my poor mandarin (compared to hers) that render me bewildered and confused after our conversations.
i have a strange feeling i may not have a housemate much longer.
update:
it’s pretty much confirmed, the housemate’s going home. permanently, i think.
the landlady has asked me to keep my doors locked as much as possible and ignore her knockings on my door if possible. and no, she doesn’t mean to frighten me. damn, how am i supposed to be unworried in a case like that?
she’s got weirder overnight, seriously. it wasn’t so bad yesterday.
she keeps going up and down the stairs, walking to and fro in her room. she’s supposed to be looking for her passport to return home and so i can understand her walking to and fro in the room. but going up and down the stairs continuously? i’m quite sure her passport wouldn’t be in the fridge or outside the house.
twice she knocked on my door and borrowed my keys to go out. the first time she came back i asked her if i should lock the doors. she stared at me blankly, looked away, fumbled with the waste bin and finally asked me to please lock the doors. the second time i just passed her my bunch of keys (together with my thumbdrive!) and she left the house with it. i sat there worrying for more than ten minutes, wondering if she’ll come back safely with my keys. ok, ok i know i should be worrying about her, not the keys. but i was worried about them both, i have important stuff in the thumbdrive! so when she came back i told her to keep the doors unlocked.
there should be an international law banning helicopter activities after 9pm.
i can’t hear myself think.
i thought the sunny island was the only crazy place that had noisy helicopters disrupting the 10pm peace, but i’m wrong.
there’s stupid helicopters flying round and round and round at 11.40pm over here.
siao one.
there’s something i want to remember, but i can’t remember what it is. i’ve been sitting in front of ally for the past three hours trying to recall what it is.
the case study i’m supposed to write, due tomorrow, remains sitting there waiting for me to complete. i hate it when i can’t progress to new things until i bring the current tasks to an end.
right, i gotta have more self-discipline and force myself to complete the case study.
even if it’s a sunday.
i am no longer royally pissed with the housemate.
she came by after my dinner to ask me if i like noodles, while holding packages of instant noodles in her arms. caught by surprise, i just went “arhh?!”
the noodles were a gesture of goodwill that she offered for not washing up the dirty frying pan, i think. and for scaring me the other day when i saw how extremely scared she was. it happened that i was going upstairs to use the bathroom and she happened to open the door. even though i tried to walk loudly to signal my approaching since i heard her at her door, she didn’t hear me. so she got a mega shock and reacted in a rather extreme manner, which shocked me in return. but i did apologise to her for scaring her.
anyway, i thought it was quite funny the way she offered me instant noodles as a way of apology. i turned down her erm, thoughtful offer since i do have a steady supply of them. instant noodles are life saviours when you want to concentrate on your work instead of wasting brain cells on whipping up proper meals.
so there, i shall return to being a friendly housemate.
despite the disaster i had to face early in the morning, i experienced a bout of unexplainable joy today.
which was brought about by the weekly *coughgroceriesshoppingcoughcough trip. the last time i was down for a long time, groceries shopping brought me from the dark inner edge of the pit to sunlight and bubbles and flowers and all things happy again.
fridays are the ultimate housewife days cos i do the laundry, ironing, cleaning on top of the groceries shopping. which was why i hated it when my mid-term exams were on fridays. they disrupted my weekly routine. housewives have to keep to their routines, you know, they just have too many things to do.
today, there was this sense of excitement when i was browsing the meats section. over the past two months, my favourite supermarket here has been bringing in minced meat - something that didn’t exist on their shelves before. so they started off with minced beef, minced pork and veal and to my dismay, there just wasn’t minced chicken or minced pork. then came minced chicken. but i’ve been wanting to cook some substitute of ban mian thingy, which tastes better with minced pork. so for weeks, i waited patiently for them to start selling minced pork.
and today, there it was, minced pork!
the little package of minced pork has put me in good humour again. i think i’ll say hi to the housemate later if i see her around. still, the label housewife doesn’t suit me very much, cos after all, i am not a wife. does that make me a….housemaid? damn!
