making cherries; kissing love

engraved

2010-02-07T03:25:00.006-05:00

In a sense, they were a silent, desperate attempt to render a fragile promise just a little less fragile, just a little more immutable.

I felt it when we bought them, wore them for the first time, saw your name engraved in mine. Maybe this will ensure we last. Maybe this will be the key, our secret to glorious triumph, this will erase all the miles and tears and differences away.

I was so desperate to set that promise in silver.

Now what?

It's locked away in a drawer, but some things don't need a ring of silver to be engraved.

This Is It, or They Say It's Brighter On The Other Side

2009-11-14T20:26:00.002-05:00

i'm taking the leap.

take me home

2009-11-14T14:01:00.010-05:00

39 more days till i am free of this place.

40 more days till i fall into my boyfriend's arms.

time passes so beyond-the-speed-of-light fast and yet so excruciatingly slow at the same time.

somehow, i feel like i haven't accomplished anything this semester. where did all the time go? why did it take my dreams with it?

every time i walk past and look at Low Library, i am unwillingly reminded of how i felt when i first stepped onto the Columbia campus and saw it for the very first time--i cried. not torrents of tears cried, because that would just be strange, but i teared seeing it and realizing that everything i had slaved over had come to fruition. i remember turning to my mom and saying, "wow. i never realized it was so........big." she nodded mutely at me; my dad looked at me like he was properly proud of me for going against his wishes and pursuing my own selfish dreams for the very first time.

i remember sitting at convocation feeling the excitement swell up in my chest as the Class of 2013 cheered and screamed and clapped along with me. feeling so hopeful and fresh and new, like anything and everything was about to happen on this campus and i was going to be reborn right in the middle of it.

time has passed. midterms have come and gone. friends gained have already become friends lost. an awesome floor has become a less-than-awesome, more-than-awkward one. clubs i was dying to join have become clubs i might join next semester ~~or year~~ because they were too intimidating. classes with people i didn't know have become classes with people i just can't fit in with. all the small talk and class discussion and trips to the Met can't seem to change that.

somehow, at the halfway point of the semester, the sense that overwhelms me is the one that screams I just can't be American.

i wonder, will this change in the next three-and-a-half years? as much as i have my own problems dealing with my Malaysianness, would i want this to change? is giving up my love for the laidback, for classes i can ace with relative ease in reasonably good universities, for supportive friends and comfort and clubbing with people i actually love, such a big deal in comparison to the drive to succeed, the ambition to prevail, the burning desire to obliterate the class curve, the networks and opportunities and capitalist tendencies and right to claim "I graduated from an Ivy League university" i stand to gain?

take me home*.

here's to the rest of semester.

*home = where my friends are, where my boyfriend is, where i felt like people cared about more than their next CGPA, where studying was a momentary distraction in an odyssey of fun, where i was truly happy, where i was never alone.

being sick for profit

2009-10-28T15:30:00.004-04:00

yes, i have swine flu. or rather, "influenza-like symptoms". fml.

but this really isn't as bad as it sounds. for one thing, i get to put off taking my Polisci midterm! I also get to skip the horrible-sounding Lit Hum oral quiz tomorrow! :D

(about Lit Hum, I had a horrible, so awfully realistic nightmare last night in which my preceptor sent me an e-mail which should have contained my grade for the paper I magically finished in 6 hours, but instead had a long, cold, hurtful letter about how one of my classmates had enlightened him to the existence of this very blog and he had read it and gotten extremely offended about posts i had supposedly written about him and my classmates. so he told me that i could decide whether he should put up the link to my blog on our class Wikispace for everyone to see. and then he ended by saying he was giving me an F for class participation for being late to every single class and lying about why i had missed class. and then i walked into my Lit Hum classroom and everyone looked at me like i was such a horrible person. :cccccccccccccc)

obviously lit hum is horrid and getting to me in ways it shouldn't

Also, I feel like kicking myself for not going to Health Services earlier. the last time i was sick (only about a month ago) i actually stayed sick a whole week self-medicating because i didn't have my medical insurance card yet and i was a bit intimidated at having to go through the entire claims process in my weakened state. as it turns out, I didn't have to pay a single cent today because everything was done in-house - they even gave me a bottle of Gatorade, a whole bunch of Tylenol and lozenges just because I asked. and my adviser e-mailed all my teachers to tell them I'm not expected to go for class or take any exams (which makes it so much more legit), AND Dining Services will be coming to deliver food to my room twice a day. this would have been so helpful the first time i was sick, when i had to constantly run across campus to Lerner to buy myself soup :(((((

meh. yesterday, when I should have been studying for my midterm, I busied myself customizing my Adium (MSN for Macs) instead. take a gander :D

love it? :D

fall break and halloween are only a few days away, and i'm sick in my room with swine flu. :( I guess this does alleviate the stress over whether I should be going out and dressing up though. sigh. not that i have anyone to dress up with. :( looooooooonely.

no school till a week from now seems like such bliss ♥ if i just ignore all the work i'll need to catch up on..................................k i'm going to play my nintendo DS nao. :D (ignorance is everything)

summer is fading

2009-10-24T15:40:00.016-04:00

lovers that bless the dark
on the benches in Central Park
greet autumn in New York
it's good to live it again

dreamers with empty hands
they sigh for exotic lands
it's autumn in New York
it's good to live it again

loves that feeling you get of ultimate untouchable thoughtless bliss as soon as you click the button to submit that assignment or print that paper and you've made it without going over that deadline.

i wrote a paper worth 25% of my lit hum grade in 6 hours yesterday.

w0000000000000t but also if i get a B it will totally be my fault and mine alone :'(((((((((((

i'm still in the aftermath of handing in my paper, and if you're a student, you probably know what that means. you feel so good about the slight amount of work that you've successfully put in that you think to yourself "oh i don't have to do the rest of my work right now, i worked so hard already i deserve a break! i can do it later!" which then becomes later.....and later......and later.

which is why it is currently 3.46pm on Saturday and I have not begun studying for my polisci midterm (YEAH SO. I DIDN'T KNOW THERE WAS A MIDTERM. WTF) which is on Wednesday. I'm currently behind on at least 2 weeks of reading which basically means I'll need at least 16 hours to do my reading and nothing else....fml.

yes i will stop procrastinating and be a good columbian now. :'(

i am having this obsession with Snapple lately. can you believe i'd never even had a Snapple in my life till less than a week ago? but i've had four in the past few days and i kind of want to get another one once i'm done with my mango green tea...>.<

i love good fall weather. (: ♥ (and yes, you observe correctly...I AM GETTING FATTER. :'ccccc cursed spicy chicken fingers and endless supply of bubble tea)

spicy, not seasoned

2009-10-21T20:45:00.008-04:00

Today was a much better day after a bunch of shitty ones. I got a 100 on my Polisci quiz which is un-freakin-believable since a) I'm pretty sure I got the last question completely wrong and I have no idea why my TA is not calling out on me for it, b) International Politics is probably my weakest subject (or not...maybe Lit Hum...), and c) I don't even remember the last time i got a 100 on ANYTHING. And it was worth 15% of my grade. Man this gives me so much more hope for the next four years I have to spend in this chamber of academic torture.

ALSO, not only was my much-dreaded Uni Writing class called off after 10 minutes today due to my teacher just not having anything to teach us about, we spent the whole of Japanese class destressing after yesterday's midterm by playing a game. Each of us wrote a random funny/scary/embarrassing/interesting experience we've had on a piece of paper, and then three of us would get called out of class at once to discuss which one of our experiences we were going to use. Then all three people would come back in and claim to have had that experience, and would undergo interrogation by everyone in order to expose the two liars (all in Japanese of course). It was awesome because my classmate's experience that I had to pretend was my own was actually that she had encountered the ghost of a moose.......yeah idk either. I sucked because I had no idea where you would find....mooses....meese.....a moose.......I said Canada but then they asked me where and I had to flail really silently and lie that I didn't remember because I had seen it a really long time ago. My other friend Rosie was even bigger fail because she claimed the moose was a miniature one in front of her freshman dorm. But the biggest fail turned out to be my teacher (the adorably entertaining Eguchi-sensei) who claimed he beat up an old lady in the subway because she insulted him and the child he was holding.....=.=" It was pretty fail in general because most of the time the person telling the truth would receive the least amount of votes for authenticity (I ended up being falsely convinced that my friend Jack used to be a soprano and sang at Carnegie Hall, and that my other classmate Ji In got trapped in her dorm elevator for 10 minutes this morning). still, it was loads of fun. (:

oh and the weather was so nice today. ♥ after a week of 4-9 degrees rain, 18 degrees sunshine today was heavenly. i sat in the courtyard behind Butler for the hour that my class was canceled and camwhored on Photo Booth with the gorgeousness of Columbia in fall in the background while hoping nobody would notice.

before i forget, though, this is mostly what i wanted to post about before forgetting - i came across something really entertaining on The Bwog last night (while i was supposed to be doing my essay. i was doing research on what else was good to eat at JJ's Place besides the spicy chicken fingers. so sue me.) In fall 2007 Bwog wrote a story about the spicy chicken fingers (i.e. god's gift to all freshmen) shockingly disappearing from JJ's menu, and here were the comments on the article (read highlighted ones):

hahahaha that made my night. and for those of you who don't have the luxury of getting to eat at JJ's Place at 2 in the morning - yes. the spicy chicken fingers are just. that. good. ;)

breaking the (bubbly) habit

2009-10-18T17:57:00.005-04:00

Today I ran across a 6-degrees windy blustery drizzly campus just to get my hands on a cup of ice-cold bubble tea. CLEARLY, THIS ADDICTION NEEDS TO STOP.

I couldn't feel my hands when I got back :(

yeah, that's kind of the only thing I had to say today. other than the fact that despite all its negative qualities, i have the strangest urge to scribble out an ode to bubble tea, and also all my resolutions to work on my two mofo long essays this three-day weekend have completely failed me. it is Sunday evening and I have a grand total of half a paragraph of one essay done. (Japanese midterm on Tuesday - have not studied, have to read The Histories by Herodotus for Tuesday - have not begun, have to do PoliSci reading for both last week and this week - have not begun and do not intend to.)

the stupid Core Curriculum (which is partly why I came to Columbia in the first place) is eating up so many of my credits and hours that I CAN'T EVEN BEGIN TO START DECIDING ON MY MAJOR. fml. how to decide between polisci and sociology and EALAC (East Asian Languages And Cultures - where i can specialize in either polisci or sociology, amongst others) when i don't even have the time of day to breathe with Japanese (5 credit class hello) and Lit Hum (next year CC) and Uni Writing (next year Frontiers) not to mention all the other required classes. Taking upwards of 19 credits is supposed to be suicide (24 is the absolute max you can take without the dean's approval), but those compulsory classes alone take up 12. Which leaves me one more class if I want to be able to sleep humane hours, and two more if I really want to push my mental faculties to breaking point. I crack under pressure. bei tahan. :'(

this frustration currently stems from the fact that I'm supposed to be registering for spring classes in a month and I planned myself a 19-credit (i.e. borderline suicide level) timetable today (instead of working on my essay as I rightfully should have been) before realizing I don't even have a single polisci class in there, fml. Just Sociology and Introduction to Japanese Civilization, which I'm only taking for my global core and also because my advisor recommended me to major in EALAC. :/ I wanted to take French too (4 credits) but i guess that's a no-go. :'( meh, maybe I should go ahead and take that 2.5 credit decelerated Korean class for fun after all......

