I think it's really annoying when people can't accept what other people are doing and try to push them down by using a combination of whining/scolding/I-Am-Better-Than-You looks.
Maybe I'm being sensitive, but really some people have to know when to stop minding other people's business and to get off their high horses. Also to stop whining whenever things don't go their way. You think you have a better way, you voice it, if people don't agree and give you a valid reason then shut up already.
And if the group's made a mistake and you've done nothing to stop it AND you're in charge, you're at fault too, so giving this tired old "Not Again" look like everyone else did wrong and you're the only one who's right simply because you didn't make the mistake will just piss people off. I always thought being a leader was more than just doing the right thing, it's leading people in the right direction and if they make mistakes due to your negligence, you whack yourself in the butt instead of acting smug about things.
Eday '09 <3
So many things went wrong and right, but each Eday (formerly Ecamp, in 2007) I've been through leaves its own distinctive flavour.
Didn't get the sleep I was expecting to have during my brief respite as a dead person, but it was fun all the same. (: Good job Audrey/Shir!
Went home at 8+ during Earth Hour
what a nightmare gosh. I don't know whether it was because of lightsoff or if it was just a coincidence, but a major accident seemed to have happened in Orchard Road, and the combination of darkened shopping street and flashing police/ambulance lights was rather terrifying. It doesn't help that I don't like walking around outside at night; no matter where I am I always feel unsafe. Product of paranoia or streetsmarts?
I did get my sleep in the end, though. Xinyuan went to sleep at 8.50pm last night and got a headache (sleep hangover!) this morning HAHAHA. We woke up at around the same time but I slept much later.
Sighh I want to slack off after being so busy this past week, but can't. There's so much to do, and so much more awaits.
A moment of sanity stolen from a work-filled night,
an oasis of
calm before the stormbefore the realities of nagging mothers
unpacked bags
unprinted papers
undone homework
un- (Oh no, lost track!)
intrude, reminding you to sleep
or Three Alarm Clocks won't wake you tomorrow in time
for you to see the first train arrive.
I'm damn stressed, have ChemSPA tomorrow, need to do so many things and
why one more. How am I to do this on top of...everything else?
Okay here's the ArtsFest '09 official post :D
Haha it's so strange that every single year during ArtsFest prep, I tell myself stuff like "This is crazy and I'm never doing ArtsFest again" etc, but by the end of it I'm all "SIGN ME UP FOR ANOTHER LOAD OF TORTURE NEXT YEAR!!!!!!". Humans are such funny creatures.
Pre-audition preps were actually rather sad affairs, because we had so many things to iron out and there seemed to be so many uneven bits :/ Plus it was LJ week before auditions and everyone was like dead tired and didn't feel like going for pracs. Then there was the outfit-finding fiasco, the shopping trip at This Fashion and the choral black-skirt-versus-black-pants debate.
But we got in (: The initial mixup was freaky, though. And I think we laughed like crazy when we saw the poll on the Finals results page. One thing it did do was show how bored/free people are when they ought to be practising for finals lol.
Finals preps were during the holidays. Amid parental objections (amazingly, my mum had objections against waking up before 6.30am. Lul.), screwed schedules, weird dental appointments and holiday homework, we made it for practices. There was a fair amount of pressure; we were still changing actions/lyrics right down to the last few days.
Then there were the year lunches at the top floor of Far East instead of the first, because of the whole "avoid fried food before finals" thing. Chicken rice <3!
For Choral, we practised The Line* so often I think we all got heartily sick of it. We practised in a variety of classrooms, in light, in aircon, without aircon, in the dark, together, separately, lying down, standing up, sitting on tables, sitting on chairs and even while playing Solitaire (hah Yingxin).
In RI, we marvelled over the size of the school, rehearsed yet again and did last-minute make-up. We skipped lunch in favour of singing together for the billionth time and touching up our faces. We sat on the stage in the hall away from the spectators, getting nervous and commenting on others' performances.