did i mention the online tutorial thingy is asking us to comment some stuff related to web 2.0? how will a closet housewife like me know what is web 2.0 in the first place? fortunately, a modern houselady will always know how to google for answers.
oh great, the housemate is back and is messing up the kitchen. should i go and smile at her?
post-edit: to my absolute horror, question 2 of the tutorial requires me to know what twitter, ning and stikkit are before i can participate. at least i know one out of three - twitter.
the woes of having an internet geek as a lecturer.
this morning i woke up to a bathroom mess of Richter scale 6.5.
the housemate had apparently spilled some semi-liquid thing over the bathroom sink, which i shall assume to be her facial moisturiser. if it’s not, i don’t wanna know what it is. her toothbrush mug was filled with that semi-liquid, but it was in three different coloured layers - white, yellow and orange. again, i don’t want to know what else was in that mug.
so the mirror had splashes of the mystery liquid which trickled all the way down to the sink. the sink counter was drowned in yellow liquid which trickled to the floor. i think she stupidly tried to clean up the sink with toilet paper, instead of rinsing it clean with water (talk about stupidity). and how did i know? there were clumps of soaked toilet paper in the sink. in her panic (according to my imagination the scenario) she didn’t flush the toilet as well.
maybe she panicked too much. maybe she was just too lazy to finish cleaning up. because she shut the bathroom door and left it that way. i swear the mess was meant to be there and she didn’t make any second attempt to clear up the mess. i waited half an hour after i got out of bed on seeing the shut bathroom door and in that half an hour, it was totally silent upstairs, which means that she wasn’t doing anything at all.
so i spent half an hour cleaning up her mess. when i met her at the bus-stop, she said hi to me but i only gave her a forced half-smile in return. i really wanted to shout, “hi my ass! you irresponsibly and selfishly left the mess like that and closed the bathroom door shut, as if it would go away by itself and you say hi to me like nothing happened?! i am not your mother who cleans up after you, you brat!”
so we sat at the bus stop in total silence for ten minutes before her cab arrived.
what else had she done so far?
she doesn’t clear the garbage. that’s perfectly fine with me as long as she keeps the rest of the common areas neat and clean, which she does not.
she goes through my bathroom garbage. which is totally disgusting.
she leaves the house without cleaning the frying pan she used for cooking breakfast. so most mornings i enter the kitchen to find a dirty frying pan with burnt bits of food stuck to it. she doesn’t even bother to soak the pan in water. in the first place, it’s a non-stick frying pan so it’s really easy to clean. so it’s just plain sloth and laziness. and what happens? i gotta clean up after her again cos i need to using the bloody frying pan.
she’s been hoarding the supply of bowls. there’s four porcelain bowls and three plastic ones. she’s keeping all four porcelain bowls in her room when they’re meant to be shared. i suspect they’re all unwashed and dirty. which leaves me with the plastic ones, or until she decides to keep the plastic ones as well. it’s common knowledge that it is not good for boiling soup to come into contact with low-grade plastic. therefore if i die from cancer or whatever disease that causes, it’s her fault.
early this week, the internet connection went dead. i thought the internet service provider screwed up again, since it happened a few times before. so i didn’t bother to bug her about it and went to school to use the internet. when it was still down after one and a half days, i asked her if she could log on. turned out that the internet cables and the other electrical wires were so messed up it got loosened. *curseandswear.
her mum called yesterday and she was shouting at her mum. i wasn’t eavesdropping, she was just ranting loud enough for me to hear her. i guess her mum is thinking of staying at home and not coming over this term. in her desperation, the housemate began shouting like a brat (which she is, anyway). i was so tempted to ask her to pass the phone to me so that i can beg her mum as well. if her mum doesn’t come, the mum wouldn’t die. the housemate wouldn’t die (it’ll be good if she does. kill! kill! kill!).
i will die.
stupid housemate. stupid housemate. stupid housemate.
more housemate stories when i can catch my breath. i can only blog in short sentences now. too many deadlines. deadlines are word-intensive.
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