If I ever become jobless (God forbid)... or something. I think my greatest redemption is my packing skills.
Some amazing thing this bag is. This bag is tiny. It cannot fit A4 at all and fits my iPad just snugly (which is really all that I need usually). The bag is tiny. My little brother laughs at me when I bring it out - "Jie, this is for kindergarten kids!" - but it is some really amazing bag yo. It's easily smaller than any kindergarten kid's bag if anything. And it looks absolutely retarded when our resident Hagrid, Darren tries to carry it - it's miniscule on his back.
Heading over the loft for a night to host our dearest SYLers from Dumaguete (: and I've packed everything I need into the bag (it helped that I wasn't planning to shower there):
- iPad
- A dress for the next day
- Long pants + Big shirt for sleeping in
- Toothbrush + Toothpaste + Bottle of toner + Pack of cotton wool squares
- Deodorant
- All my emergency medication (in the same category would be a sachet of instant coffee)
- My big fat Olympus Pen Camera
- Whole pencil case
- Organizer
- Stack of rough paper
As you might already be able to tell, I'm pretty proud of my packing skills HAHAHA Whoo. This skill will come in handy.
1. Sleepy: I look like a madwoman now having just untied my french braids. I was making myself some caramel tea and over-steeped the teabag. Now my caramel tea looks like diluted gula melaka. The heat is seriously sucking my soul. Even a sugar and caffeine dose does little to lift the broiling lethargy. And the living room has been attacked by whiffs of badly charred chinese herbal medicine - or at least that is what it smelt like.
2. Infection: I am so glad I fully recovered from the dreadful herpes zoster ophthalmicus (Herpes, whether the genital one or not, is not HIV, my darling Nik & Chester -.- tccch! So hilarious when Nik excitedly announced to everyone who entered the ambs room that I had herpes!). Terribly painful and very unsightly at that. It has been 2 years since the last episode and I have been quite unfazed by its onset because it seemed it has been with me all my life, latently there ever since post-chickenpox. And today was the one day I could not afford my eyes to look like I got punched, so I'm real thankful it resolved in time!
4. Ayam Panggang Awesomeness: I used to dread eating in school. Most of the times I didn't have time to eat; I grab a sandwich, gobble it in less than 5 and get going. When I do have the time though, I never know what to eat. But alas... now that I've graduated, Munch just had to have the heavenly Ayam Panggang stall. The ayam panggang is so good, I cannot stop exclaiming it! It's so freaking good. It's the best food I've ever had in a campus (mind, I rarely express such superlatives!). For real! It's so good. Anyone who hasn't tried it should, immediately!
5. Film to watch - Kokuhaku (2010): Got my hands on Kokuhaku (confessions in Japanese, 2010) and shall watch it on a later date when I'm not so sleepy. The reviews were excellent, and easily 90% of the reviewers speak of their impression after the film as awestruck - now that's something. Just reading them, I already love the brutal social commentary that the film presents, particularly when directors very powerfully leverage on apt cinematographic techniques and excellent acting. Looking forward to watching this - and I foresee a long post shall ensue!
Nostalgia finds you in the most unsuspecting of times. I was looking through some local films when I came across our national day songs, and promptly dipped into nostalgia-mode. Now, such accidental acquaintance with Singapore-nostalgia isn't the first time and it was totally magnified when I was at Washington. Aw man, just picture me at the kitchen table with my Macbook and some earl grey tea and suddenly chancing upon Kit Chan's Home (1998) D: It was a terrible lurching feeling - by then I had been in America long enough to feel a tinge of home-sickness coupled with incessant kway chap craving - so boy was that feeling massive. Even then, the feeling I felt listening to Home was not home-sickness - it's a simple deeply moving pride for where I came from. I wasn't moved to tears only because I am not a person who cries (I can count the number of times I cry a year with my 10 fingers) - but trust me, any typical person will be bawling away with that same surge of feelings; it was strong. I am also not afraid to concur with the many songs, for indeed this is home to me. I can never see myself establishing my roots anywhere else, lured not even by a lucrative career and lavish lifestyle. This is more than home and more than just where I belong - a certainty that my time in USA made true and cemented.
