Sunday, January 30, 2005

11:50 PM
reunion dinner 1: cms steamboat dinner at chris' house.

for once we did not overestimate the amount of food! yes, we are good! chris' mum bought lots of stuff for us so all alvin, chris, serena and i did at ntuc was load up on xiao bai cai, cabbage, dou ya, carrots and mushrooms. oh yeah, plus watermelon and honeydew.

after cutting most of the food up, the 4 of us played pictionary. got a bit high on that. chris and alvin were leading all the way. after the 2 of them were somewhere on their 3rd round around the board, we converted to playing charades. tracy, maureen&daniel, ernest, leonard, george and denise came by later for the steamboat.

chris' mum made some wondeful dessert for us - coconut konyaku jelly still in the coconut. and tracy bought the moshi ice cream thing...yum...delicious start to CNY...

1:32 AM
how do you wake up beside the same person everyday for 20 years and not get bored to tears by them? i am utterly in awe of my parents...

mum and dad had 4 tables at jade restaurant in forum galleria. dad's family, mum's family, uncle john lee's family, uncle silas' family, auntie mary-daniel, auntie margie... it was quite a celebration. i have concluded that i am a terrible babysitter; spent most of dinner trying to keep glenn from running amok. and i thought en was hyper! my dear, you are the epitome of sanity compared to a 6 year old. as usual i was stuffed to the brim after the 8-course chinese dinner, and then we massecred this giant heart-shaped cream/fruit cake in the name of lurve. haha. finally ended off with the obligatory karoke. auntie mary-daniel sings really well; she sang for my parents' wedding and as far as i know she hasn't deproved one bit.

the wushu reunion dinner was held concurrently at orchard shopping centre so biyun, lmm, lx, yl, mingyee and kianboon came over to forum to look for me after they had finished. awww....don't you just love the wushu people? pity junyuan still hasn't appeared before me yet, and naima went home, otherwise it'd really be a 29th batch reunion. we walked around orchard for a while then i caught the last train home.

biyun and lmm are really really sweet. it's quite touching to see them together. i'm so glad our batch matchmade them! muahahaha, our most satisfying accomplishment... while we were waiting for the mrt i asked lmm how he knew she was the one. surprise surprise - he didn't! i think i've been too inundated with the media idea of love; all that ridiculous 'destiny' and 'forever' nonsense. i feel like such a hopeless romantic. but i'd rather wait my whole life for the right one than rush into just anyone. not to mention the plus points of being a guilt-free, swinging single!

good friends can have lots of fun. but for anything else...
there's mastercard?!?
haha, sorry, couldn't resist...

Saturday, January 29, 2005

1:07 AM
can't believe i spent my friday night at macdonald's painting a china plate...

mum and dad's 20th wedding anniversary celebration is tomorrow, so i had to get them something by today. and before you ask, they got married in january and i was born in december. so there.

i'm really proud of my plate! it's quite pretty if i might say so myself. has "20 years..." written on top and "francis & mary" below plus a stenciled rose at the side. black and purple and gold...it took me quite some time to fill in the lines with the ceramic paint, but i felt a great sense of accomplishment when i was done. apparently i'm supposed to bake it at 3 am (it has to dry for 4 hours) but i doubt i'll be able to stay awake. maybe i'll try and sneak it past mum and into the oven tomorrow.

orchard is getting more crowded by the day. but there's no better place to shop in singapore. we bought the plate and paints from takashimaya and went to the macdonald's at j8 to paint it. well, i painted and he watched. had dinner at big o before that. this is going to be a fat weekend! mudpie today, anniversary cake tomorrow, steamboat at chris' place on sun...i seem to be excessive in everything i do. oh dear.

you really don't know what you want do you?

Thursday, January 27, 2005

11:43 PM
i like to imagine that when i enter the swimming pool, all my thoughts diffuse into the water around me. and for that 40 mins, i can think nothing, feel nothing...just be.

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

11:28 PM
i can't believe i stayed in hc till 9.15pm! and i wasn't even the one teaching the biomedical quiz students. our dear matyred weifeng conducted TWO session on blood physiology - from 3 to 6pm and then he repeated the entire thing again from 6 to 9!!! he's seriously spoiling the market.

i was bored stiff during most of the lecture, so i bought dinner for the kids from coronation plaza, visited ms ong and played with the wushu people for awhile. just as i was about to give up and go home, lixiang came to hc to visit me! awww, i was so touched. too bad i can't go for the wushu reunion dinner as it clashes with my parents' 20th anniversary. we just sat outside lt 5 and talked rubbish. he seems quite happy in armor despite all that ranting about army life. he complained that he's fat?!!?? all these army boys.... though i must admit he's bulked up since leaving hc. then again, so has lmm. haha, he keeps trying to spring surprises on me and failing miserably. like when he and zhaoqi went to my house with my birthday present and i was out carolling. and today he suddenly came to hc after wushu training and wanted to go for dinner....next time call me first!

felt really good to reminisce with him; it was just like old times when we'd all collapsed from competition training outside the huisuo . of course then lx and yl, and lmm and by, were still running off to their own seperate corners...well, lmm and by are still inhabiting their own little world but lx and yl...sigh, my heart still aches for that poor girl. why do girls always care too much?

