View from my seat

This is where we leave each other, in 2015.

Last school day

13 November // Last day of school attending lectures and all before we started hibernating at home for prolly three weeks doing up reports and preparing for exams!! Now that exam's over I am officially unemployed and the fact that Im gonna have to adult soon kind of scares and excites me, but more on that next time. Exams had been manageable, I mean seeing how I study for each paper (chiong one semester of reading materials in one freakin' day which meant I got minimum sleep if any at all and it felt soo awful coz Im too old to pull all nighters) but I could still write stuff out and that means I will do fine (: Still hoping to pull my CGPA up to the next class tho!! And my reports hahaha wtf all completed in like one day also TOO GUNGHO (tho I spent a few days reading up reference books) and I got back the results for this particular report after my last paper two days back - a freakin' 27 out of 30!! The one I included 我的少女时代 quote - “没有人可以定义我们，只有我们自己知道自己是谁，也只有我们才能决定自己的样子” HAHAHAH the marking criteria best siol :O 

I feel like there's so many takeaways from the modules I read this semester, like for the Cross-Taiwan Straits Relations class (pictures above) we are learning about history + politics + current affairs all rolled into one (they are closely linked anyway) it just opens up my eyes to know how and why things became the way they are now when it comes to the China / Taiwan issue (I mean even the concept of China in itself is problematic) and how a select few hold so much power they affect hundreds and thousands of people. Basically just how this is part of a world order (I think we all are part of a global order somehow but it's not like it stays a certain way forever) and there are still the histories / politics / current affairs of other parts of the world that Im still not familiar with. It's funny how the more we study, the realization that we know so little hits home even harder.

And then there's Quah (: who made me fall in love with literary concepts in year one (tho Im not any good in my literature classes haha) His lectures are sometimes stressful but always enjoyable, timeless even. Same for Kd's (enjoyable and timeless, minus the stressful)!! With Quah's classes, it's more of the little things that will stick with me for a long time to come. The importance of being precise and how 惰性 is a really unattractive trait and to think critically and not just take things at face value etc etc and the concept of performance of coz. Basically, to transcend. Coz he's just up there like that.

My translation class hor, I couldn't really remember when was the last time I saw Uganda. Idk if it's coz she kept flying for overseas conferences or if Im the one skipping a tad too many of her classes or both. But thank god for the translation textbook I borrowed from the library. Coz like one day before the paper I finally learnt what I need to know and I realized I couldn't term 匆匆那年 lyrics translation as, well, a 'translation' based on equivalence theory so it's at most a transposition.

And my Air Quality Management class had been timely in a sense due to the recent haze. So there's a better gauge of air pollution out there other than the PSI which they called AQI (Air Quality Index). It measures PM2.5 in the atmosphere as well which inherently poses more risk than the PM10 calculated in PSI coz PM2.5 can reach the 600millions pulmonary alveoli in your lungs and lodge themselves there (GAWD the kind of thing I memorized for exams) whereas PM10 only reach the upper parts of your respiratory system and can be expelled back through the throat. Wtf I gave up on their calculations a long time ago so basically I registered my calculator for nothing lol and the freakin' 60 bucks textbook still like brand new (can sell on carousell alr).

So right after our last lecture we were taking photos EVERYWHERE - at the Chinese Heritage Centre (which dad calls it 庙) & HSS Building & The Hive (or dimsum baskets up to ya) they are all in close proximity to each other it makes for a really funny landscape coz they each represent the traditional, the modern and the postmodern respectively; it's basically a rojak of architecture styles that are representative of the era they were built in BUT THENNN it felt a lot like ideological clashes and also, you can't just keep marketing the university based on one building when the rest of the campus doesn't even remotely look like that ugh but apparently their marketing efforts paid off coz there really are tourists who make all their way into Pulau NTU just to take pictures of The Hive ???????