/academic rant

back to topic, a friend of a friend drank the bubble tea here for 30 days straight and gained 20 pounds. ...this does not bode well for yours truly.

yummy this chicken dumpling soup is super nommy

i work on my essay starting now. >:CCCCCCC

they are

2009-10-18T00:31:00.004-04:00

hi world.

read this -

and then read this.

(:

prepare to see this on facebook one of these days - but chaque jour je t'aime davantage, aujourd'hui plus qu'hier et bien moins que demain. ♥

i am so glad the worst 40 hours of my life are over. i ran the whole gamut of emotions and now i'm in that blissful state of can't-touch-this again. how has this changed me? i still am disillusioned with the idea of love - but just the utopian concept of love, the seemingly unattainable unreachable type that every one likes to ramble on for endless blog posts about. it can all be a crock of bull, really - in the past month-and-a-half that i've been here i've seen couples that have been together for years break up just because they now live 20 minutes apart from each other instead of just next door, and girls who were so in love with their steady boyfriends being able to flirt, have a fling with and rapidly fall in love with somebody else (and proceed to break up with their previous boyfriends who committed no wrong) a mere few weeks later. a friend who found out her boyfriend of six years had been cheating on her. a friend's friend who doesn't find his simultaneous claiming that he will marry his girlfriend and sleeping with other women to be the slightest bit unusual. another friend who doesn't feel the need for committed relationships, because he says hi by having sex. more failed long-distance relationships than i can even begin to count.

but then the random spots of sunshine. a friend who used to be a womanizing jerk suddenly finding the right girl for him and becoming the most faithful creature on the planet. another friend who spent an entire night at a huge party he helped to organize off the dance floor, not because he didn't have anyone asking him to dance or because he didn't want to, but because his new girlfriend wasn't there, and he only wanted to have fun when she was next to him. and you. brighter and better than both these people combined, times a lot. (:

i might not believe in that fairytale dream of pink sparkly honey-glazed love any more, but i do believe in what we have. and i think that's the reason i found it so hard to let go this time compared to any other. it didn't feel right. it wasn't our time. an untimely demise.......i'd choose living together with you over dying together with you any day.

and hey, i think we've kinda got a pink sparkly honey-glazed love thing going of our own. (: xxx

karma's an empty gaping hole where love goes to die

2009-10-16T12:27:00.008-04:00

So I can honestly say I've never had a horrible break-up story.

Actually, I've had two....but both of them involved me being the horrible one and destroying someone else's life instead. So there wasn't really much grief involved at all...I literally rejoiced about the first, and cried for maybe ten minutes about the second, before proceeding to be officially the cruelest ex in the universe.

right now it's kinda different.

k, so maybe "kinda" is an understatement. the word "understatement" is an understatement of how huge that understatement was. more like vastly different. universes and dimensions apart. "vast" is just not vast enough of a word to describe how vastly different it is this time around. and how much it hurts, too. i didn't even realize this kind of pain could exist outside the realms of the funeral of somebody you love.

i suppose that's what it is, though. a death. the untimely demise of something that was beautiful and alive, at least to you. to everyone else he's still alive and breathing. but for you, you will never get the chance to have him in your life again. or tell him that you love him, no matter how much you want to. as if he were dead.

i fell asleep at 6am crying, and i woke up at 12pm to cry some more. it was the biggest effort i've ever had to make just getting out of bed - bigger even than all the effort i put into the relationship when it was alive. i've lost my purpose in getting up every morning. why keep breathing when every litre of blood that pumps through my veins prolongs this sense of deep, shattering loss? i hate it here. that was an understatement. i was lonely and miserable every second i wasn't talking to him or seeing him, and now i'm just lonely and miserable every second of the day. i can't work, i can't eat, i can't sleep without having horrible nightmares. is this how it feels like to be on the losing end? god, i just want to apologize to the people i've hurt, then. but at least they had friends with them and people to talk to - i have no one. i'm stuck here on the other side of the world and the only thing keeping me going was the promise of being able to be with him in two-and-a-half months' time. Now all I have is a useless plane ticket and the greatest longing to just fall asleep and never have to bear with the excruciating pain of waking up and realizing that I've lost him again.

and the worst part of it is, i know it was all my fault. i singlehandedly made the person i have loved most in my entire life stop loving me. how much of a fun thought is that.

it just hurts so much.............i can't even begin to explain.

officially my most pathetic state of being in my life

she is

2009-10-04T18:55:00.008-04:00

possibly the worst girlfriend the world has ever seen.

(after the girlfriend who kills her boyfriend in the middle of the night and eats their babies, and possibly the one who drugs her boyfriend with sleeping pills and viagra and proceeds to single-handedly make their babies)

she is needy and clingy and possessive and requires constant high emotional upkeep. she craves attention and her bipolar side shows obscenely when she doesn't get it. she's selfish and rude and masochistic. she loves too much and fucks both their brains up. she's totally aware of all of this and disgusted by it yet just can't bring herself to stop the cycle.

she should carry a warning label. damaged, fragile, despises being alone -- will suck up all your mental faculties and emotions and patience and faith in relationships and belief in what probably isn't love.

she hates how she keeps doing this to herself. every single boy since she's been 17. and just when she thinks it's over, the more in love she falls the more and more she starts becoming that girlfriend from hell again

i've cried so much today i feel like throwing up just looking at this screen. i just want to curl up in some semi-embryonic state and never have to open my eyes or breathe or know what it's like to be in love again. but work calls, work being the final draft of my lens essay. ridiculous when i can't even think straight let alone compose something impressive.

and yet the only way out without dying seems to be to take the other road entirely, and become a cold, hard, unfeeling bitch who doesn't give a fuck if he calls because she's too busy getting high or living her amazing, high-flying life where she never really needed you in the first place.

there are no non-extremes.

this is the last time i will be this person.

i am a retard (and the vodka made me this way)

2009-10-03T17:27:00.006-04:00

I hereby solemnly take a vow to abstain from the consumption of any form of alcohol for the next two and a half months (i.e. roughly the remainder of semester), if not for life.

this is what happened.

last night Henry and i decided to pregame at my place in preparation for the First Friday party i had promised him i would attend. this is the third time we've drunk in our dorms - the first and second times were with flavored vodka, hard lemonade and hard apple cider. so bearing the amount we consumed those two times in mind, we kind of neglected the fact that on our third time, we were drinking vodka straight (mixed with a little - and i mean little amount of Red Bull and lemonade).

let me just skip through this part really quickly because the mere thought of vodka or any kind of alcohol right now literally makes my chest heave and gives me the urge to projectile vomit (which is sad, because under normal circumstances i adore vodka....:c).

basically we played a dice version of Circle of Death. this was stupid because there were just two of us and only six sides of the dice so you basically had an 83% chance of drinking every single turn (and this was before Henry's ridiculous rules like "one shot every time you say the word 'okay'", "one shot every time you touch your hair", "one shot every time you put your hands in your lap", "one shot every time you laugh" came into play). anyway, in a grand total of two hours we had both cleaned off nearly an entire bottle of 40% vodka which might have been the equivalent of....i don't even know, a fuckload of standard drinks each.

i've always had a fear of throwing up and have therefore managed to keep from throwing up at all for the past eight years or so of my life. the first time i got serious alcohol poisoning (which, not so ironically considering the game mechanics, was also during a now infamous game of Circle of Death in Sydney) i had lumps on my hands when i woke up the next day, but i still managed to keep myself from throwing up. this time however? by the end of those two hours last night i was retching into a toilet bowl in the girls' room, i had to wake up in the middle of the night and retch into my trashcan again, and i only wished i could have retched the rest of that alcohol out of my system the whole of today. (i tried, many times, and only ended up hurting myself.)

(before i go on to the aftermath of my idiocy btw, this is me typing to Zay on Skype shortly after we got started drinking:

[10/2/09 8:59:26 PM] Lynn: baby were playing the dice equivalent of cicle of death im so high
[10/2/09 8:59:27 PM] Lynn: @-@

and this is me typing to him near the end:

[10/2/09 9:50:36 PM] Lynn: bbay uv= ne et ben so d6n i my hole lif
[10/2/09 9:59:08 PM] Lynn: bab im sron tun
[10/2/09 9:59:19 PM] Lynn: u8iv ebb beenwi drunk in mu lif]
[10/2/09 9:59:49 PM] Lynn: B3be abcll me

i don't even know what the fuck i was trying to say so don't even ask.)

so i woke up today with my contacts still in, wearing the same clothes as yesterday, my makeup smeared all over my face. pistachio nuts all over the damn floor and carpet, red bull all over my chest of drawers and makeup and hairbrush. junk everywhere. my physical state of being doesn't even need to be discussed.

it's 5.50pm now and i only remotely started feeling better about an hour ago - this was when i decided to walk outside into a just-rained on fresh wonderful cool Columbia evening, across Butler Library to Lerner, where i bought myself a large bowl of chicken noodle soup. ♥ i swear to god, the soup at Lerner is just the most amazing culinary discovery i have made on campus so far, period. it beats being able to buy bubble tea with my student ID and the prospect of having Starbucks a 3-minute walk away hands-down. i was actually sick since last weekend (yeah, so that's another reason i am a complete moron for drinking so much, when i hadn't even properly recovered yet) and was having Lerner soup almost every meal of every day the entire week. it speaks wonders that their soup has been the only thing i've been able to swallow all day without wanting to throw up, actually - i couldn't even eat fruit or drink water without wanting to puke. but i gobbled down their soup so feverishly and fast i kind of want to go buy another bowl now :3

oh, and thanks to my moronity i have the next 24 hours to write a lens essay on photojournalistic ethics, complete five pages of kanji and listening drills for Japanese, study for my Japanese exam on Tuesday, read Gilgamesh, and catch up on my International Politics readings which are basically more than all the readings i've ever had for ALL my other subjects combined times two. we have a test in two weeks and i'm beyond doomed. and i've actually dropped my bio anthro class just to focus on polisci, so this is less work than i usually have. :(

so as a result of all this, i am hereby declaring my body an alcohol-free zone from this day forward. i'm starting to feel kind of sick again (i think this is because of a) the computer screen and b) no more soup) and like, i am just so physically revulsed by the idea of alcohol right now. :/ it's gross and unnecessary. and don't doubt me disbelievers because after that first game of Circle of Death six months ago i swore off Baileys because just the thought of it or being in the same room as a bottle made me sick, and i haven't come near it or wanted to since.