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

11:35 PM
hmm...the second salsa lesson was a lot more interesting. lynn and amanda came along this time but SOMEONE decided to pull out. i guess you know what this means - doujiang youtiao photos here we come!

anyway, we learnt how to change direction (turn left 180 degrees) and more fancy variations on the simple turn (turn right 360 degrees). actually i think the girls' have it easy; we just have to follow the guys' lead. after being pushed around for a while the moves become quite instinctive.

went for supper with jianbang, jasper, lynn and zhongyang at lao pa sat after class. we ordered satay and stingray and fish! yum... lynn is so cute; she charmed the hawker into giving us a "big medium" stingray...haha...can't remember her being so bubbly from primary school. daniel is one lucky boy. talked a lot of nonsense and reached home late. at least i didn't get lost!

tried to get through respiratory physiology today, but i just couldn't stuff it down. after hours and hours of staring at jb west my head is about to explode. argh!! and i'm still shedding! hiaz, thanks for the moisturiser, it's really quite effective.

there's a saying - 福无双至, 祸不单行...now that is such a fallacy. if you ask me, there's all too much "福" going around at the moment. lots of ?happy? things going on...i don't know that all this excess is good at all.

Sunday, January 23, 2005

10:55 PM
my dear en, i'm not only roasted, but salted to boot! preserved teri anyone?

kayaking is quite fun, but kallang river is really dirty. don't like doing water sports there at all. jess dragged me there with the young adults' chapter of guides to fill up space...lan4 yu2 chong1 su4...anyway, joy brought lots of spontaneity to the whole thing, so it wasn't just a bunch of old foggies meandering about.

went from lavender to boon lay mrt to go for the ocs commissioning parade with ky. it's a good thing we ran into wenyang and jasper at the interchange otherwise we'd have been hopelessly lost. safti is huge! i can tell that the defense budget is being put to good use; it looks like a resort! i hope thomas gets into ocs in 2 years time so i can go to his commissioning and be one of the proud spectators who pinned some badge or other onto them.

the parade lasted for about 2 hours but it was still shocking when a cadet collapsed. poor thing....felt quite bad for lmm too; if he hadn't dropped out of course he would have been commissioned with this batch. oh well, he still has biyun to cheer him up! XD

as usual it seemed like the whole of medfac was there. larry and ningyi were a bit depressed about disrupting - no parade and no president to look forward to when they finally become captains.

i managed to congratulate haihan, weijie and lixiang. looked around for bert but he disappeared to dinner too quickly. nevermind, i passed the message to his sister. felt so happy for them all, especially when they started throwing their caps about. i guess that's what graduation is all about.

Saturday, January 22, 2005

5:49 PM
yet another day under the scorching sun...i felt like a hamster in a cage sailing at rsyc. the area is tiny and there were little kids all over the place. not to mention the huge vessels berthed around us. sigh...and i'm going kayaking with jess tomorrow...i shall be absolutely roasted by monday.

never leave rachel and i to drive a vehicle on our own. i tried to give her a lift home and wound up lost at 2 am. the problem was that she lived at braddell heights estate and i was driving towards braddell heights condo. the only good thing that came out of that is i've finally found someone who's as clueless about directions as myself. muahahaha!!!

luckily mum and dad were sleeping by the time i reached home or i would have been massacred. i guess we got a little carried away singing karoke at nanzun's house. he has a room with a projecter and a system with 10 000 songs. woohoo...his very own kbox. amanda is really good - she sounds like a professional singer. haha. she's the english-singing version of diya.

we had a steamboat dinner that (as usual) overestimated our appetites. it's almost inevitable that any social gathering will end up with leftovers. well i guess the 2 beagles could always finish it up. they're so cute and fa..erm, huggable... XD honestly i wasn't all that comfortable around the others because...bloody hell...i'm not blind or deaf and even being selectively oblivious only goes so far. i didn't want to go in the first place but jasper kept talking about hc people being antisocial and maybe....i was just the slightest bit curious. i'm not sorry i went - i did have fun - but...argh...see, that's why ignorance is such bliss.