Okay, now Idk if I can succinctly say what I wanna say about my three and a half years in NTU Chinese in one post and Im not going to try anyway. Maybe coz Im not even emotional about leaving school (yet). Im just glad I chose a humanities course after all, even though I most probably will have it easier if I go study business. And as always, I could have put in more effort in my studies HAHAH tell me how I even managed to come this far, it's astonishing sometimes. But I guess I will miss being a student. Anyway, fun times taking photos together on our last day sia ~ school had ended on a sweet note (:

xx

When they don that mortarboard

Everyone's saying how the value of degrees have dropped in recent years coz there are just TOO MANY graduates out there on the streets, and how even our own government's actually NOT encouraging people to further their studies, it suddenly feels like spending a longer time studying in a local public university is a brave thing to do when a different route (say a considerably shorter time in a private institution, why not right) will most probably yield the same results i.e. starting salary. Then again, it boils down to the field of study and this is not what I wanna talk about. What Im saying is, those are not reasons to erase anyone's efforts, no matter which route we chose. We all know how fucked up this system is, so please take a moment to celebrate this milestone.

ADELINE

YAIHUI

ZIXIN

JOANNE

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.

.

.

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:p

This year, it's a record of three trips to NUS university cultural centre for the commencement of two secondary school friends and two polytechnic friends. It's funny how my friends who entered local university are all in NUS and Im the only one who joined my Sis at NTU!!! And how Zx mentioned she hasn't even been to UCC before this, when I think I had been there FOUR times hahaha (plus Xy's commencement back in 2013). I believe I have said before graduation ceremonies are so so beautiful and I take back my words now. It is graduation itself that is beautiful. I think generally the ceremonies are plain boring. Soo looking forward to Pq's later in the year which means more pictures to come!! 

And with that, cheers to education and learning, forevermore (:

This is water

(Source)

"to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out"

Seeing how July's the commencement season, I find it totally apt to post this. Below is David Foster Wallace's commencement speech given in 2005 to Kenyon College, and I know it's a whole chunk of text BUT a good read is still a good read ten years on. And this reality - this "water" - is what Im preparing myself for down the road. Perhaps we would like to think we alr know this, but in Mark Manson's words, this is a piece one can often return to whenever you feel like you need some perspective. And in any case, Im sure I would get a different feeling reading this again once I truly step into the working world. So here goes.

__________________________________________

“Greetings parents and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about “teaching you how to think.” If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here’s another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.'” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”

It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there’s the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education–least in my own case–is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] — this is an example of how NOT to think, though — most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck."

Switch it up

This was us at Switch last friday chilling over good food, drinks and live music. The band only started at 830pm but we reached there a good two hours earlier just so we could catch up with each other (like ever since ... xmas ?? and like we can't wait till school starts lmao). Anw it'd be hard to talk after the band plays. One of their lead singers was actually a contestant from the recent Project Superstar hahaha but it was another lead singer whose delivery of G.E.M.'s 泡沫 tt left me in awe, the jaw drop kind of awe. It was sooo good, even better than the original I dare say. We were only there for 2 sets (they were playing 4 sets that night I think), but it had been a good start to the new year. 

"keyboardist, what time you end work? (;"

唐诗 • 宋词

What I read in Literature of Tang and Song class (:

Actually enjoyed that class more than I thought so.

(Source)

⚡ The girl who lived ⚡

Hi blog, so long. Finals ended yesterday, which also spells the end of a cray cray semester. It had been cray cray only coz I decided to give a fuck to pulling that pathetic GPA up and I did put in considerably more effort than I used to. In fact, October and November flowed into each other it was actually possible to NOT feel a sense of time. Project meetings on Friday mornings before going for my french class, after which I would join them again and we would usually end at 9 or 10pm (we stayed till 12am once, the horrors), and also going back to school on Saturdays etc etc. All these just for one module. Effin' CLAN is really effin' I told you. Also, I could still remember feeling down for quite some time when I failed my first french test, and the whole learn-a-foreign-language experience got worse when it came to the speaking test. We had to do it in pairs and I genuinely thought I could partner with this girl who sat at the same table. I think the rest of the class thought so too, even the instructor. But she wanted to pair with someone who doesn't want to SU the module, coz the fact that I wanna SU implies that I might not put in my best effort. I understood. But so much for that excuse, coz she had heard me speak french before. Whenever I thought of how the instructor had wanted me to read french texts out loud a wee bit more often than some others maybe coz I failed my first test, I always sigh a little inside. In short, everyone knows everyone else's standard. And my spoken french sucks. In the end, the instructor paired me up with an exchange student from Germany I could really cry coz I'm not that good with accents I was afraid we couldn't communicate in english, let alone french. In fact, I did cry in school when I recounted the whole thing to Sis. Please don't tell me I thought way too much into it or she hadn't meant it that way, coz I was pretty sure I had been looked down upon. 