this means my birthday (in less than a month's time, how does the year fly by so fast?! :O) will be alcohol-free. believe it.

i can't wait for winter break. singapore and zay is going to be amazing ♥

random sad it's-monday-again, i'm-a-lonely-overwhelmed-freshman which rapidly progresses into LDR (long-distance-ramblings) post

2009-09-27T23:46:00.011-04:00

college is lonely.

my guess is that there are a lot of people around me - people in my classes, people on my floor - who would love to disagree (especially since i'm at Columbia, where people specialize in disagreeing), but there it is. i'm not sure what it is. is it me? :( i probably haven't been getting involved enough, putting myself out there. i haven't been auditioning for every single orchestra or applying for every single organizing committee or showing up for events. i put a barrier up around myself when meeting people because i'm subconsciously worrying if my boyfriend on the other side of the world might disapprove. i don't go clubbing; i stay home to talk to my boyfriend.

somehow, this has turned into talk about my boyfriend. (again.)

i remember when we first started college in Sydney, and i would tell Eunsu how glad i was i didn't bring a boyfriend over because it was bound to be such a tight leash around my neck. for that very reason, when i found out i was going to Columbia, i made up my mind to not fall for anybody in my remaining three months there. but yeah, that was really just a resolution for dramatic effect. after all, i met my current boyfriend three days after getting that decision letter (and presumably three days after making that failure of a resolution). and had fallen for him another three days after. (yes, i fall for people hard and fast. it's what makes me extremely vulnerable to douches like Barney Stinson, only they're usually less awesome :c)

it does make me wistful sometimes to watch everyone else reveling in their newfound freedom. i would be lying if i said it was easy only being able to go to gay clubs so there'd be less of a chance of upsetting my boyfriend, or not being in the same room with another boy, even if it were just for a study session. suddenly facebook friending and overfriendly wall posts become a source of countless arguments and name-calling and emphatic denials. when telephone carriers or technology fail you're suddenly cut off, sometimes at the most inopportune times. and you have to wonder: is it worth it? why am i giving up this entire city of possibilities for someone i haven't even known for that long, someone who can't be there for me in person the next four years?

here's my answer.

it's worth it, to hear your voice first thing in the morning when you call because that's the only way a 14-hour difference can work for a pair of stranded lovebirds

it's worth it, to come back from class and hear the feedback from your microphone letting me know your webcam is still on as you sleep

it's worth it, seeing your face when you receive my surprises in the mail, and seeing the roses you sent me on the shelf (now dried) on the first day i moved in

it's worth it, remembering the happiest months of my life and how i spent every waking minute of them with you: making you tea, folding your laundry, cooking you noodles, night after night at chat thai, green tea creme brulee and shanghai berry at musashi, epic fail at the game centre (which you have now rectified), first times, last times, freezing winds, keeping you in my room when you were sick, multiple fire alarms, being scalded by boiling water, loving how it feels when we go to sleep - and being able to claim those memories as mine

it's worth it, every time i don't know what i'm doing with my paper and you can come to the rescue and start telling me about utilitarianism and how i should justify my argument using deontological theory and my heart just fills up with indescribable oh-my-god-is-this-boy-even-real?!

it's worth it, being able to look at you and feel so proud of the fact that i'm able to call you mine

it's worth it, every time you tell me it doesn't matter how many days we're apart now because we'll have the rest of our lives to make up for it

it's worth it, counting down the days and knowing that come midnight on Christmas Day (assuming immigration and customs and flight conditions are friendly to me), we'll be together (((:

one day i will tell the world the story of how i ended up with zay and i swear to god (or whoever it is up there that takes pleasure in sending us in circles and occasionally paths that can't even be classified as proper shapes) it will be so much better than how i met your mother. or gossip girl. actually, it will be like himym + gossip girl x awesome. and everybody will ask for moar. ♥

what i woke up to one day on my computer screen

wail.

2009-09-26T11:33:00.008-04:00

i'm sick! :(

being sick in a foreign country is awful. i have no idea how to claim health insurance (so i can't see the doctor) and i have no idea what i am and aren't allowed to buy in a drugstore (because this lady in England yelled at my parents once for trying to buy some medicine for me and it escalated into something extremely nasty). and of course, no caring loving soul is around to pamper me or bring me breakfast in bed or check my temperature occasionally or just give me a generous dosage of TLC. :(

in fact, the most TLC i've received in all the time i've been here was a few days ago. i was super stressed out from school and snapping at my boyfriend and trying to book my plane tickets to Singapore when i suddenly realized my class had already started and so i ran out of my room only to realize i'd forgotten my things so i had to run all the way back and then i collided with Cristian (this guy from down the hall) who i've hardly even talked to since school started but i told him i was just so stressed and panicking and i wanted to cry and he just said "oh don't cry, you need a hug" and gave me the biggest warmest bear hug you can possibly imagine. that one, simple, never-ever-will-you-get-this-in-malaysia gesture made my day.

but i need more than a hug to cure me now. :( to be specific i need more than whatever was in the six pills i've taken already. i also need an extra 48 hours in the week. not 24, 48. and an obscenely cute puppy (that doesn't defecate or require feeding/cleaning/exercise/grooming) to play with when i come back to my room. and a magical food generator so i don't have to go six floors down for a bite to eat. and the ability to withstand the sultry temptations of sleep (like that thing you can purchase in Sims 3 with enough lifetime happiness points....whut....). and a teleporter so i can teleport to sydney, australia every day. to see my boyfriend, not the kangaroos. i also need my boyfriend. i really need my boyfriend. :(((((((

i was going to say i need a best friend but i suddenly realized that for the first time, i can actually call my boyfriend my best friend. !!! truly a momentous occasion indeed. especially considering the fact that my boyfriend is hot and is in constant demand. and had to be tamed before capture. ~~i choose you pikachu~~

okay i hope he doesn't see this, that would be awkward.

my Lit Hum preceptor has turned out to be pretty cool because even though i missed both my classes last week (something you just DO NOT DO) i told him my alarm clock didn't go off and i didn't get up in time and he just went, "haha that's totally cool, 9am classes do that to everybody." and then proceeded to tell me to buy a book called Beowulf on the Beach and then talk to me about what it's like to live in Malaysia and how he's a fail semi-Buddhist (just like me) and how he lived in Tibet and can speak Tibetan and Sanskrit. what up! :D! also, he kinda looks like Clark Kent. (EDIT: OHMYGOD I just realized they even have the same initials. O____O) perhaps it's the glasses o.O

okay, i'm feeling sicker and sicker. i think i should go eat something or i might pass out.

P.S. i'm seeing jude law acting in hamlet (yes, in person) in 4 days!! BE JEALOUS, PLEBEIANS. :DDD

P.P.S. yesterday Hyeonju and I discovered that dressing room lights in very expensive stores tend to make you look radiant and beautiful.

e.g.!

ok blogger kind of destroys the picture quality. but how does my skin look that unreal?!?!?!!!! it's either the lighting or the BB cream (or both).

oh man. this deserves future research. and by this i do mean dressing room camwhore sessions. (:

the standard freshman rant

2009-09-12T12:48:00.009-04:00

okay, it may only be my first weekend here at an Ivy League university, but i already feel like i am trapped in some horribly claustrophobic pressure cooker together with the entire class of 2013 with someone's sadistic hand on the heat dial making it go up and up and up.

the pressure to perform is like none i have ever experienced. it's weird because even when there isn't a paper to be written or a bunch of sums to be worked out, you feel like you have to perform. for example, my Lit Hum assignment (a random question about the Iliad that i will have to post a couple of paragraphs in response to) will only be given to me tomorrow (a Sunday), but it already feels like there's some kind of horrible clock ticking down the minutes till that question is up for the tackling. there is also the niggling guilt in the back of my head that i should be contributing something to my class' Wikispace, since people have already started (putting up games to help you remember the Greek kings or the gods or even analyses of the Judgement of Paris) and class participation makes up a whopping 25% of our grade. and of course let it not be forgotten that class itself basically consists of pop quizzes and a group of people all trying very hard to say something that sounds remotely intelligent about a text no one can yet comprehend because the key to succeeding at Lit Hum apparently lies in seeming smarter than you really are. hmmm.

this weekend i also have 62 pages of reading for biological anthropology (a class about the human species and evolution which i am taking for partial fulfillment of my science requirement), two articles to close-read + a summary and conjuring of "fruitful questions" for each (for my University Writing class), two academic papers on abortion to read for my philosophy class on Contemporary Moral Problems, and of course two hours of Japanese homework which is pretty standard, seeing as i have Japanese class every day from Monday to Thursday (with a quiz in class and two hours of homework EVERY SINGLE DAY).

so altogether i am taking 18 credits and have roughly fifteen contact hours in a 4-day week. excluding the many, many painful hours spent outside of the classroom attempting to keep up with my classes, of course. i'm pretty sure i never read this much my entire five months in Sydney. cramming an in-depth study of the Iliad into four meagre lessons (which is luxurious, really, seeing as Odyssey gets two and Gilgamesh only gets one) is a lot more fucked up than you can possibly imagine.

i am probably just a n00b freshman though and in a year's time i will probably be finding this a relatively light workload (and possibly even taking the maximum 22 credits - actually, no, i will never take the maximum 22 credits.) class wouldn't be so painful if everyone wasn't so kiasu but unfortunately, they are. :'(

or maybe i've just been lazing around out of school for too long.

(and on the bright side, the stuff i'm learning is generally totally awesome and absorbing and exercises my neurons to their fullest capacity and i mean biological anthropology, how cool is that. i take your Lamarckian acquired characteristics and raise you a Darwinian adaptive radiation. also on the bright side, i pwned all my Japanese quizzes and homework and my teacher drew smiley faces all over my work. he is just the coolest guy ever. ..and my lit hum preceptor looks like a Hollywood celebrity which makes early Tuesday and Thursday mornings a lot, lot more pleasant)

k.

need to go read about God vs science now.

baibai.

i heart ny?

