West Coast Park

I have always preceived West Coast Park to be an uprooted East Coast Park + a few better equipment. Given that East Coast Park is synonymous with dog poop, used condoms, couples engaging in activities which should really be confined within 4 walls and frequent sightings of adult caucasians perched over tiny skate skooters as they whiz after their children, it was thus no surprise that throwing some structures spasmodically over a pit of coarse sand was still insufficient to tempt me to divert my route there.

Yet, as much as the climbing structures failed to lure me from my mindless pounding on the treadmill, my recent craze with Sasuke (otherwise rephrased here as Ninja Warrior) got me so hyped up over doing an obstacle course (now this term is subjective. I'm not referring to things like the ボヂプロプ. I'm talking about climbing a few ropes here and there) that I ventured to West Coast Park.

I had a companion of course.

And we went through the 'obstacles' together, working our way around the damaged ones by devicing new rules to go along with it. So, the companion decided to cross the bar with the missing net using his arms only. Like this:

Lift yourself up.


Swing.
Swing higher.


Flip!

Fall.

The companion brought his frisbee along, and as he tossed them around with some new found friends, I did some core stablising work with this:

Planks propped up by springs are perfectly fine. Ropes, on the other hand, even if they were thick, proved much of a harder challenge.

Fortunately for me I did not see any of the undesirable scenes mentioned in the opening paragraph. Ah, West Coast Park, I will be back some day.

All Hail!

I have never known my powers of influence to be so strong to the extent of 'all hail thee' level. Today showed me that this power of mine, is multiplied by at least 100 times, in the area of spoilt appetites and caloric-busting activities.

I am all the more motivated to sign up for the personal trainer's certification course. The sight of me, dressed in signature Nike trainers with TESQ emblazoned across, standing akimbo atop the highest pull up machine you can ever find wielding a 100kg bench press above my head as I exalt all to 'WORK OUT AND STOP EATING', accompanied by lightning bolts and roars of thunder under a torrential storm that for some magical reason does not wet me - is almost risible.

But it'd come through some day (albeit with on a less dramatic scale).

Facts in Brownian Motion

Categorised as 'Duh'
Mum still thinks I'm fat, but will 'try not to say it'.
I certainly do not feel like driving anymore following that racist incident. Hence my procrastination in renewing that stupid PDL.

On Working Out
Thank God for Youtube: ExpertVillage and SparksPeople! I never thought I could do so many strenously fun, and difficult!, workouts with the simple exercise ball. Perfect complement to my 'vary-per-minute-of-inclination' treadmill routine.
Ah, but despite this new found gym routine, I've been dying for a PLUNGE into the pool. Do I have a short attention span? Or do I simply get bored too easily? Either way, I find it difficult to keep going at a particular exercise regime day after day. Seeing the same machines and executing the same exercises just builds a thicker runner's wall that leaves me begging for variation. So yes, I've been yearning for laps which put less stress on my knees, but somehow my evenings keep getting occupied. Yes, blame it on my inability to swim at night (why do I keep thinking that a crocodile is waiting amidst the deck chairs for the opportune time to swoop down and bite me). Alternatively, its my fault for not being able to wake up early enough such that I can swim without subjecting my keys and access card to the risk of theft!

*I might just be getting a Bosu ball for my birthday present. Hooray!*

On Music
I am going to post some questions to Mana-sama.
Dear Mana-sama,
You are an inspiration to all who love classical music. And while you make the rapid scalic passages on a harpsichord sound effortless, is your astute skill today a result of hours of training amidst so many distractions? Did you ever have to strain your ears to pick out the best nuances in your Polonaise, while someone blasted the TV right behind you? Did you ever rain down your pent up frustration through a densely chordal Grieg, only to have someone come down and tell you to shut up because someone else studying upstairs had resorted to covering their ears as you played? Were you ever given weird stares when you expressed your passion for the talent of Chopin? Did you ever cringe when someone said that music was an 'escape', finding that giving music the place of an 'outlet' to reality somehow belittles the richness it beholds?
Ah, but you, born to a musical parentage, probably had a music room all of your own.
Or maybe you struggled with so much more, and overcame all, and became who you are today, one of the lucky few who carve a lucrative career in this industry of heartache and joy.