But I guess there's always a silver lining. Dad would always fetch us home whenever we stayed back late, except that one time we took taxi back for it's past midnight. So ever thankful. And he got to chat with bubbly Kt, which was nice coz his daughters don't speak much lol. And all those long days in school weren't without its fair share of laughter! The three of us would entertain ourselves with dirty jokes (like guys like that sia haha), bringing up our eyecandies every now and then, and just confiding in each other about how stressed we were (people everywhere with that one drop of tear rolling down their cheek). So so glad those never ending project meetings were with the girls, at least projects didn't feel so much like a chore anymore. And that speaking test, lol. That exchange student's called daniel anyway. He had such mesmerizing green eyes hahaha I didn't know until I sat next to him. And whenever we didn't get each other, we would just d'accord (french for okay) our way through. But I managed to pass that speaking test and the second written test. I know this sounds petty, but I got one mark higher than the girl who didn't want to pair with me. Coz thanks but no thanks for making me cry. And right after class, I overheard her consulting the instructor about SUing the module. Really?!

So that's my 动荡的学期 for you. So much for giving a fuck, coz this is how school is like. I guess my final year would be less taxing coz I would only need to register for four modules, instead of the usual six which is wayyy too much. But anyhoo, I will forever miss HC3013 + Year One Sem One. A picture of the nightmare module class below, coz no matter what, it's still helena gao (: Partly also in remembrance of my eyecandy this semester lmao

A little update on the past half a year:

✭ Took this CEI-KAH test in early July and passed on my first try ✌

✭ Worked in UE for the whole of July before the semester started I'm still not quite sure how I feel about it

✭ Mum's godpa and her birth dad passed on a few days before and after my birthday this year respectively. We hadn't been really close but they were related to my mum and it's complicated but nevertheless, death is a sad thing. Inevitable, and sad

✭ Vendor for a day at Lucky Plaza flea, chaotic much

✭ Stayover at Pq's two weeks into the start of the semester (how come it felt like eons ago) Always being silly with my potatoes ^^

✭ Weekend bkk trip with the ohana, pray and shop a lot, we even saw jesseca liu (!!)

✭ First mani-pedi session in whut six years (??) lol but immediately regretted my mani color, even got around to painting a new color over it myself

✭ Signed up for ballet lessons with adeline and her mum, but I don't feel graceful at all hahaha anw got too bogged down by schoolwork I only attended three lessons (?!)

✭ Saizeriya opened just one street away from home. This was exciting news for Sis and I coz that was where we loved to eat at a few months back when we were at Beijing and Shanghai, sooo value for money we always order too much. In short, Saizeriya's our 乡愁 

✭ That bitch finally moved out of the house, and two days later we have loansharks come harassing us. Bitch is bitch, no wonder even her siblings didn't want to have anything to do with her

✭ Was conducting a verb test with random ntu students for the nightmare module and one participant turned out to be this fellow math tuition mate from church. That one period of time I went to church back in my Sec four days, going for math tuition under chuweikian cher, and this funny guy of the same age damn nice to me lol but walau eh, we couldn't even recognize each other today. Imagine me singing "tell me the tales that to me were so dear / long, long ago long ago ..."

✭ And I'm so ever sorry for forgetting your birthday adeline :( still very 过意不去

Alright, I feel so much better after writing everything out. Maybe not everything but still, till then xx

#一片冰芯在北京

Okay, you've really got to give us credit for thinking up the nicest Ig hashtag for this trip - so ingenious, so poetic. And coz we covered three areas, took a gazillion photos everywhere, I (still) find it hard to form coherent sentences about the experience and hence, the blogging inertia. I remembered feeling a lot thinking about a lot during the trip itself, but when I got back (and after a week of going to classes) it had been entirely different. I could not even define 'it'. So this is me attempting to record some initial feelings and thoughts which might sound disengaged as you read on, but I don't know any other way around it.