Friday, January 21, 2005

12:23 AM
crazy day...my fingers hurt...

i suppose windsurfing would be a fun sport BUT because i couldn't even lift the mast up i can't say for sure. in my defense it was a 7 ft hard sail and beginners usually start with a lighter, shorter, saner sail.

in short, i spent 5 hours trying to pull up the mast under the baking sun. well maybe that's a slight exaggeration; we also played tic-tac-toe, five stones, pick-up-sticks and some gambling game with twigs and mini-pinecones. heh heh...huai2 nian4 tong2 nian2...eventually i managed to stand on the board for all of 1 sec, no thanks to jasper trying to tape my unceremonious and frequent falls. told jianbang it's a thankless task trying to teach beginners, especially when he makes it look so easy.

still, there's always something to be said for just floating around in the ocean bobbing amongst giant waves.

zhongyang, nanzun, dickson, yauhong joined us later. testosterone overdose...but what's new? i should be used to it after all the wushu competition trainings; still remember the 2nd interschool competition training where gary made junyuan, lixiang, lmm and i run for 1.5hrs around the duchess area. nothing will ever beat that.

zhongyang and i then went for dinner with ky, anson, fuqiang at cafe cartel in j8. we watched "shall we dance", one of those typical romantic comedies about ballroom dancing. i thought i would drift off but it was a happy show - all that music and prancing around made me high.

some dance to remember, some dance to forget.

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

11:32 PM
our dear renal physio lecturer - dr. martin lee - loves to start off his lectures with words of wisdom. which, unfortunately, just add on to his already interminably long lullabies. so when he started on 'not getting lost in the matrix' i didn't really take him seriously. alas! i now find myself completely, wonderfully, and utterly confused...

it's hard to look at the big picture when you feel like a Harry Potter figure in a lego Hogwarts set.

Monday, January 17, 2005

11:52 PM
dancing is fun. even though i can't make manouver my gluteus maximus as adroitly as the teacher. bet i'll forget all the salsa steps by next week though. on 1...turn...release....thought it was quite easy at first but then it got complicated. isn't it always?

anyway, i managed to drag jess along (the blackmail had nothing to do with me!) and she provided entertainment enough for all of us. went with her, zhongyang, jianbang and jasper and this guy called jianyang who's serving ns.

anyway rj guys are quite different from hc ones. most of my male hc friends are "jie3 mei4" but they are rather too rowdy to be that. haha...culture differences...

Sunday, January 16, 2005

11:26 PM
singapore won the tiger cup on home soil after a gazillion years.

it was 2-0 against indonesia i think. 1 excellent goal by someone or other and a penalty shot. though i wonder if the players were footballers or mediacorp artistes from the amount of acting they did; all that falling down left right and centre. i felt sort of sorry for indonesia.

well, i'm still proud of them, and i think the goalie (lewis?) deserved the MVP award.

jia you!

1:12 AM
serene's 20th birthday party was brilliant! she had people from her primary school all the way up to SMU. hope she had a good time...

i belong to the RGS faction of the guests i suppose. we were both in 3/4 & 4/4 and sat next to each other for a while in sec 3. that girl is hilarious. i never laughed so much or so hard in my life. apparently laughing for 15mins a day will extend one's lifespan; i'm sure she added a decade to mine. and we used to draw these little peanuts on our notes - rotten peanuts! haha. but they were cute.

as usual i spent the entire day procrastinating and only bought her present at 5 plus pm (the party started at 7!) but i thought the black and white 'nightmare before christmas' bag i chose was pretty and besides, i stuffed it with a pack of peanuts. in commeration and all that ;p

there were a lot of familiar faces at the party even though i didn't know most of them personally. got to know huimin, peiyun, vanessa and xinyee a little better. singapore is really tiny; 3 degrees of seperation (or something like that) instead of 6. everyone was connected in some way, whether by class or cca. it's amazing. i never realised my social circle encompassed such a small area.