Then it was our turn. So many things went wrong, like Peilin's uncuttable ribbon and the problem of Choral having a mike when the main characters didn't (we overpowered their voices. A lot), so we just went back to our places and enjoyed the rest of the acts, like _______, which was excellent comic relief.
Results were released in the auditorium, and Open was first to be announced. It was fairly surreal; we were dreaming and hoping for maybe a 3rd or something. Then RI got 3rd and we were like "okay let's hope we get 2nd".
Crescent Cedar (thankyouAudrey!) (Heal The World or something) got 2nd. That was when most of us practically slumped and went "aiya whatever la don't win then don't win".
Then:
"In first place......One."
Okay I don't know about the rest, but for me it was like "Whatever man. Who the hell is One anyway...HOLY PINEAPPLES THAT'S US OMGOMGOMG!!!!!!!!111111oneeleven"
Cue hugging, crying and insane maniacal laughter. Then Drama and Dance got 2nd, which means a better haul for RGSRCY this year compared to last year yay (:
Oh I saw Kester as we were filing out towards the canteen. I don't think he recognized me though :/ Eyeliner makes me look weird.
Then after photo-taking, school cheers (yay Raffles Ichiban!) and a mad rush of make-up removing and changing, we went for unit dinner at J8's Ajisen :D Sadly, I didn't have enough moolah on me to buy the value set but I was really thirsty, which was why I was super happy when the auntie brought iced water for me because I didn't order a drink :D My seafood ramen was good, as usual. Lingzhi gave me her scallop because she didn't like it :O
Unit bonding was quite amusing. It's amazing what we can do with butterfly wings, bamboo poles and buckets. There were a few cats around the place, which freaked Carey out. I think there was a whole cat family living there, because they were all of different sizes and I saw a really adorable black kitten following a white mummy cat around (:
We went home at around 9pm, but I took longer than expected to get home and only reached home at around 10pm, where I gorged myself on leftover instant noodles, jiaozi and tangyuan. Sigh I should really slim down; I'm eating too much and getting too fat.
And that was the end of yesterday, one of the most awesome Saturdays ever :D
ArtsFest '09; Entwined by One <3
Open Category FTW!
WELL DONE RGSRCY FOR ARTSFEST '09 :DDDD
2nd for Dance, 1st for Open, 2nd for Drama!Yay Open Category rocks :D
One - Entwined!
Shall post more tomorrow, I'm dead tired and only just finished removing all traces of eyeliner.
Oh and I almost forgot:
JIAYOU RGSRCY FOR ARTSFEST FINALS TOMORROW :D
DanceOpenDrama FTW!Two's too few, but THREE'S JUST NICE YAY!
Today's post shall be all about food. Hehe.
Let's start with lunch. We went to Yingxin's chicken rice shop again, where the service is literally faster than fast food - sit down, order, 3 seconds later your meal comes. Even Macs has lag time, but this one doesn't.
Anyway, our chicken rice came and Sindhu The Evil stole my plate of roasted chicken because it had more skin on it. I attempted to wrest it back from her, but the uncle who was serving us soup was looking at us amusedly and I decided to relent for a fee of 2 pieces of chicken skin.
I think I'm a really fast eater, because when I finally finished my first plate of rice, I looked around and everyone else was halfway through their food. So I decided there wouldn't be any harm in ordering a second plate - what better to do when watching people eat than to eat while waiting?
Well, everyone had that "ARE YOU SERIOUS" look on their faces. But I was hungry, so I just got another plate, poured some soy sauce and started mixing it in, until Claire gave me this deadpan stare and solemnly informed me of my impending Death by Sodium.
Suddenly, my fragrant rice looked like an artery-clogging murderer. But it's sinful to waste food, so I decided to just eat it and stay off salt for the next week.
--
Next was dinner.