2009-09-06T09:41:00.012-04:00

so new york.

being in new york kind of feels like being in a poisoned candy store. or possibly Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. the immense range of everything at your fingertips calling out to you to touch me, taste me, love me but you're not exactly sure if you should because for some inexplicable reason it feels like that candy might bite right back. for the most part, i love it. i'm scared shitless, but i love it.

the exact same analogy goes for Columbia, by the way. except i might be a tad more frightened of it than i am of the City. being a lowly freshman, i have already missed out on the chances to get into the classes I really wanted to take this semester, PLUS my assigned Lit Hum and University Writing sections both clash with at least four classes I could possibly take, so while everyone's got six or seven classes on their registration sheet I have a measly three. I am scouting out everything from Astronomy to pilates to Environmental Science to Music in an attempt to fill up the gaping holes in my schedule but luck has remained a stranger to me so far. :'( maybe i should become an astronomer instead

Columbia itself is only so frightening because it is so awesome, though. my dad, who as a few of you might know is (actually was!) the biggest pro-LSE/UK education person ever due to his being on the LSE alumni committee and taking obscene amounts of pride in it, is now a convert. he told my mom, "LSE just cannot possibly compare!" (as if this is how he felt all along of course) while we were walking around campus one day and after the convocation ceremony SO MANY TIMES that the novelty actually began to wear off after a while. my parents are basically infatuated with my university, and i can see why. and that also makes me glad, because it's nice to have parents who are letting you go be who you want to be with their blessings for a change. (:

the first few days i arrived it was rainy and blustery but the sun has come back recently and it is absolutely glorious. ♥ the skies are so blue (much, much prettier than grey, icky London) and i'm just glad i don't sunburn. Hyounju and I walk around the Upper West Side every day, occasionally venturing downtown to hit Korea Town or Times Square or, in yesterday's case, NYU and West Village. there's always so much to discover and i don't think it's just because we're still practically tourists in the big city - the city just seems like one of those places you could live in nearly your whole life and still not know like the back of your hand. there is so much of the quaint and cultural, glitzy and gritty, that you just don't know where to begin, and there is never an end in sight. (unless you ride the subway till where it turns around, and from what i hear from Barney Stinson of How I Met Your Mother, you do not want to see where the subway turns around.)

I've already seen Mamma Mia for the second time on Broadway (the first time i saw it was six years ago, my first time in new york, the time i fell head over heels in love with the city and vowed to return to study here one day ~~but at NYU since i didn't know of Columbia's existence back then COUGHCOUGH~~), entrance to the Met for Columbians is free, Central Park is a few blocks away, Times Square is a ten-minute ride away on the subway. i live on the same floor as a Bulgarian boy who loves anime, a Cuban girl who (very strangely resembles Shameen) grew up in America, an Indian girl who grew up in Thailand, an Asian-American boy who has a passion for brewing tea, an Irish musician, a Hispanic straight boy who loves to sing and dance, an African-American semi-professional astronomer, a Romanian physicist who speaks like he stepped out of West Side Story, and thirty-one other amazingly talented and equally diverse young adults. the wealth of opportunity and breadth of diversity just astounds me every single day, and all i know is that i have yet to inwardly roll my eyes or think something caustic about the intellect of anyone i have spoken to so far, and i have spoken to a lot of people. you just cannot possibly get a more incredible environment for learning than this. and trust me, having had the unusual opportunity to be a freshman at another university in Australia for six months - I know.

coming here was pretty tough on the relationship part of my life. long-distance is a bitch as we all know, and going to university for the first time is a huge transition and immensely exciting experience, as we all know. meeting so many people (and I have to admit, the people here weren't as unattractive as urban legends made them out to be) was pretty distracting at first...which i guess we were both expecting. but nearly losing him one day made me realize how petty these distractions can sometimes be. yes, the prospect of newness does lend glitz and glamour and a rose-tinted looking glass to every person you meet, but none of that can ever hope to replace something much more real. i nearly made a humongous mistake my first few days here, and all i can say is i'm glad i didn't. i miss the tangibility of what we used to have...but at the same time, it is still tangible, just in a very different way. in a very think-about-that-one-person-every-second-of-every-day way. in a straddle-two-different-timezones and let's-just-sleep-less-so-we-can-talk-more kind of way. after the incident i actually feel more grounded in this relationship now than i used to be, which can only be a good thing. oh god. i miss my boyfriend so much though. i can't wait to see him again. :'((((((((

anyway, pictures are all on my facebook. (: yes i will attempt to take some with me in them.....sooner or later. :D

to Hell and back

2009-08-22T07:01:00.009-04:00

ok, so my interpretation of the term "Hell" here is extremely liberal. there were no spouting pits of fire, nor were there deep cavernous abysses with winged harpies ready to devour your soul or anything. true, BTN camp wasn't as bad as I expected, but that was mostly because 90% of the planned outdoor activities (e.g. the 2.5-kilometre run, the 2am jungle-trekking, the physical endurance tests) were canceled due to a participant's untimely death during a jungle activity a few weeks back. (this may sound a bit flippant, but I hope the government gave a due amount of compensation to the poor student's family. :c) and it also helped that I had an awesome awesome group which made the activities for the third and fourth days a lot more bearable, but I digress.

I suppose I was lucky because my batch of participants were the second to test-run a new system of running the camp. So I can't really speak for all BTN camps - obviously seeing as there have been so many reports of racism and insensitivity (or ultrasensitivity?) at camps over the years the government must have finally decided to do something about it (because the power of blogs today is far greater than they ever reckoned, as they kept reminding us, actually), because there was never any outright insulting of other races during my week in Ulu Sepri, unlike previously reported. Yes, there were outrageous trains of logic, yes, at times it all did border on brainwashing, yes, there were a few times I was so silently inflamed I wanted to get up and beat the crap out of someone, but ultimately, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. ...mostly because i'm a loser and any form of hardcore physical activity would have turned my opinion of the camp right around.

the 5 worst things about camp
1. the (lack of) bathing facilities. in the end, because I just couldn't figure out for the life of me how i was supposed to be using my kain basahan in order to use the public bath, I ended up having to shower squatting next to a hose in a toilet stall with a hole in the ground. at one point I actually ended up accidentally launching one of those water scoop-y things directly INTO the toilet because i was attempting to scare away a dragonfly :C um. if anyone else gets enlisted for Ulu Sepri Camp A, try not to use the water scoop in the girls' bathroom, second toilet stall on the left :/;;

2. my bed. it wasn't that bad, really......until the last night at camp. when my friends and I noticed a bunch of dark brown stuff all over my bedsheets and looked up (I was in the lower bunk of a bunk bed) to ultimately realize that all week long, I had been unwittingly sleeping on and showering in........termite eggs. WTF.

3. the wildlife. i hate creatures. all creatures must die. ok so maybe that just extends to include lizards, insects, rats, lizards, insects, and.......lizards. (frogs too, but i didn't see any of those at camp.) see, when we discovered the termite eggs on my bed the girl next to me volunteered to share her bed with me for the night. that is, until we returned that night, and found we had a house guest on our wall: a monitor lizard. A HUGE-ASS MONSTROUS GODZILLA WANNABE MONITOR LIZARD. that took a huge shit on my friend's bed (that my pillow was already on in preparation for that night. brilliant.) so in the end I moved to another dorm for the night, only to discover upon entering that they didn't have a lizard infestation, but a rat one. some girl's bag that was on the floor got chewed right through. lovely. :c

4. waking up early. i hate waking up early under normal circumstances. but these were not normal circumstances. these were run around doing misguided patriotic activities and listening to inflamed patriotic talks till 1am attempt to take a disgusting shower at 2am then wake up at 5.45am to be forced to watch a different historical documentary every day (which all recycled the same footage) and then march and then perform various physical exercises before being given a single morsel to eat at 8am circumstances. so at camp, i abhorred waking up. at all. period.

5. the food. oh god. i am generally a picky eater. about 50% of the time i'm not satisfied with what my mom cooks for dinner, so i usually end up consuming about 4 spoonfuls of rice and select forkfuls of side dishes each time. but this was on an entirely new level. I suppose some meals weren't that bad....but the best it usually got was one edible prepared dish out of three. the rest of the time none of the dishes were edible, so i'd get full on rice and lots of tea (or extremely diluted air sirap). and I have come to realize that I am......really just not a kuih person. like, I just don't like kuih. kuih-muih orang Melayu terlalu manis. manis gila. sampai I pun tak sanggup makan. saya rasa New York mungkin tak ada kuih kut. alhamdulillah. /Malay fail

the relatively nicer things about camp
1. making new friends! this is kind of a duh.

2. getting to interact with Malays again. I actually realized I haven't really had Malay friends for nearly ten years. it was nice to be reminded of how we're all the same kind of people, just with different backgrounds and different cultures, behind all the political agendas. and getting to hear some of my less fortunate friends' stories made me realize how lucky I am to lead the life I live. ..also, i sort of remember how to speak Malay without sounding like a Chinese immigrant again.

3. ok so some of the games were pretty entertaining. mostly the ones with no isi tersirat behind them. especially the "Jambatan goyang-goyang" song which was supposed to be performed in the style of an extremely effeminate male, complete with voice inflections and body actions...you do the math.

4. ...yeah, that's about it.

oh, let me just add that it was nearly impossible to get reception for two out of the three major mobile phone networks at camp. it soon became just another part of the scenery to see dozens of people walking around in between sessions with their hands waving around in the air staring at the little gadgets clutched in their palms and cursing nobody in particular. a random shout of "AAAAHHHHH TWO BARS!!!!!!!!" would invariably draw a sudden rush of people to the same spot, hands flinging around wildly with a renewed frenzy, in hopes of picking up on the same signal. suddenly i wasn't so weird for using every given opportunity to stand in the middle of a bridge (a hotspot) staring at my phone practically blind to the falling rain. it didn't help that i started running out of credit halfway through the week, so pretty soon it became nearly impossible for me to contact the outside world at all. :(

long-distance relationships suck, if you don't know this already.

or maybe i'm just not a relationship kind of person. ..actually, i think i'm too much of a relationship kind of person. I was reading one of those scientific analyses of my personality the other day and it said that I was an extremely needy kind of person who couldn't stand being alone. That I go from relationship to relationship extremely quickly (a relationship addict, I think it was called) because of that aversion to unattachment. hmm. it was something I had never really thought about before, but it seemed to contain more than a hint of truth in it. I suppose it did take me a year before I went from my last relationship to this one, but I'm pretty sure that was due to a lack of opportunity rather than a lack of readiness. I always did use to tell my friends that "the only way to get over a breakup is by falling in love with someone else instead", which was probably a rather telling statement, now that I think about it. I always did fall in love, by the way, far too quickly and far too hard - it's caused me more than my fair share of heartbreak and humiliation in the past, sadly. :( I guess I was lucky my last boyfriend shared that same kind of desire to constantly feel attached, that special "somebody out there owns me" kind of feeling, but what happens when you step back into the real world and realize your significant others aren't always made out of the same mold? suddenly that need to always feel like a part of a couple is no longer a blessing...it's kind of embarrassing. and you're never certain if you're being a loving partner or just an unwanted burden. ~~(the word that was used is unreasonable)~~

here's the question: can you, do you, should you allow yourself to love another person more than it feels they love you?

other than the issues of pride and such. if you really love someone, shouldn't those things no longer matter?

k i need to shut up and pack. i've just been told i'm leaving for london/new york early tuesday morning (it is currently saturday evening) and i have not even begun, crap.