Thursday, January 13, 2005

11:41 PM
i'm peeling like an onion. how dreadful...that'll teach me to run around sentosa without sunblock.

played badminton with the hc people again today. 'peace and love' aka 'you2 tiao2 and dou jiang4'/jess and jialing versus 'evil and darkness?'/kenneth and i for a while. right. what a misnomer since j&j were the ones who kept trying to trick me! and poor weifeng - he seems to be a bundle of unintentioned laughs. his right leg cramped but he still insisted on challenging jess and jonathan. though he did beat jess. no one beats jonathan.

we went to munchie monkeys for dessert afterwards. as usual it degenerated into a 'free-for-all' verbal brawl mostly between jess and weifeng. they tried having a truce for a while but i guess both of them were getting too bored with the peace and quiet.

oh dear, can't get jess' you2 tiao2 straw and dou4 jiang4 escapade out of my head. hahahaha...can't believe you fell for it mon ami.... ky post the pictures! XD

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

10:55 PM
went back to hc for the cca fair with yanlian. we were trying to help promote wushu to girls because my grandjuniors believe all the tchs wushu guys will automatically turn up for trainings. hope they're right...

spent most of our time bumming around and watching little j1s go by. we're J4s now!!!! seriously ancient seniors. but yihui, sui an, quanlun and even evil man came back too, so we were the youngest of the oldest... :)

i love wushu.

i don't mean this in a strange way, but i love guys doing wushu. when i watch their performances, i can get absolutely enraptured. it's something in the way they become something else; so confident, like a prize stallion which knows it's beautiful. then they have to stop and become (mostly) irritating little chinese high boys again, but hey, while it lasts.... ahh, one of the main reasons why i joined wushu was because of the gun4 wu3 hua1 i saw during the 28th batch open house performance. i wanted to be a part of that. still do. hc wushu was the best time of my life. learning gun4 shu4 is to date my most satisfying experience. wonderful. surreal. but i was there once.

i shall embark on the great quest of trying to get my wushu batchmates to go for reunion dinner. let's see, biyun, lmm, yl, lx, zhigao, junyuan and i. the rest are scattered around the world. hope yl and lx are really ok now. poor yl, it's been so long. time heals all wounds.

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

2:53 PM
i really should be doing my head and neck tutorial. but i'm procrastinating. so there.

not sure why i blog sometimes; half the time i can't even be honest with myself, let alone the handful of people who actually read this. whenever i re-read my posts, they seem so...shallow. ah well, i suppose there's something to be said for superficiality regardless. entertaining yes?

anyway i made another pointless observation: many of my classmates have a decidedly artistic bent. there are those who write, those who draw, those who play instruments because they actually love to, sing, dance, take photographs... it's amazing what trawling through other people's blogs will tell you. now i should feel guilty for invading their privacy since most of them don't know me personally, but what can i say? the guilt's been used up. i am evil!! muahahahaha!!!

i wish i could start writing again. but the spectre of my FIRST PROFESSIONAL EXAM looms over everything. why am i reading fantasy when i should be reading moore for example? haha. get it? reading mo(o)re...great, i've really lost it.

Monday, January 10, 2005

11:19 PM
and so it begins again....

first day of school and i can't wait for the next holidays to come around. is it just me or do holidays seem to go by extra fast? sigh....

celebrated ruxin's birthday with my anatomy group. zhongyang was saying he was too skinny so zhongkai asked him how he'd ever carry his bride if he got married. i just had to open my big mouth and tell them about my dear, pretty, LIGHT younger sister. showed them claire's picture which i'd stored in my handphone as well. haha, the guys in my anat group were so lasivicious! well, not all of them, but the vocal minority certainly wasted no time in drooling over my little sister. tsk tsk, i felt like i was selling her off! not that she needs any help in that department. i suppose God is fair. but i think i'd still have picked the grades (fox and the sour grapes neh... XD)



so...

有缘千里来相见, 无缘对面不相逢

do you see?

Saturday, January 08, 2005

1:47 AM
ouch.

sunburnt shoulders, feet rubbed raw by sand, forearms bruised by an insanely hard volleyball, aching muscles....(some sentosa commercial that would make!)

but worth it.

went to sentosa with the nus sailing club people today. we played ultimate frisbee and water "monkey". poor isabelle kept getting teased during the games, but she took it all with good grace. and it certainly upped the entertainment quotient. pity the sand was really coarse for the most part though, not to mention the hidden pieces of glass! a natural pedicure, but a bit too vigorous for my liking. i don't suppose i'll have footprints for a while.

kahyee, sirui and i went back to hwa chong for the campfire night (supernova!). i think it was mostly an excuse to sit with old friends and chat. i seem to have spent most of my time walking around the school with qi. she's going back to oxford on monday...sniff.....it's crazy to miss her since we chat on msn all the time, but it's different, better, when we're face to face.

the j1s are split into houses, no more by faculty. the houses are called athena, artemis, apollo and aries i think. absolutely incomprehensible titles when you consider that hc is so...chinese...it reminds me of rgs actually; there's a statue of athena at one of the entrances and our school song had something about "sacred fire" and "olympus" i believe. haha...at least the hc songs will always sound lovely to me.