My mum called at around 7+ to tell me to wash vegetables for dinner. I don't know this type of veg's English name, but in Chinese it's known as 苋菜. So anyway, those who're familiar with 苋菜 will know that it's really soft and tasty, but BOY IS IT HARD TO CLEAN.
Firstly, there're the roots. These contain the most dirt, so you have to chop them off first. Unfortunately, the people who package the vegetables at Bukit Panjang or whatever can't be bothered to arrange the vegetables neatly so that the roots are easy to cut off. So I had to either sift through the 1000000000 stalks of vegetables to find uncut roots, or chop them further up the stem and waste edible stems. Sigh. I was pressed for time, so I chose the latter option. D:
That wasn't the end of my Xiancai-Washing Nightmare, though. Next, I dumped the whole lot of rather stemless vegetables into a large container, filled it with water and started swirling the veg around. When I lifted up the bunch of vegetables, there was practically an entire SAND DUNE at the bottom of my container. Oh, brilliant.
After using tons and tons of water to shift the Sahara out of my veggies, I finally felt safe enough to soak them in water and leave them there until my mum came home to cook them.
Guess what? My mum complained that there were still a few grains of sand left in the water I used to soak the veg.
This is it. I'm never eating 苋菜 again, unless I don't have to wash it myself. Because there is no way I can ever be as thorough as I was today, and I don't want to die of Death by Choking On Sand before I get my rightful Death by Sodium from the copious amounts of salt I've apparently been ingesting since the day I started eating chicken rice.
Mmm, soy sauce. (:
I am awfully tired, and bloody annoyed.
Sigh. And I'm hungry too, but dinner isn't till 1 hour later.
FOOOD I WANT FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD. (Eek I sound a bit like Xinyuan.)
Ohnoes and there's still Modulus assignment and I have to keep Sunday afternoon free in case we're using it to do The Thing That Must Not Be Named.
I want to sleep.
Scaling + polishing hurts like anything, and I was so freaked out by the laser thingy the dentist was pointing at my teeth today that she felt the need to explain every single detail of the process. I felt so bad. But I was scared she was going to lasercut up all my teeth and announce that I was going to get dentures in place of my real teeth.
Lol Xinyuan and I are arguing (not the angry kind, the debate kind) about whether or not one can survive on a $1k salary per month.
I think it's impossible. She thinks it's possible.
But she also mentioned a point about my staying in a condo, which should ordinarily put me in the "upper middle class" category and therefore far removed from poor people's troubles. I think most people do think this way, and I can't blame them because it IS normally true. But it isn't for me, because we're no longer rich. We're not poor per se, but un-rich enough to understand.
*10 minutes later*
Anyway.
She appears to have won the argument, based on the assumption that the person doesn't have kids. But I still believe that our hypothetical Poor Clerk has kids, because poor people (especially clerks) always have lots of kids. Maybe they have more time to, you know, get funky in the bedroom because they work fixed 9-to-5 hours or something.
But then again, my mum and I were discussing the "poor people have more kids" thing a few years ago, and I proposed the unbeatable theory that poor people are poor BECAUSE they have so many kids. Hmm.
It's so weird to be annoyed and scared and happy in equal measures!
Ah well, back to Time Traveller's Wife. Maybe they'll correct the mistake (in our favour, of course) in a few hours.
(Update) WHEE LET'S GET IT STARTED, YEAHHHHHH ~
DanceOpenDrama <3
Three, twice in a row!
Only problem's that time-management will be the key to staying alive this hols, but I suppose it's all worth it (: One more week, let's jiayou!
I suddenly remembered this random snippet of conversation from our bus ride 'back home':
"Okay fine. So what DOES our year like to do?"
"Sing."
Oh gosh today was so hectic but fun.
Woke up at freaking 5.05am in an attempt to catch the first train but missed; ended up taking the third train or something instead. Wouldn't have been that bad either, but I slept on the 190 and overshot and landed at the Raffles Town Club bus stop before I woke up. Worse still, there was this huge hedge thingy dividing the road so I couldn't see whether there was a bus stop on the other side of the road, so I just took a chance and ran across the overhead bridge. Luckily there was a bus stop there, so I took 190 back from the opposite side -.-
Reached school around 2 minutes late, but it was fairly okay I guess. It was a mad rush of makeup and changing and last-minute practice.
