Butchered Meat!

Its on everybody's facebook, blogspot, livejournal, (insert name of other personal webspace). Chinese New Year Pics!
I have tagged those relevant snapshots in my facebook account (which, I must say, I have become increasingly addicted to) and, also because I find the act of switching on my bluetooth too troublesome, shall leave this blog post for the very interesting account of being butchered alive.

So yes, I was slit open on an operating table in the Ambulatory Surgery Centre @ SGH. Thanks to 3 stabs of LA from syringes with long needles, I was spared the pain of the butchering, and was left only to feel myself being cut open, the warm blood trickling down my back, and the tugging and pulling of the damn lipoma out of my back.

But I did feel the full effect of the butchering when the LA ran out halfway, and miraculously managed to maintain enough composure to spell out "Dr (name withheld since he said so!), its starting to hurt, can I please have some more LA?" I must have consumed so much LA (think, 6 syringes?), but the wonderful medical team was every so obliging. I believe the reason I didn't even flinch or shed a tear throughout the entire operation was because I was under the care of the best team of surgeons and nurses there. Oh well, it pays to have connections, and a smile, and a sweet demeanour! I hope they like my Thank You Card.

In fact, the only 'extreme' emotion I displayed during the operation was laughter. I remember laughing so hard when the surgeon, having to pluck the remaining half of the lipoma from its tightly embedded spot, stuck his finger through the incision such that I could feel it rubbing against my ribs, causing more streams of warm blood to pour down my back. And it was ticklish!

I will be seeing my stitches today, after I remove the dressing. Thank you Surgeon for subcutaneous stitching, I shall see you for a steroid jab if (God Forbid, I end up with a kelloid).

I have suddenly been infused with an adrenaline high. The kind of adrenaline rush I get after I pound the pavement or hit the water. Which is a mystery, considering how the operation has left me confined within the walls of my apartment, trying to catch up with schoolwork and popping panadol in between for 3 days straight. This is good. I shall channel this energy into reading, studying, and doing other productive things like studying the language of ...

Ah ガゼット，for you I shall forsake the pursuits of an English Major and master the art of blogging in 日本語。

Attn: Sarah!

In celebration of double chocolate coated strawberries, brownies, delicious lasagne, and most of all, a friend who listens ever so patiently to my non-stop rambling on everything in the world, I will be dedicating this blog post to Sarah!

So, Sarah, I apologize if I have made you confused over my sexual orientation when I started displaying handsome 'guys' on my msn dp. I know I have said this before but just to clarify, they are indeed MEN (i.e. think : the yellow fruit), and they are men who I find attractive, to say the least.

Anyway, for a quick refresher, here is the first guy that I ever showed to you:
Here's Ruki, the lead singer of alternative metal Japanese band - Gazette. Wanna know how Gazette looks like?

Here you go:

Ruki, by the way, is in the middle. You'd probably think that I regard Ruki as the most handsome of all the 5 of them (yes, keep reminding yourself that they are Men!), but actually, no. My personal favourite is actually the drummer, Kai (who is the 2nd from the right in the above photo). I know he doesn't look very good in this picture, but hey, look at this one:

I think he actually looks better without make up, cause removing all that layers of white powder revelas his oh-so-divinely good killer cheekbones. Seriously, he may be male but I won't mind having a face structure as awesomely modelesque as that.

Another piece of eye candy has to be Uruha, the electric guitarist. He's the one on the utmost right, and a close up looks something like:

This has made me conclude, rather naively though, that if I were born a male, I swear I'd be gay.

Ok Sarah, I hope you understand 'my type' now :) And till I see you on Wednesday,

Cheers!

(Un)pack

Having moved house twice in my whole life, of which I am still in the midst of moving the 2nd time, I can save with some certainty that packing and transporting the goods is so tough when you get down to it, but they look like child's play once you get to unpacking.