"And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all" --
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all."

my L is F-ed

2009-08-16T11:11:00.007-04:00

i am going to BTN camp for five days beginning tomorrow.

kill me now kill me now kill me now kill me now kill me now

for those of you who don't already know, BTN camp is like National Service crammed into five days with the addition of an exam you must pass in order to qualify for your right to sell your soul to the government for a funded education.

if God is merciful he will give me swine flu in about ten minutes or so. and i will be able to show up at camp, register, and not even make it halfway through the night before infecting my entire dormitory at which point i will demand to be given the exam immediately so i can pass it and be sent home for fear of me dying a premature death in the middle of the jungle and giving BTN camp more bad press than it can already handle. i am also already trying to devise a backup plan in which i somehow manage to allege a random boy of attempting to sexually harrass me and have a freaking panic attack and proceed to make the same demands for the exam and return home etc etc.

but chances are, i will not be afflicted with swine flu, and i will not be harrassed by a random boy (omgpleasenopleaseno), which can only mean i will come home on friday undoubtedly enlightened with the art of how to use a public bath without flashing yourself to your surroundings. then again my surroundings will mostly consist of trees and buffaloes, which is ultimately preferable to perverts and voyeurs.

oh my god. sudden thought. what if someone at camp comes down with swine flu and i am then QUARANTINED up in that stupid mountainous place omgomgomgomgomg

FML

fifteen

2009-08-13T15:46:00.006-04:00

since all the kids from the US Apps 2009 workshop have been working on their 15 Random Things About Me lately (in order to synthesize material for their application essays), I grew a bit nostalgic and decided to try and dig up as many of my old "Random Thing" memes as possible. of course this notion lasted only about 15.5 seconds (enough time for me to quickly scan through just one most recent one on Facebook and rapidly give up on the idea), so here are a whole brand spanking new set of 15 random things about me (I never recycle ;))........just because.

15 Random Things About Me (Take 7, or something, possibly)

1. I really like making lists. :D there's something very thrilling about it all, like the suspense that lies in between the 1s and 2s or little bullet points, or the mostly-unvoiced/unnoticed/presumptuous expectation that by the end of your list EVERYTHING you have mentioned will come into place and form one giant fantastical conclusion that will save the universe, or at least make your day.

2. i don't like bread. i just don't. why do people eat bread? it's disgusting.

3. I secretly enjoy stereotypes. (well, some of them.) ironically, they make life a little bit more colorful.

4. i think my getting into columbia was a fluke

5. every time I look at old family pictures I surreptitiously observe how fat I was at various stages of my life. for some reason in my head i believe if i can spot the timeframe during which i magically "bloomed", i will be able to travel back to that time and stop that little kid (preferably screaming "HALT!!!!!!!!" in a very dramatic way with my palm outstretched and holding a big red shiny stop sign) from crossing that dreadful border.

6. the only reason I currently want to learn Chinese is so my boyfriend's mom will like me. :c

7. but i still very selfishly hope and pray the Chinese economy will fail so i will no longer feel obliged to learn the language.

8. recently my capitalisation has become a very temperamental creature. I can never strictly capitalise or uncapitalise my blog posts because sometimes i can be bothered to press the Shift key and sometimes i can't. notice the fluctuations in this very last sentence. occasionally i'll feel bad about how it looks afterwards and go back and make it uniform but for now i'll just leave it au naturale (this is requiring a strange amount of willpower for some reason, I just really want to uncapitalise that I) so you can see what i'm trying to say.

9. lists are cool because they cut out all the crap in between the good stuff.

10. well-organized textbooks make me so happy. there is just something very magical and euphoric i find about being able to flip through and marvel at how well a book teaches one its contents. the books that scream "LEARN ME!" are keepers. i am especially in love with my revised edition of Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese (by Akira Miura and Naomi Hanaoka McGloin). my dad brought it back for me from Sydney today and i was so joyous to be reunited with it i spent hours just reading grammar lessons and reciting the passages aloud to myself

11. there are many, many occasions in my day-to-day life where i pause out of nowhere and wonder if I, as a person, as a student and a human being, deserve a lot less or more credit than I tend to give myself. there is such a huge crime in both undervaluing and overvaluing one's self that i just can't decide which would be preferable.

12. when i'm on my computer in my room i drink too much water and therefore always need to go to the toilet

13. I don't know how to play solitaire. like, i really DON'T. it seems like everyone and their grandmother knows how to play solitaire but i've never really managed to comprehend what it's all about. i used to cheat during computer lab periods by just dragging cards all over the screen until they stuck somewhere (and then i'd know that was where they were supposed to go). till today i still don't know what the point of those piles at the top were for. Aces? why the hell are the aces up there in the first place? D;

14. i've always secretly thought the 1990 people have it all. I seem to know of far too many (far, FAR too many) perfect people who were born in 1990. it deeply vexes me. is that even possible? what year comes after the Snake anyway? hmm must wiki.

15. I'm so excited by the thought that in a few years my friends will all (hopefully) start getting married. can you imagine being invited to friends' wedding ceremonies on Facebook and watching them start uploading pictures of their kids and families and brand new homes?? :DD it's so crazy to think that loads of people meet their future husbands or wives at university - which is where we are now. I actually have a sekrut list of the friends I know who are dating that are likely to stick together and get married one day.....but obviously that list is staying secret. >;D (well currently it only really consists of three couples. actually possibly four. which is quite a lot, all things considering.)

Bonus #16: ...the little things matter. i wish i didn't care so much. :'(

meh, i don't think this list was one of my best works. i actually reckon i've run out of fresh new facts to tell people. :( let me add more garam to my diet (ahem, from the Chinese saying "your elders have eaten more salt than you" i.e. have had more experiences in life) and then i will get back to you.

Link to second-most recent list here. Was written a week before I left for Sydney in February. actually, six months ago. wow. time flies. o_o

it's 4am!

i hope my sadness goes away.

i hope i dream with one eye open tonight. (:

on seeking the legendary

2009-08-12T04:53:00.007-04:00

haaaaaaaaiiiiiiihhhhhhhhhhhhh.

*deep breaths*

I've just spent many many many hours reviewing Malaysian students' application essays to the US. One of the bonuses for the 250 students that have been attending the US Apps 2009 workshop is that they get to submit their essays and CVs to us for review and much harsh guidance on their third day. It is strange how exhausted yet refreshed I feel after all this reading and typing :D I actually reckon I feel so refreshed because I'm getting to be really mean to people in a very legit way and it is quite satisfying. (oklah I'm really not being that mean, I criticize CONSTRUCTIVELY. really.)

Reading all the essays that have been submitted really made me realize how it was never a wonder that Malaysian students always did so badly in previous years when applying to the US. There was just always a lack of information and proper guidance for us - it's actually a miracle that I was even admitted in the first place. But being the activist idealists (yes we have been blogged about!) that we are, the Malaysian admits are finally making a huge effort to increase awareness of American education in the country. I could not be prouder of our efforts! :D Though due to lack of time I'm really only a small part of them. Chen Chow actually cried this morning when he woke up to see that every single essay that had been sent to us for review last night had nearly three comments each overnight - and by comments I do mean long, in-depth evaluations, though sometimes the temptation to leave them with a quote another facilitator, "BOOORRRRIIINNNGGG. your essay goes on and on about absolutely nothing of any significance at all and makes me physically ill. rewrite or go to hell. end" is very strong indeed. John Lee (from Dartmouth) actually managed to leave a comment for every single damn one. I have no idea if the man even slept last night. The current and future applicants to the US have no idea how lucky they actually are. (I feel like my mom and dad already. "you all ah got Facebook got Internet got Playstation you know we used to catch frogs in the drain you know how lucky you all are or not?!")

Little things like this make me believe that we are not doomed to fail as a society; and that one magical wonderful day ~~we will break free and fly away~~ our youth might just be able to save us from all the mistakes our forefathers have made. If we ever get rid of this oppression, I wonder who it will be that will have the first scream?

By the way, I don't think I've mentioned it, but very recently I came to the sad and sobering realization that I officially hate being Malaysian. I think it was sometime between receiving my JPA scholarship and reading about BTN camp and the death of Teoh Beng Hock. I'm disgusted at how the opposition parties so fervently promised and preached change when they wanted to be elected into office this year, but when Malaysians delivered and rejoiced in their victory, they proved to be the same type of poison under a different name. I also feel like I'm selling my soul to the government for the right to pursue my education, but I think I've mentioned that already. (BITE THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU.)

So sad. :'( *sniff*

i want to fly away
i want to live BIG.
someone pls take me <3

P.S. oh apparently today is Dom's birthday and my awesome friends in Sydney are making him complete 21 tasks in order to qualify as a mature 21-year-old so he is running around with posters asking people to vote for him in the next ERECTION (also something involving a pun on his name which is HO), waving flags that have been prepared for the same cause, also he is wearing his pants inside-out with his nails painted sparkly blue and asking people on the street to become his knights and maidens and join him in his quest and also he had to make out with a streetlamp. i am obviously out of the loop since i am on a different continent so i can't tell you what the other 16 things on the list are even though i very dearly wish i could. :( will i ever get to do something so legendary? and will i get to tell the world if i do?

play a lovegame

2009-08-10T00:43:00.015-04:00

I am such a gameslut.

I downloaded six more games for my DS yesterday and the day before, and the only thing that's been stopping me from downloading more is the extreme guilt that seems to heavily weigh upon me. It's kind of like having a blog, actually. Once you start a blog, you're expected to finish a blog. Not that it's really possible to finish blogging, but you know what I mean lah right. Don't update for a few days and the feeling of discomfort starts to creep into your spine every second you find yourself with access to the Internet.

"aiyah blog only lah. but i got nothing to say! yalah but just say something only lah. but then not nice to read also for what i want to write? not like anyone reads also for what you care? but then if people see then not nice lah. look bad only. pai seh. it's YOUR responsibility so just go and post something lah!! one sentence also can!!! cannot. my blog look too emo already."