当你孤单你会想起谁
你的心情总在飞 什么事都想去追
想抓住一点安慰
你总是喜欢在人群中徘徊
你最害怕孤单的滋味

你的心那么脆 一碰就会碎
经不起一点风吹
你身边总是需要许多人陪
你最害怕每天的天黑

但是天总会黑 人总要离别
谁也不能永远陪谁
而孤单的滋味 谁都要面对
不只是你我回感觉到疲惫疤(5-6-7-8!)

当你孤单你会想起谁 (华初!)
你想不想找个人来陪 (想!)
你的快乐伤悲 只有我能体会
让我来陪你走一回
(x2)

Thursday, January 06, 2005

11:15 PM
so qi, ym and i were walking around wisma when it struck me how pointless our existance really is. orchard, home, hospital. the story of my life. if i died tomorrow, or if i had never been born what difference would it have made? actually even if the earth was wiped out by terrorists, natural disasters, God...so what? The problem with memory is that it makes human beings prize ourselves too much.

they say life is a journey. how apt. but a most futile and redundant one. after all, there is only 1 destination. and when you believe, as i do, that God is at the end, life is just a huge detour. a punishment for Eve eating the fruit from the Tree. death is Our reunion.

1:14 AM
retail therapy does wonders.

so does having dinner with a couple of really good friends. except that #$%^&*, excuse me, sarah. who CANCELLED ON ME LAST MINUTE!!! that evil child, especially when we organised this dinner just because she said she wanted to meet up with zhaoqi before she went back to UK again. and now this!! sigh. i suppose she was really tired after being in school from 7.30am to 8pm but i still feel...stood up. which i was. ah well, it was good to be with yiming and qi. it's so relaxing talking to ym sometimes; her life is an open book, and she's one of the most straight-forward, honest people i know. all sacred cows are slaughtered, gutted and served in her presence. of course she also seems hopelessly confused half the time. but who wants to live sober anyway?

school is starting again soon. it seems the higher up the education ladder i go, the more i dread returning to school. i wonder what happened. i should be looking forward to it by now, after being bored out of my wits during most of the hols. there is nothing for me there.

Tuesday, January 04, 2005

11:51 PM
just a thought - i haven't held a pen for so long...

i feel so apathetic, ungrateful, angry, sad, guilty...confused...bored...tired? i don't know. i wish i could just talk it all out, reams and reams of words words words, but i'm not that kind of person. and you are not that kind of friend. perhaps if our paths had not diverged my dear....i miss trapeezing to orchard road on wednesdays, the elated exhaustion after wushu training, everything....

no doubt the only constant in our lives is change.

we're still so close; i feel as if i could reach across...to you....

but

Sunday, January 02, 2005

1:25 AM
hmm...

i have a feeling 2005 will be a rather sombre year. perhaps the world as a whole will begin to mature; world peace doesn't seem like such a crazy prospect after all. human beings are such perverse creatures - we seem to stop fighting only when a major disaster that kills hundreds of thousands strikes. the only way to catch our attention is to wipe out even more people than we are already managing to by ourselves.

on the bright side: new year, new beginnings, new hope.

spent the last day of 2004 playing mahjong with jess, kahyee, daryl and kenneth at jess' house. i did not get lost driving there! ahem...anyway, i wasn't exactly on a winning streak so i willingly gave up my place to daryl when he came. ky had wonderful luck; her cards were beautiful and she 'kang4'-ed almost every round. and we finally finished a whole round of dong1, nan2, xi1, bei3. muahahaha...we rule, we rule, i'm high on air...whee...

*cough* back to earth.

new year's day was quite uneventful. i went for dinner with my catholic students society freshmen orientation camp group (that's a mouthful!) at ps swensons. greg, alexis, marilyn, jeff, andrew, ian, dyan and i basically bummed around playing black magic, fuzzy wuzzy and various other 'qian4 bian3' games. i must admit, i am a sadist; beware unsuspecting world! oh, and for once we weren't fixated on medical topics since 5/8 were from arts. a refreshing break.

perhaps it was all that carolling during the christmas break, or it could be jess' influence, but the cultural arts seem fairly appealing at the moment. i'm tentatively going to learn salsa, and perhaps i'll take up hip hop class too if the nus health and fitness club organises it again. i like dancing. when i was young i learnt some ballet, but i didn't enjoy the rigidity of it at all. also, contrary to popular opinion, wushu is a lot more like dance than karate/taekwando/etc. in fact it's practically chinese dance with power. and to top it all off, i have parents who do ballroom dancing and a sister who dances for her school! it's almost inevitable that i should gravitate towards dance at some point in my life.

why not now?

Saturday, January 01, 2005

12:00 AM
a new dawn arises...

goodbye 2004,

hello 2005.