So now, as I am typing in the new study room - a dismantled table stacked behind me and many cardboard boxes in the sofaless living room outside - I am starting to feel extreme admiration for Rachel, an ex-classmate of mine who's father's job required her to move from country to country almost every few months (though I feel nothing but envy for the fact that you attended private school in New York at the company's expense and lived smacked within Shibuya). If moving within Singapore is hard enough, let alone travelling the globe with cardboxes in tow.

Anyway, moving to this new abode has led me to display (unwittingly) several unpleasant symptoms. I have deduced, from observing myself over these 2 days, that I could possibly be:

1. Allergic to strong air-conditioning.
2. Allergic to dust.

Not that the 2nd one is anything atypical, but as for the first, that might just be a bizarre freak of medical science.

3. I do like swimming after all.
4. I have been using 'moving house' as an excuse for not making anything beyond the doorstep of the Bleak House.
5. (Not exactly a discovery related to moving house, but discovered at the same time anyway) I must learn to enjoy the comforts of hawker centre food.

3 was because I tried the pool out for the first time today. Which leads me to ask if the public pools are even cleaned at all? I was happy to not be swimming besides floating leaves, hair and whatever unknown substances that could have been inside.

Ok I've just reread point 4 and deduced that I really should be doing something else other than blogging.

Before I go: I can't wait for lessons at Bunka to start! Though I'm certainly not looking forward to the travelling back and forth at peak hours :P

Edit: I forgot to mention this. I am dying to get a radical change in hairstyle. An extremely radical one with spiked ends and all.

Fast Food

In my pre-sem 2 post, I had expressed an awareness that this semester would be much more hectic than the previous one, particularly with drony professors who require my 3 hours of nonstop super intense concentration and rapid note-taking skills. I have yet to take any assignments or tests to gauge my competency at keeping up with the quickened pace, but my growing tendency to feel tired (read: sleepy, fuzzy thoughts) after reading tome after tome and mulling poem after poem is a cause for concern that I should be thankful not to have to deal with such things yet.

I was hit by the fatigue bug again today, after my only 2 hour tutorial. So, desperate for an almost instant energy booster that would be portable enough to bring to the lecture theatre, I succumbed to the Golden Arches.

More expensive, less tasty than home made milo dinosaur. SGD$1.65 for fast + convenience + standing behind the counter while someone fills up the plastic cup for you and holds it while you poke the straw in and hands you a napkin with both hands thereafter + regaining my top form for 2 hours more. Not a bad deal.

The throes of my 'oh-so-divine' calling (I think!) to be a global citizen (buzzword here!) has propelled me to sign up for INSTEP. But I don't think I'm in the right form now to craft the compulsory, cheesy, 150 words 'why-I-deserve-this' paragraphs for GIP. Closes on Sunday though, maybe I shall go to the Bleak House first.

At Long Last

After a long long time of cat-less days, I encountered this affectionate one outside Canteen 2.

School work is piling up and competition is heating beyond boiling point. How I love those snippets of jogging, chatting, eating, company. But they shall remain as snippets, not time-wasters. I shall adjourn to the Bleak House now.

Of tissue paper ownership and prawns

This is going to be an almost pictureless post - not because I did not have any picture worthy moments to capture - but because the latter moments happened to be too disgusting to be captured in print (more on that later).

Anyway, I started this morning by ripping my left contact lens into half. I cannot figure how it happened though. I had just removed it from the dish and was washing it with MPS lotion (a mandatory procedure before I insert the lens into my eye) only to discover midway that I was cleaning 2 transparent semicircles instead of a complete lens. On hindsight, the haze of a late night accompanied by a bizarre dream must have resulted in me subconsciously exerting more force on the soft optical tool. What a waste. I had to stumble back from the sink back to my room, half blind, in order to get a new one. Now how should I explain to my optician that I need to buy an odd number of lenses the next time I see him?