The actual auditions were...okay I suppose. Nothing unexpected.
Singing on the bus back to RGS was awesome :D I felt one of those deeply joyful moments I get when everyone's singing together and we're all high and stuff. Well, I suppose we won't have to take care of our throats for the next few days. It was such a torture trying to keep away from sweet/spicy food so as not to make the phlegm problem worse la :/
At some point before lunch Verna had to ask her mum not to drive her home as she was going with us for yearlunch. Her mum was sitting in the canteen where there was a parents' reception for those parents who went for the HCL talk, so after Verna was done talking to her mum we walked past the fruit punch cooler...
and decided to steal some. :D Unfortunately, I later received an SMS from Xinyuan saying her mum saw us doing the dirty deed. Amazing how I'm so recognizable, really.
Lunch at FarEast was actually quite good. Yingxin recommended the Hainanese Chicken Rice shop beside the escalators. The service was unbelievably prompt and the chicken more tender than the dish sold at most stalls. Smart Lingzhi suggested we eat there everytime we go for yearlunch, yay :D
The only bummer was that I wasn't in much of a mood to enjoy the food. My teeth hurt like crazy, seriously. The orthodontist's finally closing the gaps made by the 4 extractions and my teeth aren't the type to give in to the rubber bands easily. So I've got PowerChains and Scandinavian elastics on my teeth. Pain pain pain ):
Oh gosh this is insane.
Clear mind, breathe in deeply, strike a yoga pose. Okay.
--
Today's prac was awesome la (:
I've so much to say, but I guess it can be left until tomorrow.
GO RGSRCY FOR ARTSFEST '09! :DDDDD
--
Slumdog Millionaire (the book) is awesome. I wish I could watch the movie, but I guess I'll have to wait till the pirated DVD people come to Sengkang, because it's RATED ARGHHH I WANT TO BE SIXTEEN NOW.
Ooh yeah I still have to apply for my IC. Pink IC FTW! But Xinyuan says she hasn't gotten hers yet, and she was born in early January. Sigh.
I'm in this weird nervous frenzy now, because auditions are tomorrow and I still feel awfully off-tune and I haven't recovered fully from my sore throat yet and my voice still gets scratchy at times and oh no what if I can't sing a pure note tomorrow and I screw everyone else up die die die.
And I just went to cook the rice, which now gets me angry everytime I use the rice cooker (which is everyday, brilliant) because it likes to malfunction whenever I'm not staring at it. It goes all blinky and weird and starts flashing orange when I'm not in the kitchen, but it NEVER dares to do that when I'm staring at it.
I think I'm going to have to camp in the kitchen if I want to get nice, hot rice by 8.30. Wish me luck; I'm bringing Deathly Hallows there to read.
If only I had a wand and a book of kitchen spells like Mrs Weasley. I'd make good food appear out of thin air. ):
Chinese LJ today.
It sounded promising: Movie Screening. From the rumours circulated around my batch, I thought we'd be forced to watch Moving House again for the umpteenth time.
Well, it was worse. The narrator was unnaturally cheerful, the background info delivered in an unnecessarily draggy manner and the conversation uninteresting. I attempted to stay awake and pay attention like Xinyuan, but it didn't work out, so I returned to the control room and found Denise asleep and Vic trying to do her work in a corner.
In the end, I woke up and went outside when the credits started rolling to find Panda and Vic squished into a chair and watching the movie with apparent enjoyment. Sigh. It had to get interesting just when I fell asleep?!
The rest of the day was rather sian but necessary. I lent my ezlink card to Alicia and forgot to get it back from her. Got it back in the end though.
Aiya don't feel like blogging anymore. Lol.