And before I go
Some readers have asked why my posts vary so greatly in content. One minute I'm a horribly emo, potential wrist-slasher and by the next post I'm incredibly overjoyed. Well, take a look at the title again, 'real random ramble'. I'm hit with varied circumstances everyday, life hands me a different spectrum of emotions, and these emotions change as circumstances change. So, don't worry about me slashing my wrists anytime :)

The Big Two

Imagine time, spent with friends, so comfortable, that the usually trigger-happy me wasn't even tempted to reach for my phone. That's how it went at Siam's Kitchen on the 27th of April. So what if the food was not as good as we expected, or that some of us were down with raspy throats and couldn't swallow nary a spoonful of tom yam without scalding it, or that the Art Museum which we arty-farty people adjourned to after dinner was closed, we had a great time. I know I'm being horribly succinct, but seriously, even a ton of descriptive paragraphs detailing every single dish and presents would not do justice to the comforting atmosphere of time spend with friends.

And talk about a genuine surprise. Maybe it was just my ignorance, but I simply couldn't see it coming, the surprise joint birthday celebration. And I was presented with a gift that is thoughtful, practical yet unique. I'm not saying what it is though, or posting any pictures, its just between us.

I'm so thankful for all of you.

Skin

I just need to get this off my chest before I begin the ramble: Urgh. I've been chucked to the waiting list.

This is going to sound completely incredulous, and it might just come off as a lie. But here goes: At some point in my life, my skin was actually perfect. Smooth and clear, I'd dare say flawless. I never had to worry if globules of god-knows-what would clog it up from within, inflaming it, producing godawful bumps, and leaving unsightly scars.

Oh how things have changed. I've lost count of the amount of money I've spent on cleansers, lotions and basically any other form of topical medication. I've bought, literally, into every single claim there was on the market, all in the hope of acquiring good, or at least, better skin, than my horribly pockmarked pizza face. More often than not those things never worked. And though popping pills improved the situation a little, the dire consequences it rendered onto something else, has put me off any more tablets. And later, with blotters as my stable companion (I'd break into hysterics when I ran out of them), I discovered the world of make-up. I layer coat after coat on my face, trying to replicate the perfect canvas I see on so many other people. And needless to say, things got worse.

Now, before you start droning on, with your mockingly sweet voice that spills from that mouth perched on a canvas of perfect skin, that I should 'drink a lot of water and don't eat so much chilli', maybe you should actually bother to notice that I actually swig down more than you do. And don't you remember the time I stopped chilli for so long? It did not help either.

'Superficial'. 'Stop being so self-conscious'. 'Why do you care so much about your looks'. 'Looks don't matter'.

I don't know if you intend it or not, but saying 'looks don't matter' to pizza face certainly comes across as horribly sarcastic considering you have never had a spot of imperfection on your face before.

All the probable solutions to this entail hefty price tags. And so you say, for someone of my condition (read: pizza face), you cannot help but to spend on these things. You talk as if I can crap money.

I have no choice but to acclimatize myself to meeting the world as PIZZAFACE.

I'm actually starting to like the sound of 'pizzaface'. I can picture a Marvelesque heroine who slays villians with her pockmarked face.

A New Routine

After 2 days of procrastinating, which turned out to somewhat of a blessing after all, I finally stepped into the gym again. I was expecting my workout this morning to bear the outcome of 2 previously sedentary weeks, and thus was intending to do things at a much slower pace. Yet, somehow, the momentum just flooded back the minute I pushed the tricep bar, and I went on from one exercise to another almost spontaneously, such that I emerged from the gym equipped with a new and possibly better (I say possibly since I'm no authority on this) workout routine :)

And, as we all know, in the pursuit of better health, what one eats is about as crucial as one's exercise frequency. Hooray for Dad's creation (this was for dinner last sunday):

I had a much 'greener' than usual lunch today:

Pardon the brown bits of taupok and meatballs, my yong tau foo selection comprised otherwise of vegetables and beancurd. The drink is none other than my favourite combination of green apple + celery! (Stop gagging. Try a sip first.)

Maybe it was the really productive gym session that influenced my choice in meals. Either way, I hope I can somehow drill in myself the will to make healthy choices all the time. Cheers to good health!

Purged.

So the recent liberation from digesting and ruminating novels from a mandatory list has set me free to go to the public libraries. There is something more romantic about enjoying a novel knowing that you GPA is not attached to the way you read and the way you write about it thereafter.

And my book of choice is Paul Mercier's 'Night Train to Lisbon'.

And it is such an answer. I finally can put my finger on the right expression to describe the usage of 'haha' over msn conversations:

'They're so horribly frayed and threadbare, these words, worn out be being used millions of times. Do they still have any meaning?'

So yes, 'haha' no longer means laughter, it now has the duty of peppering a conversation at junctures where one party is obliged to reciprocate a few words so as to indicate some form of interest in the convo.