The national day songs are, of course, great reminders for people like myself - who agree very wholeheartedly with this sense of belonging. We've seen brilliant works from Sing Singapore emerge - Home (1998), Where I Belong (2001), We Will Get There (2002) & One United People (2003) - the few shall always remain my firm favourites.
I think the magic in these pieces, relative to the post-2003 works which very much pale, is their singability. Of course there isn't such a word as singability, but it is in my definition, songs that are always sung wholeheartedly, the sort that as you sit with your classmates in the parade square singing in chorus - and that will really hit home. They are the most poignant. There is a power in singing along with friends. I always believed the act of singing is one of openness - sharing a chorus is that powerful. I loved singing these songs with my classmates, even the chinese ones and the awkwardly enunciated Mandarin - there's magic in that. Others find the recent songs deficient in catchy-ness - a fair comparison. The recent songs pale not because they aren't works of art in their own right - they very well are, but they are not compositions that demand an openness that is key to the overwhelming pride that fills singers. Case in point - What Do You See (2009) & Shine for Singapore (2008) (fast forward to each chorus to get a feel of what I mean). Song for Singapore (2010) is slightly better - and I don't even recall the rest of the songs. Maybe they are getting much too modern for us old-schoolers (HAHA furreal~). I know so many who shrugged indifferently to the 2011 edition of Home, diehards of the 1998 original. Well, here's another true blue 90s kid ;)
So. I've got hives. Every single day since I returned from Dumaguete. When I am at home I am literally pink and white - liberally lathered with calamine lotion. When I am out I sometimes look constipated (lololol) from trying not to scratch the terrible itch. I look like a mottled pink ball of miserable (is there any other way to describe it!). I have never had any allergies in the past so I figured maybe my trip to Dumaguete triggered something in my immune system.
Well, so I've been thinking a bit about it before I realised what this was about. Since I returned from Dumaguete, my body clock went crazy. When I don't have anything up the next day, I slept at 4am and woke up at 2pm on good days, and on bad days, I sleep at 11am and wake up at 4pm. I know, tell me about it - I'm tempted to believe it was jet-lag. I think this crazy body clock butchering has messed with my fiesty lymphocytes. A search on google will return you with results suggesting that if it isn't an allergy, stress may also trigger a breakout. I haven't been stressed at all (lol really. Other than fretting over having nothing to do), so I figured it's physiological stress from my presently malfunctioning body clock. I resolve to commit to Operation-Fix-My-Body-Clock pronto.
And! Although I've always known that one's circadian rhythm is very much dependent on light (natural or otherwise), I've never experienced it first-hand until Dumaguete. By 6.30pm, it is dark, very dark. Save a few rooms with lights, the whole center is dark and outside there are barely any (none, if I recall) street lamps. With that, even on non-tiring days I get incredibly sleepy by 10.30pm. By 11pm, my brain stops working Being able to sleep at that hour in Singapore is... bizarre. Back in Singapore, we're surrounded by so much of artificial light that really affects our sleep - or at least our brain's capacity to perceive our natural need to rest. By contrast, during my time in Washington, (since my room is very dimly lit, I was quite dependent on natural light as well) 9pm is lit like 7pm-Singapore - it is bright as heck and I cannot get to sleep until pretty late at night. Don't you think it's just really cool how our sleep is affected by our ambient light? Another aspect of neuroscience that is mad cool (:
Operation-Fix-My-Body-Clock, action.
(credit)
Whatever is spilling out my mind is too sombre (alright introspective, rather, since it's not particularly dark really) - what with quotes and film critiques - so here's some mandatory adorable to nudge the balance scales. Gotta love smiley pebbles lol.
1. I need to buy paintbrushes. I eased my urge to paint with my Letraset markers last night, but they are afterall markers and my urge has been anything but quenched.