I hate how my mum thinks MPP isn't as good as CAP or something just because "CAP can help you with your compo-writing during exams!" Screw compo-writing, I joined it for THE LOVE OF POETRY, PROSE AND ALL THINGS GAY.
First thing she asked me when I got back from Bill-Writing Workshop (which was good, but fairly boring) on Saturday was "Did they teach you how to write essays?".
RAWRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR A BILL IS NOT AN ESSAY IT ISN'T EVEN CLOSE TO AN ESSAY WTF.
Fine, so right from the start I should've known because she keeps thinking MPP is extra and wastes time and doesn't help my GPA at all. Screw GPA, I joined MPP for THE LOVE OF ADVOCACY, POLITICS AND ALL THINGS BORING.
At least she's stopped annoying me every time I go for an MPP event. She used to think I was doing it as an extra (read: pointless) activity, until I explained that I'd have to do normal RS anyway if I weren't doing MPP. Now she's decided to resign herself to the fact that I'm not going to drop out of MPP anytime and instead nags me to manage my time better.
Can't imagine how she'd react if I tell her I once wanted to join Fashion Cluster. -.-
The best thing is that in an attempt to mould me into a version of her newfound idol, Dr Lee Wei Ling, she tried to tell me earlier this year to always speak up for what I believe is right. When I mentioned to her that advocacy takes time, she told me that it's worthwhile "if it's a good cause that can help people".
Oh, the irony.
Lolol Dr Sakhar said during RALA outing yesterday that he deleted all of Chris Brown's songs from his iPod just because Chris Brown beat up his girlfriend Rihanna.
(Btw they got back together again. Chris and Rihanna, I mean. Not Dr Sakhar and Chris. Apparently Rihanna felt bored without a boyfriend. Sheesh. Can't she survive for a few months without one?!)
Anyway, he said it was because he couldn't stand that Chris was singing songs about love and everything, like With You, on one hand and beating up his girl on the other, and that it was hypocrisy.
But since when did singers ever sing about what they really believe?
Take Sara Bareilles, for instance. I don't think she even has a boyfriend. Even if she does, she probably doesn't love him as much as the persona she adopts to sing Love Song loves HER lover.
Okay that didn't make sense. Never mind.
Anyway I wish he'd sent us the songs or something before he deleted them. Regardless of whether or not Chris Brown really meant it, With You is nice.
I wonder if every RGS girl questions the system when she first enters the school.
Because I never did. In Sec 1 I walked through the gates expecting a premier education (at least, academically) and nothing else.
On one hand, we learnt about the Thinker, Leader and Pioneer. (heard they added Person. Anyway, that isn't the point)
On the other hand, we learnt
boundaries. The invisible OB markers surrounding us everywhere, constantly reminding us that no matter what we do, people are
watching.
One of our teachers said RGS is resistant to change. I wholeheartedly agree.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.I feel like I'm at crossroads.
I feel stressed.
But I'm not stressed because I can't finish my revision.
I'm stressed because I've finished, but everyone else hasn't and therefore there must be something wrong with me because HOW ON EARTH DID I FINISH SO FAST I MUST HAVE LEFT OUT SOMETHING OHNO OHNO.
Maybe I should read ALL the pdfs on SS Moodle.
Or maybe I should finish doing Biozone. I mean, I only did around 25 pages worth. Maybe I should finish off the 2 chapters' worth of Cells. Whatever.
I know this post sounds sarcastic, but I'm genuinely worried. What did I leave out?!
Now, if only I could sit back, relax and twiddle my thumbs like Xinyuan. But copying Professor Dumbledore feels inherently wrong somehow, because unlike him, I am not a venerable, gay old man who loves maroon robes.
Hmm. "Venerable" and "gay" sound wrong when used together. Must reexamine attitudes towards homosexuality. Am I unconsciously biased towards gay people?
--
In any case, ignore the post above. One part's serious and the other's purely satirical.