(the above merely being a very general example. um, of course. >.>;;;)

I've actually downloaded over 100 games and finished, um. about 16 of them. (of the ones that can be finished anyway.) so the ones that I finish normally have to be really really good, or at least have a storyline so riveting or gameplay so addictive (yet not overly challenging) that I don't just lose interest halfway through or jump cartridge to another more exciting prospect.

but anyway. I've been very actively looking for new games to play lately because I have waaaay too much free time on my hands (and a boyfriend that's perpetually MIA. hmm :c). However, the next few months look to be extremely promising new release-wise and here are the games I have basically been willing to sell my soul for ever since I've learned of their existence and eminent release! (drumroll drumroll!)

1. Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box
Zay and I once got into an argument that lasted walking all the way from Myers to his apartment in Chinatown over whether Professor Layton could kick World of Warcraft's ass. My whole argument was that you cannot compare the two games because they are of entirely different genres, but they are both undoubtedly extremely good and widely critically-acclaimed games. But of course my darling boyfriend was being a total WoW/PSP snob who is averse to all things DS (or anything that doesn't involve graphic violence) and we actually ended up getting really pissed off at each other. 8) He also refused to believe that The Sims could possibly be the highest-selling PC game in history till I showed him the stats on Wikipedia. Girl and casual gamers are a growing and significant market, people. Believe it. (And if you haven't already played Professor Layton and the Curious Village, you don't know what you're missing!!)

2. Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth
Yeah so, the first time I heard of the Ace Attorney series my reaction was kind of like....what???? I mean, I don't know how someone came up with the idea of a game revolving around a defense attorney, but I'm pretty sure there wouldn't have been a burgeoning law student market or anything of the like. But I played the fourth game in the series and the rest, as they say, is history - I loved it so much I went and downloaded all the previous three games, played all of them through, then went back and played the fourth one all over again just to tie it all together. (I haven't even been able to do that with my Harry Potter books, even though I've often tried. Go figure.) For someone that normally can't even finish one game, let alone four of roughly the same gameplay, this is a HUGE testament to how awesomely compelling the storytelling of all the games in the series is. You may have your doubts, but just go pick one up and see for yourself - and don't blame me when you're not able to put it down. Ace Attorney Investigations is the first in the series where you actually play a prosecutor instead of a defense attorney, and apparently gameplay is completely different from the previous games in the series. But I have extremely high expectations, particularly plot-wise, and I am confident Capcom will not have let me down. :DDD

3. Scribblenauts
Basically the game that defines what the Nintendo DS is all about. Write anything, create anything, do whatever the hell you want as long as you complete that level. This game won a gazillion awards at all the gameshows this summer. Dude, you can summon a "manbearpig" (idk wtf that is) or give God a skateboard and shotgun and sic him on Cthulhu. THAT IS THE BEST GAMER EXPERIENCE HUMANLY POSSIBLE RIGHT THERE.

4. Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days
Kingdom Hearts comes to the DS. 'Nuff said. :D (and if you're wondering, the title is apparently read "Kingdom Hearts Three Five Eight Days over Two". hmmm. i dunno. D:)

5. The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks
I guess this won't be out for a while since I can't actually find a release date or proper cover art for it yet. :/ But the prequel to this game on the DS, Phantom Hourglass, was just endless hours of fun and awesomeness, and it's likely that this one will not disappoint either. <3

6. Mini Ninjas
I actually only discovered this game yesterday. I haven't even seen proper DS gameplay yet; I think I watched gameplay from the Xbox 360 version or something. but it looks awesome. and most importantly, it looks cute. very cute.

The moral of the story is: GET A DS.

come on gaiz, sometimes amazing CGI and big budgets are overrated. (yes, this applies to not just movies but games as well.) what you want in a game is pure, unadulterated FUN. which the DS provides in the form of some the most original, wackiest, creative games you will ever see. (trust me, there are some games I really want to buy the PSP for, but overall, the PSP vs DS gamepool just cannot even compare.)

if you get lost, ask me! i will happily recommend you some of the best games in the known game universe. :DDDDDDDDDD

and games are sometimes the only thing that can take your mind off things you'd rather not be thinking about. that are too emo for this post of love and joy for all things electronic.

kesimpulannya, i am so glad i was born a child of the 21st century. (:

you also will die without your Facebook. correct or not?

prozac nation

2009-08-08T03:33:00.007-04:00

ugh. I was looking through the blog I wrote when I was 16 and came across a personality disorder test I took back in October 2005. my life has been a big cesspit of awfulness and all things miserable the past few days so I decided to take it again to see if my results would have changed after four years. Here was the outcome:

Me at 15
Paranoid: Low
Schizoid: Low
Schizotypal: Moderate
Antisocial: Moderate
Borderline: Moderate
Histrionic: High
Narcissistic: Moderate
Avoidant: Low
Dependent: Moderate
Obsessive-Compulsive: Low

Me at 19
Paranoid: High
Schizoid: Low
Schizotypal: Low
Antisocial: High
Borderline: Moderate
Histrionic: Very High
Narcissistic: High
Avoidant: High
Dependent: High
Obsessive-Compulsive: Moderate

:( suffice to say, all the red stuff is things I've apparently gotten crazier in. the sad part is, i think i agree with all of it. it's more than bad enough to be even one of the above, apparently i am SEVEN psychological disorders rolled into one. omg, i am just a complete lunatic. >:C

one thing i do mildly attempt to practice is self-analysis. I over-analyse myself (and the people around me, in an extremely amateur way, of course) all the time. they should like totally put me on Oprah i would kick dr phil's ass. ANYWAY as i was saying I think it's important to know about your flaws in precise detail, as demeaning as it may be, if you want to have any hope of fixing them. (I should probably get around to doing the Nohari window one day..) So here's a cheerful list of all the things that are wrong with me, according to neuroscience! :D ~~please don't run away from me after reading this. :c~~

Unwillingness to forgive perceived insults
Excessive sensitivity to setbacks
Consumed by anticipation of betrayal
Combative and tenacious adherence to personal rights
Relentlessly suspicious
Strong feelings of anger, anxiety, or depression that last for several hours
Feelings of low self-worth
Unstable relationships with friends, family, and boyfriends/girlfriends
Needs to be the center of attention
Rapidly-shifting and shallow emotions
Exaggerates friendship
Overly-dramatic, occasionally theatrical speech
Requires excessive praise and admiration
Obsessed with fantasies of fame, power, or beauty
Preoccupation with being rejected or criticized in social situations
Fear of embarrassment results in avoidance of new activities
Poor self-image; feelings of social ineptitude
Desire for improved social relations
Deeply hurt by mild criticism or disapproval
Has a need to be taken care of
Jumps from relationship to relationship
Remains in abusive relationships
Sets unreasonably high standards for themselves and others

etc. :c

Unfortunately the website did not provide much for means of a cure. Apparently most people with my "disorders" have a great need for talk therapy, which is probably why I rant so much and so often to people whether they like it or not. Which is why i needed to start blogging again, so i could get it all out of my system, all these poisonous horrible thoughts that i have, because even if they may seem like really horrible things to say sometimes, sometimes it is only by getting the horrible out of my system that i start feeling normal again.

so I'd just like to take this opportunity to apologize to you (whoever you are) if I've ever hurt or offended you by anything I've ever written about. :( whether it was this blog or my previous one or the one before that or the one before that. I know I've said some awful things to certain people. I should really just slap a password on my blogs and keep them that way. I swear I love the people around me. I'm just so lonely all the time. ._. People and their opinions and acceptance mean a lot more to me than they should.

Oh, but I just really need to say something.

As someone that's gone through clinical depression and self-mutilation, what really pisses me off is how others can be so closed-minded in their evaluation of people's emotions and motivations. Just because something is not relevant or real to you does not make it irrelevant or any less real or dismissable to somebody else. Just because a setback in life may seem petty on the surface does not mean it cannot affect people in extremely deep and varied ways. This is just my opinion, but the people that can't understand that without passing some kind of judgement on others from the imaginary moral high ground they like to think they hold demonstrate a complete lack of empathy and human understanding. High IQ, zero EQ. I may not be the pro, but EQ is what gets you places.

when i was in high school i used to think i would really like to be a psychiatrist or psychologist so i could help people. i always, always wanted to talk to people, and know what made them tick, and help them see the areas they are often blind to themselves, and help them make the changes that would immensely better their lives.

but now i think i should really work on bettering myself first. :(

but hey, at least i know where i'm at now, and i'm not in any amount of denial about it. (kudos must be given for that. y/y?) (:

i don't think i'll ever

2009-08-05T08:28:00.007-04:00

latest update on one of the unkindest days of my life: once again, my mind has proven to be greater than my body, and the stress has given me a rocketing high fever. at least that explains the constant throbbing migraine.

we buried my dog in the garden a few hours ago. i shoveled dirt onto her body until my hands blistered and my tears turned the soil on my arms to mud but i just kept shoveling some more.

when i was in the shower washing her off me i suddenly remembered that night so clearly, when his face suddenly changed as he looked at me and i was reminded uncannily of a child. when out of the blue he said in a small voice "I don't think I'll ever love anyone in my entire life as much as I love you." i looked at him differently after that night. i still remember so vividly how i thought i knew at that moment that we would spend the rest of our lives together.

oh god. please get me painkillers for this now

goodbyes

2009-08-04T23:37:00.013-04:00

sometimes i forget that not all people are made the same way.

by this i don't mean the various means and ways in which one can be conceived, if that wasn't clear already.

but we are all such essentially different people at heart that it can feel like such a spark or tremendous leap of joy when you see yourself in somebody else. you think, "this person could be my best friend. this person could be my soulmate." you get so carried away by that possibility of true connection that nothing but getting to know that person matters.

i have met one such person in my life. a girl. i wanted to be best friends with her the moment i knew of her existence, and i still do.

i'm sure she has no idea.

*

Bitsy died this morning.

she used to sleep under my dad's (or mom's, whichever was parked in the front porch at the time) car all the time. so normally, whenever someone got in the car and started it, she'd immediately crawl out from underneath it and find somewhere else to lie. normally, she'd be out of there the second you opened your car door and shut it again.

so maybe, something was already wrong with her, before my dad backed his car out this morning and ran her over.

it was so sudden. and so quiet. no barking, no blood. just Bitsy, lying there, lifeless, but looking for the world like she was nothing but asleep.

it was the stiffness of her limbs that gave it away.