I have also found an expression which encapsulates why I have fallen in love with languages.

'Of the thousand experiences we have, we find language for one at most and even this one merely by chance and without the care it deserves. Buried under all the mute experiences are those unseen ones that give our life its form, its colour, and its melody.'

Yet, on that note, I am in danger of allowing this novel, in its muses on language and love, to take me away from what's required now - 日本語revision.

And in the style of the random rambler: My body has been feeling sluggish lately, despite having caught up with sleep, but pounding the treadmill has become an activity so monotonous I'd rather spend time with the weights. Its time for some structure-scaling at West Coast Park. I will brave the whizzes of adults perched on skate scooters, followed by a trail of toddlers on even tinier versions.

The Obligatory Post-Exam Catch Up

Ok, as can be inferred from the title, the exams are over. Practically every student's blog I read is pasted with a large 'hiatus' symbol during the exam periods (though this hiatus symbol sometimes gives in to short posts titled 'i gave up' or 'i cheated' or 'i got bored'), and this post is thereby followed up with 'ITS OVER!' once it really is done.

So yes, this is the obligatory post-exam evaluation/planner etc. basically anything you use to name THAT post after the exams where you write about how the papers went, how you think you would do, and what you plan to do now, more often that not promising to no one but yourself or your blog that you would study harder next semester.

I'll try as much as possible to turn this post into something interesting. But remember, its about the exams after all. As much as a module may be exciting and challenging, how much could an exam get? Challenging for sure, but exciting? Nah.

So anyway, here's the evaluation:

Comms - Here's to the first time in my life that I mistook my seat number. While I initially felt horribly guilty for making the rightful owner of seat number 233 run up and down twice just to ensure it was me, and not her, that got it wrong, this guilty was quickly dispelled by the horribly tricky MCQ and cloze passages. Ah well, a 'tricky' paper is about the closest resemblance you could get in an exam to a real life situation anyway, so maybe we students have shot ourselves in the foot for complaining that exams are 'nothing like what you get in real life anyway'. Here we get it. The tricky paper. Mimicking real life scenarios where everything is uncertain.

Survey Part 2 - I'm still in disbelief that this paper turned out to be the easiest exam I've sat for since I entered university. But the fact that this easily translates into stricter marking guidelines and steeper bell curve is not making me anymore hopeful.

Cyber Security - Here's a toast to learning the hard way that, as much as globalization calls for us Singaporeans to embrace 2 gigantic growing nations, for now I should endeavour to avoid modules where the general locus around me in the exam hall features nary another Singaporean (oh wait! The rest of my kind have learned!) So you can just imagine my pain as I chewed through the MCQs and was going to work on the 6 structured questions when people from those nations and a couple from other lands that sported the same crew cut + spectacles + bermudas + sandals + tshirt ensemble began to leave the exam hall. Surely it didn't help that I was struck by this unexplainable and horrible headache that left me stoning at some junctures when I should have been writing?

Victorian - This course has served not only as a killer, but also as a warning for me. And was it a mistake to veer over unseen poetry for a recollection of narrative twists in some mystery sensational detective and potentially racist novel instead? Science Fiction for next sem? At least I know the formula for dealing with her classes now, but would I execute it correctly?

Singapore - So Singaporean, everything was 'up to you'. Now I just hope my angle was right. Sighs, if only the next step was headed by another one ( inside joke, can't name names here).

And my overal say on the exams would actually be that this semester was tough, and its only going to get worse, so I'd better step up the game. Try as I might to avoid saying this, cliches are often the truth (and that is a cliche too). I've also made a mental note to try to go for courses which are not so final exam heavy, and oh the woes of having 2 exam papers in a day. I cannot complain too much on this since some of my friends are having to deal with 3 today, but I inevitably found myself repeating the same phrases for the essays in my 2 papers today.

OK enough of this evaluation, let's move on to the 2nd part where we talk about what we are going to do this holidays.

But nonetheless, while quite a significant chunk of my 3 month break would be taken up by an internship, I do have to get other things accomplished during this holiday, some of which I actually do not have the mood to do, but have to kick myself to do it anyway.

And the list goes on:

1. Going back to exercise! Yes, I can't wait to scale the structures @ West Coast Park.
2. Driving. Enough Said.
3. 日本語not forgetting my test on Thursday!
4. I can finally read a book which is not on some list of mandatory (techincally only) readings.
5. I'm really looking forward to my birthday celebration this year. I finally have a barbecue pit and, freed from exams, I will have the liberty to prepare my own feast for the guests. Right now I have a vague menu in mind, but its definitely going to involve a pasta salad, succulent meat cuts, roasted vegetable skewers and barbecued bananas and sweet potatoes for dessert.
6. The inevitable - Housework.
7. The want - Visiting grandma, picking up the recipes!

And yes it goes on and on, but right now I've since been interrupted by the urge for a run. I have also made it a point to spend less time on my laptop, though not to the point where I would actually lock it up as planned, since I tend to get horribly distracted by the likes of youtube and msn when I do attempt to do something productive online. So I'd probably be blogging about my hoilday exploits from a stool in front of the desktop, which is perched on top of cardboard boxes.

And the obligatory post comes to an end!

Immobilized

By pain. The dull type that stems from a regular flow of blood out of your body. It ebbs. I can feel it.

But I shall resist the urge to sleep it away.

Maybe it would dissipate, or at least become less localized, if I pound real hard on the treadmill today.

And I must abolish stereotypes. Hurhur. Just because you're form a certain school in a certain discipline under a certain bond does not necessarily mean you are going to look upon me as a piece of scum.

God help me.

Is this a direct Yes, No, or what?

So Mum prayed on my behalf today and an answer came.

Its just an answer. Its not a 'yes' or a 'no' or even a 'wait'. It could be anything, or even a conjugation of 'yes take this and you will feel that you should have said 'no' but wait this is what I want you to do.'

Fortunately I do have some time before I have to make a decision. And I'm brewing in a cauldron of skepticism and hope.

But you see more than I can, you know more than I would ever know.

And you love me so.

And I must love you too.

So, help me.

Exams!

I sometimes have impulse reactions. Those moments where I do something, from something, because of something, which cannot be explained. My kneejerk reaction to an impending event of catastrophic nature, particularly those events which require a huge amount of brain work, speedy pen strokes, rapid thought firing, all within legible handwriting and organized paragraphs in a cold room - is to snack.

Best snack ever: Pocky.
This is a close runner up.
And this was my choice, paid for by Mum :D
A sweet ending to a meal of raw octopus today!

Vegan Tired Me

In a time of rocketing food prices, $12 per slice tiny peach cakes and $4.50 cucumber juice, I am so thankful for the humble vegetarian stall at NTU Canteen B, where I can get this:

For SGD$2.00. Nevermind all that thing about vegetarian food being a million times unhealtheir than its omnivorous counterparts. This is probably the best-tasting stall accessible for a busy HSS student anyway.

Yes, busy with the upcoming exams. I am tired.

Anyway, on a brighter note, I have found a replacement for Pazzion, and its all thanks to mum! Pictorial evidence will follow suit in later posts.

In the mean time, a long and hard day is about to ensue!

Farewell Shoes

Today I bid farewell to Pazzion. Thou have served me so well though I exploited thee. Thou has shielded my soles from torrents, sun and pain without complaint. And today thou shall enter eternal rest. Obit.
On a better note, I have yet to finish blogging about my time in 黑社会. Thai-style dishes were fabulous as well.

Made a mental note to order some Hoegardden if I get these dishes the next time I visit. Caloric counting activites can be dismissed in the light of the beer-belly inducing mixture of chilled Hoegardden to wash down crisp, spicy crunches of popcorn sized-chicken and crab.

Screw + Nut + Bolt

I need to hop somewhere to escape from the oppressive forces of faculty mandated modules.

Or is it just totally my fault that my entire semester is so screwed that it has nuts and bolts sticking out of it as well.

Anyway, I had other dishes from 黑社会 as well, here goes :





And today - as a way of comforting myself from the drone in my head which was concussed as i mummered 'no pain no gain' throughout the extraction process - I treated myself to a mint brownie:

Which was a tad disappointing. The brownie tasted more like chocolate cake, and the mint paste lathered on top was more sweet than minty.

Ooh, if only the mint leaves had been crushed and folded into a thicker batter.

Bittersweet

My favourite word. Somehow sweet stuff - here I refer to everything from the slightly more expensive dark chocolate bar to life as a whole - are better only when there's a bitter undertone to each bite. Cause its only when the tongue tastes the cruel bitter that it begins darting round on an unending quest to seek the sweetest parts hidden within layer after layer of bitter mess. And when the tongue finally seeks out the sweetest portions, the bliss of the melting sweetness moves the corners into an inevitable smile.

Today was like a well filled to the brim with the bitterest concoction ever, and me having been dunked head first inside.

But I searched hard enough, smothered by the bitter, and eventually found the sweet.