This China trip had been full of last minutes. The night before we flew my luggage was only half packed; we hadn't settled the flight ticket that was going to bring us back to Singapore from Shanghai (only booked it at a travel agency in Beijing); and then we totally ran out of chinese yuan we had to borrow quite a hefty sum from Kt (initially wanted to use the card to pay for the Beijing accommodation but both our cards couldn't work so we pay it all via cash) totally freaked us out coz that meant we would have to pay for the last air ticket in cash too. We didn't exchange so much chinese yuan!!! But things always have a way of working themselves out.

Also, a few days prior the trip we two made our way down Waterloo Street's Kwan Im Temple to pray for safety. I don't usually do this kind of prayer, I mean I sometimes talk to this miniature buddha statue in the living room, but I think making my way down shows more sincerity hahaha. I still think we were very blessed; so many things could have gone wrong given our unpreparedness and life's uncertainties, but the trip had been very smooth. Wtf each time I board the plane I imagined it to be my last one, and each time I landed safely I thanked all deities. Took four planes over a span of twelve days I was really put off by them winged creatures for a while. Like having too much of a good thing inevitably makes that thing not good. Not necessarily bad, but just not good anymore.

PS: I reallyyy wasn't expecting myself to write so much hahaha

(this was meant to be a visual diary post, but heck)

It was close to 2am by the time we came out of Beijing Capital Intl Airport's arrival hall, and we had Kt and Aq welcoming us right there even though they had classes next morning!! So touched haha coz we only reached our hostel at like 330am (taxi queue damn long). We chose the Peking U hostel which cost SGD$160 per room per night, which was woah sky high expensive for us. But damn near their hostel. The room was more hotel than hostel anyway, with its soft orange lighting and all.

The first day we were there we sort of covered the major tourist attractions like 天坛 Temple of Heaven, 天安门 Tiananmen, 故宫 Forbidden City and 南锣鼓巷, where this maze of hutongs and siheyuans trapped us for so long. Basically it was a lot of walking (you know how China's so big right), a lot of traffic lookout (no one's following the freakin' system), and a lot of UV rays (still a little sunburnt right now from my first day there). I was sooo tired I conked out without even taking my shower. Add blisters and cracked heels to that equation you can imagine how battered I was.

And it was only the first day.

So, with not less than five plasters on both legs, I trekked on. Itinerary for the second day was more artistically inclined. We went to their National Film Museum (Idk why) and 798 Art Zone for their graffiti and whatever artsy fartsy stuff they house there. But so disappointed with our graffiti photos!! Also, we wanted to see for ourselves the night life of Sanlitun Village but got too freaked out by the pole dancing and strippers scene, too happening for us alr lol we literally escaped the bar street.

The next day we crashed their literature class at Peking U omggg school's the same everywhere coz I actually dozed off, couldn't bear to listen on, and left the lecture during break. We didn't really have anything concrete planned for the afternoon before Aq's birthday celebration at night, so we decided to go 颐和园 Summer Palace and I got myself this beautiful pictorial calligraphy of my chinese name which I like a lot. Like really a lot hahaha it's now pasted on the wall above the headboard.

And just before we met up with the rest for a birthday dinner at this German? Italian? restaurant, Sis and I got a chance to ride pillion on Kt's cousin bike, it was asdjklnb coz he doesn't have a licence I think. But he damn steady luh. And then at night the exchange students aka fellow coursemates + two extras who only flew in recently from Singapore held a mini party at their hostel for Aq's twenty first (: 

The last day we were supposed to climb the Great Wall but I wasn't feeling up to it (my feet wasn't) so it had been a little regrettable, I mean Great Wall leh 不到长城非好汉 but I think it just gave me an excuse to bring Dad there next time you know, like book a tour or something when he gets older so we can walk around see mountain see water. Quite nice huh.

We decided to go what is commonly known as 'the egg' which is the National Centre for the Performing Arts, much like our Esplanade without the thorns, butttttttttttt wtf google pictures are all a lie. Sigh much, I don't even wanna talk about it. The doraemon exhibition was impromptu, soo glad we went - cuteness overload!!!

Pretty sure I hadn't write about some stuff I was meant to write, like it's either I have so much to say I don't know where to start / how to continue, either that or I have nothing much to say hence the struggle for words. But Im leaving it at that. This post needs to see the light of day.