Bitsy came to us when i was only 13. she came with another dog, that my dad named Xena (which i constantly heckled him for), and when we gave Xena away to the SPCA because we couldn't afford both, Bitsy stayed.

she stayed with me all throughout high school and college and more.

longer than anyone has ever been willing to stay with me.

more patient with me, my crying when i was sad, my ignorance when i couldn't be bothered, my lack of effort, my lack of commitment, than anyone ever was or could be.

i remember how only a week ago i tried sneaking her into the house, into my bedroom, while my mom was out. she had never been into the house all her seven years with us, and i remember laughing at how tentative she was about even stepping past the threshold of the front door. i would walk a few steps with her, then look back to realize she was already back outside, looking around fearfully for fear of my mom's screeching voice. it took a while, but i finally managed to drag her in. she was so good and quiet the whole time - in comparison to Bear, who, being an obnoxious puppy, has already to our annoyance barged into the house and my room countless times in the past ten months we've had him.

i'm so glad she got to see my bedroom before she went away.

and i regret hardly spending more than five minutes with her the past week.

Bitsy was the first real, loyal pet we ever had, and i knew when i cried this morning, and when my sister found out and we hugged each other and cried together, and as i cry now, that i'm crying for the loss of a member of my family.

RIP Baby. We'll miss you so, so much.

I know I already do.

*

and yes, my boyfriend and i broke up today.

i told him he deserved ~~better~~ different. he agreed.

this was at about the very same time my dad ran Bitsy over

*

i went to Assunta Hospital about half an hour later for my complete medical checkup for the scholarship. my eyeballs were red and swollen and my head was splitting open and i was lacking so much oxygen from crying so much i could just barely even breathe. i thought they would take one look at me and scratch out my entire medical examination form.

i had to force nearly two litres of disgusting filtered tap water down my throat in a dirty toilet stall just so i could produce enough pee for two urine tests. it took me nearly an hour just to get it done with. the whole time i felt like vomiting my insides out and like my head and heart could not possibly throb any more.

they injected live culture into my body for some test i have never even heard of before. it looked very much like you'd imagine when one injects live culture into your body - think The Matrix. luckily for me the lump on my arm disappeared pretty quickly. i took two blood tests - one for HIV, which i had to sign a consent form for, which scared the hell out of me because when i asked them what my risks were they said "HIV" which just didn't make any sense to me - and a chest x-ray.

the only thing i could process the entire time was that the nurse who administered the live culture injection to me was so, so beautiful. she looked like a model or a cabin attendant for SIA. it somehow touched me through all the nausea and dilution and pain that someone so beautiful could have decided to devote her life to becoming a nurse and helping others instead.

i thought to myself that she is more beautiful than any supermodel i have ever seen.

*

I have realized why it is so important that I need to blog, now more than ever.

I need an outlet for my pain and an outlet for all the other stupid, crazy, fluctuating emotions that I feel.

I need to be able to cry and tell somebody, anybody about how frustrated and insecure and depressed and just sad I can be without curtly being told that I am an irrational, overemotional, oversensitive, selfish human being.

I need to be able to be weak without being made to feel like it is something I should be ashamed of.

because it's not.

and now I know.

and I know beyond a shadow of doubt that if you cannot understand that everybody is allowed to cry, and that some people just have more things to cry about than others, and that just because you aren't the same doesn't mean that you are the norm, and that the only thing every single person wants is one person they can go to and cry to and know that they will be taken care of, and this is their safe haven, then you are the selfish one. and you are the one that will never even come close to comprehending love.

if you can't give that to me, there are many who can.

tonight I am going to sleep stronger than I have ever been before.

quicksand

2009-08-03T03:52:00.012-04:00

"You came along, I didn't know of love
But now I know that sometimes it's just not enough
...Baby, because you and me are sinking like quicksand"

please excuse me while I be a ridiculous ~~emo kid~~ bitch and ~~mope around~~ viciously scream via a bunch of HTML for a few minutes.

Everything was going absolutely perfect not a very long time ago (a mere two posts ago really), and by perfect I mean complete, unadulterated joy and happy bunnies and cotton candy and bliss. But yeah, we do know how this normally goes: said perfection was the zenith of my post-Sydney pre-Columbia era, and a very wise person once rightfully propounded that you do indeed fall harder the higher you climb.

All of a sudden everything seems to be going wrong. :c Yes I have a scholarship, but it's not the scholarship I wanted or expected, and while it may pay off the most, it is also certainly the scholarship with the most downsides by far as well. (call me ungrateful, but it's like being bought off by the hand that poisons you, to put it in a very non-sensitive way, which any young Malaysian will probably understand in a heartbeat.) Getting the scholarship also meant I now have the wrong kind of American visa, and judging from my many calls and conversations with occasionally-helpful people, I might not even be able to enter the country come my departure date in just over three weeks. Adding insult to injury, I now also have to attend the much-dreaded five-day Nazi camp and put up with all the racist political dogma or risk my scholarship being revoked. (but yeah, i'll be honest, i just don't want to have to go jungle-trekking and be forced to sleep alongside 5792846622 mosquitoes. come on, that was so lower high school.)

let's not even touch on matters of the heart here :( (because if i could lay my hands on that one person who destroyed the whole of my Sunday, and most of today, and a large chunk of trust i once had in my boyfriend, she would probably be waiting in line for her turn at a facial reconstruction surgery by now. thanks for rocking the foundations of the one thing i thought i could bank my life on, bitch. it's all gone now. everything is gone.)

IMPORTANT NOTE TO SELF: the government is giving me lots of cash. selling my soul to save my family's holiday plans is a plausibly reasonable trade-off

Please lend me your unwelcome rodents and skanks. They will serve perfectly as a medium for channeling my emotional turmoil into slightly more productive measures. (:

peculiarities

2009-07-29T23:57:00.001-04:00

It is strange how love is.

It is strange how love can be and is defined in any dictionary; when love itself is such a mutable thing.

It is strange how love transforms a human being, a creature solely devised to be the fittest and survive, into one that would give up their life for another - defying the laws of genetics and evolution.

It is strange how love can be felt by both animals and man, when so much else is limited to only the latter.

It is strange how the people we love can, at times, make us feel so full (what is it that's full? our souls? does love directly feed our souls? i think it does), and at times, make us feel so empty.

Like a husk or an empty shell, washed up on a secluded beach; friendless, alone.

Like this letter I wish I could write to you. But cannot begin.

*

It is perhaps not so strange how the people we love hurt us the most of all - who else do we allow to remain so close by our beating heart?

Five litres a minute, coursing through our bodies (what about the soul?), everything tainted with one person, and one person alone.

A prime position to simply reach out an appropriately-placed word, or not to reach out at all, and make our insides stop. The human heart is myogenic -- it tries to keep beating. And it hurts. How it hurts.

Letting people into our heart is like swallowing the poison.

But we do it anyway, because somehow, someway, we want to be let into someone else's the same way. Like we used to be, as a child unborn -- so close to another's heart. So warm, so protected. So safe to be so close to another's soul. How can they destroy you when they'd be destroying themselves?

You might say it's a survival technique.

And at the end of the day, two souls feel better than one ~~(as long as we don't remind ourselves that one soul feels better than none.)~~

It is strange how iloveyou.

It is very, very strange.

(or perhaps..not so strange at all)

dreaming with one eye open

2009-07-27T02:33:00.006-04:00

....I can't believe it.

This morning I woke up to find a huge brown envelope with express shipment markings all over it sitting neatly on my desk chair. What does a person do upon finding a huge brown envelope with express shipment markings all over it sitting neatly on their desk chair?

Well, in my case, ignore it, apparently. I think I actually might have sat a little on it at one point.

As much as I love getting things in the mail as much as the next person (it's just always so much more exciting than receiving an e-mail or post on your Facebook Wall, for some reason, which makes it so much more of a disappointment when you rip the envelope off with glee to discover that you've received a - congratulations! - bank flyer or new summer catalogue), my complete lack of interest was actually due to the fact that last night, I had received something also in a huge brown envelope with very similar markings all over it - except that one had "URUSAN SERI PADUKA BAGINDA" (or "AFFAIRS OF THE KING") officially stamped on it. What was in that envelope was, as befitting something to do with our good King, completely mindblowing and unexpected and just made all the hard work I've ever put in over the past 20 years so worth it, but I get ahead of myself. (wait in suspense till end of entry for some excellent news? ;))

Anyway. Upon waking up a little bit and actually looking at the envelope, I came to realize that this was, in fact, a brand new and very different envelope. Looking at the description on the front and feeling - well, that very unique omg-i-got-something-in-the-mail :D! feeling, I saw that the package had been shipped to me from the United States. Quick but very real panic attack: Did I inadvertently buy something I cannot possibly afford on eBay?! Hm, no. But the description of the package said "Books" right there, and then I thought, oh, Columbia's screwed up again and sent me a third copy of The Iliad. (Yeah, they sent me two. How eager are they for me to read this abysmal thing anyway?) But but! No Columbia official logo on the envelope. Hmmmm. The mystery thickens. :o

I tore open the envelope to find another one inside (haha. very funny UPS Express.) and then see an invoice for whatever it is this mysterious package contains. I prise it open with trepidation and.....cannot believe my eyes. Because what is written on said invoice, other than my boyfriend's name, is Ashes and Snow.

Does anyone remember me talking about Ashes and Snow? Probably not. But back in March of last year, I discovered an amazing project by photographer Gregory Colbert called Ashes and Snow, and promptly fell head over heels for it. While the entire project itself is visionary, a marriage of photography and film and a traveling museum, what I truly wanted was to read this book. Composed of 365 letters a man writes to his wife every day as he journeys around the world, it contains extremely Zen gems such as these:

In the beginning of time, the skies were filled with flying elephants.
Too heavy for their wings, they sometimes crashed through the trees and frightened other animals.

All the flying grey elephants migrated to the source of the Ganges.
They agreed to renounce their wings and settle on the earth.
When they molted, millions of wings fell to the earth, the snow covered and the Himalayas were born.

The blue elephants landed in the sea and their wings became fins.
They are whales, the trunkless elephants of the oceans.
Their cousins are the manatees, the trunkless elephants of the rivers.

The chameleon elephants kept their wings but agreed never again to land on the earth. When they go to sleep, the elephants always lie down in the same place in the sky and dream with one eye open.

The stars you see at night are the unblinking eyes of sleeping elephants, who sleep with one eye open to best keep watch over us.

*

A pod of whales was lying like long reclining Buddhas on the sea. My sister and I put our ears to the bottom of the boat so we could listen to their songs.

We turned to my grandfather and asked," What do their songs mean?"

"The whales do not sing because they have an answer," he said. "They sing because they have a song."

I had basically given up all hope of ever getting to read these 365 letters - because each book, individually handcrafted in Nepal, was being sold for nearly USD150. In fact, back when I originally discovered it, it was being sold for USD175 - waaaay out of my price range.