2. Me + Sam + Daniel = utter randomness ensues. So today from an unsuspecting game of Monopoly Deal at Starbucks, we drove over to Jalan Kayu for prata and then watched people fly massive LED kites behind the Singapore Sports School. Hilarious conversations in the car and Daniel's chronic fear of massive trucks and buses when driving, gotta do this again.
3. Somedays I feel like printing pages of my tumblr to stick into my moleskine D:
4. My siblings are growing up to be progressively more amusing.
5. 750words.com (Habit back in Washington that I lost when school got way too busy. Picking it up again!)
6. I am thankful. I truly am.
7. Rome + Venice ahhhhhhhh.
8. Cynicism =/= Maturity
Psst. I also fixed the mountain timelapse video's autoplay - it was annoying me muchos.
Utterly amazing.
The caveat of being a city dweller is the sparsity of our beautiful sky. As if not already sufficiently confined in our walled and ceilinged homes, the vast boundlessness of the sky is also obscured from us. The reason why we do not see so many stars in the sky is not because Singapore is placed in a star-less point of the Earth, how silly that notion would be. It is because we're too well-lit, too bright; so very bright that our stars pale into our dimly luminous sky. Not dark enough to reveal the true sky, our nightskies are rendered an engulfing dark sheet with little depth; the kind of depth that only stars can show.
The city lights steal our nightskies. But of course, there can only be light in darkness.
I just packed my room! Well half-way through at least. I am talking about packing of elephantine proportions. I shit you not. Of course, already in Phase One of Operation Ning-You-Seriously-Got-To-Do-Something-About-Your-Bed-Store-Room, I have found treasures aplenty. Always happens that you'd discover something that makes you either smile or feel awkwardly embarrassed as you unearth stuff in your room. Neoprints (omgah) from secondary school, all the letters and notes and postcards and massive birthday boards. And then of course, in more recent years - all the memories from Ngee Ann seem infused with a different feel, looking at them now at this point of closure. Mmmyeah. Let's save the nostalgia for another day.
In my packing I have realised that:
- I have a lot of scrapbooking supplies sprawled all over my room. They are now all in one very nicely cataloged drawer - really proud of myself HAHA! And timely sign for me to stop splurging on scrapbooking supplies.
- I still have notes from Year 1, semester 1. For real. D: I don't know why I don't throw them away - even now that I have graduated it just feels terribly... wrong to throw away my notes and tutorials. No junior will want to take them from me anyway, they're ancient! Meh. I'll figure out in Phase Two of the Operation.
- I have a lot of art supplies. Seriously. Apart from the typical set everyone has, I still have a whole thick slab of linoleum for linocuts. Acrylics and oils. Stack of primed canvas. Charcoal pastels. Man, this brings back more nostalgia than the letters I unearthed! Back in the day when I was still an AEP student mugging for art history and all the sleepless nights with only our art supplies for company. And the strange things I decide to draw (my choice of sketch subjects was always peculiar) - prawns, owls, egg shells - yeah.
And of course, that was back in the day, when there were only 4 schools in Singapore offering the programme (IJTP, VS, NYGH & HCI). And being one of the apparently very few higher art students in Singapore, it seemed a general notion that art should be our destiny. Everyone in IJ still cannot believe I am pursuing science. I quote Lucille just a fortnight ago: "BUT NING. You're an art student, goodness, are you sure you still want to do science!". Only Zee went on to pursue art in London! Val and Nicxy are both doing law. No idea where the rest are, but I'm certain they aren't doing art. Regardless, AEP late-nights, not having to do D&T + Home Econs and all the studio madness - fondest times in IJ. Why should it matter that my love has been, and is ever increasingly, science? What matters is that the artist in me never left. ;)
Okay now, didn't I say nostalgia for another day?
Anyway! I've this terrible urge to paint! I've got so many supplies, surely I must do something with them. Seeing that I still don't have a job, I might just head down to Art Friend to purchase a stretched canvas (and maybe an easel too?) so I can paint again! Y/Y?
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