It was also one of those rare occasions today that I had post-church lunch with Jie and lilbro John and the latter's friend. Being students with student's pocket money, we walked past the likes of Superdog for the Kopitiam at VivoCity instead. Not that there was anything to gripe about, since I had a delicious ladle of Hokkien Mee to feast upon. In this age of rocketing food prices and plummeting economic levels, Hokkien Mee is one of the dishes I can order which miraculously has not shrunk in portions. So, I received a huge plate of hot fried noodles and 3 succulent prawns for only $4. A very good deal for a foodcourt in a prime shopping mall. I had intended to photograph the heap of noodles, but was immediately deterred by the prospect of having lilbro John's friend think he has weird siblings. Yes, I have received weird stares for photographing my meals. A perfect example being yesterday's lunch of a tomato with Italian dressing:

To which Eden JieJie when 'WHHHAAATTTT!' when i whipped our my trusty sony ericsson.

Anyway, lilbro John happened to order the same meal as me and walloped the noodles at a faster pace, only to leave the 3 succulent prawns behind. I had only worked my way through a quarter of the noodles at that moment, and after decapitating a prawn, began working on the body.

Now, I have a very strange way of consuming cooked unshelled prawns. Unlike home-cooked prawn dishes in which Eden JieJie removes the legs and slits the shells before frying, prawns bought from other eateries come with their legs, head and even feelers intact. Hence, unless they happen to be Cereal Prawns - which shells have been fried to the point of extreme crispiness and can be consumed like chips - eating a prawn calls for some amount of dexterity with chopsticks and a spoon.

So, what I did with the decapitated prawns was to place them on the spoon, hold them still with my chopsticks and siphon out the flesh from the shells by gently exerting pressure near the tail. The hardest part of this process is to exert the right amount of pressure such that the prawn flesh actually moves out of the shell without the shell caving in. At that juncture, I was oh so tempted to whip out my sony ericsson and photograph whatever was left of the prawns, but figured that the horrendous mess of shell + spittle was too grotesque for my blog.

After seeing me work my way through all 3 prawns, lilbro John recounted an incident where a missionary friend ate prawns and their shells, and decided to try doing that with his 3 prawns. After biting off a segment of the 1st prawn's body and quite a bit of careful chewing, lilbro John declared it the worst prawn-eating experience ever.

And that was when he took out a packet of tissue paper from his own bag. 'I don't usually bring it', he explained, 'it just so happened that it was in my bag'.

Now I am not against male hygiene practices or what, but I have always felt uncomfortable around guys whose attitude towards bringing tissue paper differs from my brother's. It is no harm, in fact, it is a good practice for a man to be able to fish some tissue out of his bag (no matter how crinkled it is) whenever the need arises but somehow the thought of a creature with XY paying as much attention to it as XX does just reeks of 'sissy' to me i.e. would not leave the house unless he has like 5 packets in his bag (with snoopy prints on them for the matter). Hence, I am always very willing to dispense tissue paper to the men around me (just ask my male friends), but conversely, I cringe whenever someone of the same gender as me regards me as a tissue box. Ladies, please, let's take pride in bringing tissue paper along.

Without Pictures

I believe wholeheartedly in the cliche 'a picture paints a thousand words' and hence avoid blogging unless I have some form of image to accompany my text (despite the 2.0 megapixel sony ericsson). However, as I have sunk deeper and deeper into the throes of school - particularly in the harrowing process of module selection - I have since been unable to capture anything blogworthy. In fact, the past few days have left me with no time for jogging either as I have to devote my optimum jogging hours to camping in front of the computer screen, hoping for a vacancy to appear.

So, you cannot imagine how relieved I felt when I opened my school email yesterday evening to receive notice that my Appeal (yes I had to go to that extent) for a certain elective had turned out to be succesful. Since my school goes by the system where students place their electives on a waitlist and are allocated 1 or 2 based on ballot, those unlucky ones like me who end up only with 1 elective have no choice but to stay shackled to the computer screen till a vacancy appears throughout the very well-loved 'add-drop' period. If we're desperate enough, we might even try to appeal for the module by coughing up a 400 character paragraph of pleas an excuses which should be moving enough to sway the administrator's heart. Sarah and I tried out both options and while Sarah succeeded at the 1st one, I went with the 2nd.

Yet, as much as I am happy to be clearing 19Aus this semester, I am nervous at the prospect of handling this extra workload on top of driving lessons (and an exam at that) and possibly Japanese lessons at a language centre. This predicament is made all the more exciting by the fact that the module which I have since been allocated is of a contrasting discipline (read: extra effort required).

I know I know, I can almost hear the school counsellor again, 'Yes, things are going to get tougher and tougher each time, but don't you find it exciting in some way? You must find time-out activities, activities which help you relax and rejuvenate yourself. And you must fnd the studying method which works best for you.'

Got it ma'am! I'm getting better at doing work on the bus and train already, and I still make it a point to run! Soon, I shall be swimming and bench-pressing too.

The Big Fat Snail

The recent disruption in my frequency of blogging daily has been due largely to a lack of blog-worthy materials, and unfortunately, to a smaller extent due to me getting back into the momentum for school. Today would have passed as yet another day of me doing nothing productive, but with it also being the last day of the holidays, I simply had to dig into every nook and cranny of my life in order to find something to blog about.

Ok so I will ramble about yesterday's movie.Jie and I went to watch 崖の上のポニョat the Tiong Bahru GV. We had intended to head down to the more lively VivoCity instead, but detoured to Tiong Bahru Plaza when we realized that the evening shows at the former were already half-full. And it was a good thing we did, since the best movie experience is none other than in a relatively empty cinema which does not compromise on screen or seat quality. Boy do i hate jostling with crowds, crowds with handphones, for the matter.

We had 40mins to spare before the movie so we trudged down to the basement for some Ajisen Ramen.

The broth had been spiced to suit the local chilli-addict standard, but it was marred by the fake 卵 plopped like a disc in the bowl .

And then we went up for ポニョ. This 宮崎tale only warmed, but didn't tug hard enough at my heartstrings and at times I got annoyed, rather than cooed over the rebellious eloping ポニョ. However, I did leave the theatre feeling sad, since every 宮崎 film inevitably reminds me of his masterpiece 千と千尋の神隠し. (I cannot believe they ended the film without letting 千尋 see ハク again.)

I also learnt that carting those obscenely overpriced movie house goodies into the theatre serves more than the purpose of providing GV with about 90% of their revenue. It helps the viewer mask the pungent odour of the cheesy mayo(yikes) hotdog emanating from the tween in front.

Today started with breakfast at Wang Jiao with Jie, Clarise and Yong Xiang. As we made our way to our common destination, we encountered many of these:

I would have wanted to place my ruler beside those snails so that the picture could tell how remarkably huge the one on the right was. However, convinced that no amount of washing and detergent would be able to rid my ruler of snail secretions, the faithful mathematical instrument (which has seen me through countless math exams) stayed within the pencil case. That pretty much leaves me with typing out the characters 4.5inches to express how large it really was.

Fortunately, the snails did not spoil my appetite for lunch, or maybe it was just the company which helped.

And, why did KFC shrink their chickens?

On a more serious note, I am starting to feel the 'school starts tomorrow' dread I have been experiencing every 1st jan for the past 12 years of my life. But since I have promised to make every semester better than the previous one, I shall undergo a drastic change and wake up tomorrow with a grin and voracious appetite for my books - even as I sit at the computer playing the finger dash for another module which my school has robbed from me.

Yes, I must increase the intensity and quantity of time I spend on school and even C work, but several things still must go on!

Here goes another list:

1. Jogging (Pounding the pavement as ガゼットblasts in my ears is the best way to unwind.)

2. Swimming (I am no good at this, but since Dad and Mum already paid so much for it, I have to. Besides, my knees will thank me in time.)

3. Gym-out (I am no gym bunny, but this shall be my West Coast substitute when it pours.)

4. 日本語 (Yes this has to go on)

5. Anything related to Piano and Cello (I am so tempted to physically squeeze my brain for the juices to spawn some form of song/musical.)

6. Driving (Damn those haphazard instructors and the freakin difficult examination up ahead. But for the ability to control something on 4 wheels, I've already gritted my teeth.)