And yet there it was, right in front of me, cover made of Nepalese paper coated in beeswax, bound by two thin-waxed chords, with bamboo defining the exterior flap. Each book unique, pages printed - typewritten - individually in Italy, on the most gorgeous aged paper (a different texture for every page). And all this, apparently, because my boyfriend 4,108 miles away wanted to give me something really special - just because. (:

"Look for that which is not visible. Learn to dream with one eye open."

i know, i know. I probably didn't do anything to deserve this. and this probably seems like such a random non-traditional gift for a guy to give his girlfriend. but (excuse the PDA) damn i love my boyfriend ((((((((: ♥ I can't actually tell you what it's about right now since he's forbidden me from reading more than one letter a day. (omg. I've just realized that means it will LITERALLY take me a YEAR to finish reading this DDD; THAT IS NOT POSSIBLE. note to self: MUST BREAK DOWN ZAY. negotiate for two letters a day, at least. D:)

Speaking of pretty things i got in the mail recently, i recently redecorated my DS! (:

Yes, to match my Macbook. ;) Exactly the same design by exactly the same people. my DS is so loved by the way. if my DS and my iPod were sliding off a cliff heading for a Bottomless Pit of Doom, i'd totally save my DS. (and if you don't have a DS, you need to get one. like...you need to get one. true story.)

BUT FOR THE REALLY GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY! (drumroll please) I got the JPA scholarship!!! :DD This awesome feat is made a gazillion times awesomer by the fact that I didn't actually apply for it. Well, in a sense I did, since apparently my dad secretly applied for me while I was in Sydney.....but the point is, that was all he had to do. No interviews, no questions, nothing. Once they heard I was going to an Ivy League university, they handed me that full scholarship (complete with insanely large probably unnecessary amounts of additional allowances - I mean, RM1,200 specifically for me to buy winter clothes?! o.OoO") in a big brown envelope (yes, the mysterious one that I mistook Zay's surprise for). It just seems bizarre to me that these people I've never known or met are basically handing me over a million ringgit to further my education. And that fact alone is enough justification for me to encourage absolutely every capable Malaysian student out there to just give the Ivies a shot. It feels like finally, finally, I have something concrete to thank the government for.

It may be a bit belated-lah, but I have come to realize there is no feeling like the one earned when all your blood, sweat and tears over your seemingly pitiful academic life finally pays off in the form of lifting this overwhelming burden off your parents and family. My sister can dream of going to the States now. My parents can stop deliberating if they should sell off their property. My family can start going on annual holidays again. I am currently in this state of simultaneous bliss and disbelief over how lucky and blessed I have been these past few months for all these countless things, both small and large. All I want to do half the time is get down on my knees and cry. humbled and undeserving and oh so grateful. that's what i feel to the very core.

Sigh. Life is so good right now. I don't want it to end. at this point in time, i really don't think i could ask for more ((:

chapter, meet close.

2009-07-26T07:54:00.006-04:00

tomorrow a new semester at university begins.

Not for me, though. tomorrow my Big Plan involves ignoring the remaining four books of The Iliad (we have to read twelve books now, not six) and wondering how G's wisdom tooth extraction is going. but a new semester for all the people I left behind in Sydney. It's a new beginning that I'm no longer a part of. (or perhaps the new beginning for me is that I'm not really doing anything?? ..ok, let's not quibble here.) The point is, that a chapter very new and tangible, a newness that for some reason is strangely empirical, seems to be beginning in my life, and I feel like something unseen but big and scary is pushing me to adapt, adapt, adapt. Not unlike Hugh in Friel's Translations with his "fossilising" unless we "renew our images", and "'always' is a silly word", rinse and repeat.

So I adapt, because that is what the big unseen scary monster is telling me to do. (Btw did anyone ever realize that Friel kinda looked like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle? no disrespect intended. and sorry, LOOKS, because apparently he's still alive (gosh i am just a joyful bubble of faux pas today). P.S. if you didn't know this, imageGoogling "Friel" gives you pictures of semi-nude girls. hmmmm.)

New blog means new clean slate to mess up for new chapter of life, etc etc. Or maybe I am just a blogwhore (this is my fourth blog in four years) - the thought has definitely crossed my mind, thankyouverymuch. I swear this is really not a conscious effort on my part, though, like an annual purging of the systems or something - it just always feels like something I really have to do in order to move on with certain aspects in my life. Some people cut their hair, some people move to a different country.....I change blogs. (But come to think about it, I did all three. Twice, in the same year. ..haihyoh.)

Now, assuming every chapter of every book requires a title, we need to think of names for all my previous ones. Sydney was the "Girl Emerges From Cocoon, Becomes Semi-Social-Butterfly-slash-Facebook-Whore" chapter, which was awesome. A-Levels at HELP was the "Girl Rethinks All Values And Priorities" chapter, which was painful but necessary. High school was the "Girl Undergoes Token Emo Period" chapter, which was.....best off forgotten. And the ones before all those shouldn't even need to be touched with a fifty-foot jolok.

I don't really know what I want this next chapter to be, but i can think of all the ways it could go so utterly wrong. I know I've got a great start to this story, though - an amazing opportunity to work my ass off at an awesome beyond awesome university (or do I have to say "college" now, a la Americane?) - but it will ultimately become whatever I (and the people I choose to surround myself with) make it.

This could mean I am screwed, but let's remain optimistic. (let's also check back on just how awesome i think my college is 6 months from now.)

So in order to close the fantabulous little time bubble of my life that was my five-month sojourn in Sydney (that is essentially what it was, a time bubble - where time seemed to stand still in our little exclusive circle of people and everything that happened to us (there were many things that happened to us!) was so surreal yet rough to the touch at the same time), here are my 10 Favourite Memories of Sydney (illustrated with pictures where I can find them):

1. The night of our Accounting mid-term

Obviously this memory wouldn't have anything to do with the midterm itself (though I did get a HD on it, yay me! :D!). That night was the night I met the people who were to become my closest friends (or the ones that introduced me to my closest friends) in Sydney for the rest of my three months there, though not all of them are pictured above. It was also the first night I went clubbing, and the first time I met Zay. (: (For the record, it was not love at first sight as he likes to think.....when we first met at dinner i thought he was an unfriendly snob. :x this impression rapidly changed though upon us discovering that a) he could dance b) he could dance very well c) he wasn't THAT much of a snob and d) it was just really funny how one girl we fondly dubbed "the tranny" literally draped herself all over him the entire night.)

2. Meeting Eunsu at Women's College

It was the third (or fourth?) day of Women's O-Week when I spotted Ella talking to another Asian girl I could only assume was Korean in the corner of the reception area. Now that I think about it, it was actually the morning of the Chancellor's Welcome, since we were all dressed in those godawful ill-fitting academic gowns. I walked over and introduced myself, and upon confirming the fact that Eunsu was indeed Korean, immediately asked: "Do you like Dong Bang Shin Ki?" (Please don't judge me.) As it turned out, she did - and we even had the same favourite member. I told her she could come over to my room anytime if she ever felt homesick or in need of some DBSK love, and this shy girl I had never even noticed before immediately burst into a huge grin and exclaimed, "Ohmygod, LYNN! You are my new favourite person!!!!!" And we rapidly became each other's closest confidantes at College. ♥

3. The Amazing Race

oh. my. god. from uni to Newtown to Circular Quay to Darling Harbour to Hyde Park to Railway Square to Glebe to uni again, ENTIRELY ON FOOT. Just thinking about that disgustingly hot day makes my calves hurt again. the free pizza at the end DID NOT make up for the physical and mental torture we were forced to undergo (and the egg-balancing while manouveuring that idiotic jungle gym rope thing which was being simultaneously terrorized by 5-year-old brats after our calf muscles had already been reduced to masses of shivering jelly was just. cruel.) But still, it's definitely something I will remember (though I've already forgotten how many Thai restaurants there were in Newtown and how many of them offered $6 lunch specials). Sadly, Casper the white balloon we were entrusted with did not make it. Our Nazi of a group leader spiked him on the grass when we didn't win. Poor Casper :'c

4. The ComSoc cruise

I asked him if we could trade glowsticks - I had wanted the pinkish-purplish one all night. He said, "Sure."

Kids, trading glowsticks can lead to bad decisions. Baaaad decisions. (Why did Ted Mosby's voice echo ominously in my head as I typed that?)

5. Awesome nights with awesome people

I loved our crew. A minimum of fifteen shots - anytime, anywhere. People making out with people's friends, people making out with each other.....it was kind of like Gossip Girl, Kangaroo Edition. Nights at Home and Pumphouse and Verandah were especially legendary. Equilibrium also became a legendary night........for all the wrong reasons. (Read: we got so bored five of us fell asleep. they kicked us out pretty quick.)

6. My first ever Passover

I didn't take pictures (why didn't I take pictures?!), so um, have an awesome Jew. Having known next to nothing about Jews and Judaism for the first nineteen years of my life, it was a good learning experience to get to know my Jewish relatives better (my aunt married a Jew and converted, don't look surprised, we are a totally global society!). One weekend they took me out to Hornsby to celebrate Passover with them and their friends, which was very weirdly interesting. At one point I had to recite the ten plagues in Japanese, which involved me quickly looking up how to say "wild beasts" and "pestilence" in my very handy DS dictionary. (I cheated on "incurable boils" by saying the word for "pimple" and kind of winged my way past "death of the first-born". Boo-yah.)

7. Chilling in Jason's room

deserves its own mention because it was just awesome. Plus so nearby my own room, that it made those let's-just-stay-till-the-buses-start-running-at-six ventures almost inevitable. Marathoning How I Met Your Mother, watching Jason and Zay practice their dance moves, attempting to study, and 3am runs for Istanbul chicken burgers!! ......speaking of which, those burgers and fries deserve their own paragraph (if not entry) :3

8. My surprise farewell party

I did keep wondering why Zay kept leaving the room to take his phone calls. And also why he kept mentioning "um yeeeah I'm with LYNN right now" very pointedly whenever someone called, and then I luled at his extremely artificial "Okay Jason, I'll uh SEE YOU LATER AT SPACE, BRO." But no, I didn't really know what was going on till I walked into that super fancy restaurant (overlooking Sydney Harbour, very nice touch) to see my favouritest people in the continent sitting there with goofy smiles on their faces. <3 style="font-weight: bold;">9. Circle of Death

If this night had not happened, so. many. things. would never have materialised. I would probably be single right now and Dim and I wouldn't be friends and people might have gotten their pride very hurt later on and I might actually still be able to drink Baileys. As things turned out, I am not single right now and Dim turned out to be a great Gandhimitri and while people still got hurt, the fall was cushioned and I still feel like barfing if my olfactory senses even notice the presence of a mere drop of Baileys in the room. Suffice to say. It was one of those nights in my life I will be able to look back on fifty years from now and still remember every legendary detail - or at least, whatever stayed with me after the hangover.

And last but certainly not least,

10. Zay

details?

ha. you wish. (: