Dragons

So it is the time to usher in a new guardian animal again. Except that this animal is a glorious combination of several animals and the creative juices of them ancient Chinese. Dragon, Y U NO exist?! Rest assured that I will be the first to sign up for adopt-a-dragon drive if I can keep something like Mushu as a pet.

Chinese New Year means locking myself in the room upstairs blasting #foreveralone songs (read: Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Astronaut etc) while my 80-odd member strong extended family take their turns at the karaoke set or the poker table. Being the socially awkward penguin who hates noise, I have to blame Unicorn (sorry!) for the presence of relatives who all have one thing in common: the inability to keep their mouths shut for extended periods of time.

Lemme digress. Every time I read intellectual blogs written by intellects I feel bad for creating posts after posts that have nothing to do with anything except for my introverted and psychopathic tendencies nature. And I am also sorry for you people my relatives who have to put up with a my simple yes/no/*shrugs shoulder 0-1 syllable answer to any question under the sun. 

But at the same time, I feel good for assuaging the fears of them academically-challenged individuals because hey look, I am living proof of a clever person who is destined to fail in life and looked down by others because of zero social skills so hey look, exam results aren't that important after all.

I digressed. Anyway, on my lonely evening walk yesterday I found a gate that leads to an open field which leads to another gate which leads to some random wilderness. But the rain took away my opportunity to search for a unicorn :(

I am starting to lose some of my egoist sentiments so I shall end this post with a fullstop.

While my peers are busy

working in clinics and offices and restaurants and bookshops I am happily typing away my new blog post in the comforts of my air-conditioned room, accompanied by a colony of about six hundred weaver ants.

Weaver because these ants weave pieces of leaves together to form their little happy home. Glue used: slik produced by larvae of weaver ants.

Lemme show you a picture (thanks NatGeo)of these Oecophylla smaragdinas. They are pulling them leaves together so that the gluer could cement the leaves.

Click me!

And so I was assuming my role as garden patrol yesterday when mum spotted a colony of these and threw the entire colony away in the direction of our dear neighbor's house. 

And thank goodness I spotted a second colony! Said colony is sitting in a plastic cocoon made up of two 1.5-litre bottles nao. My new pets!

As of now, they are busy re-constructing their home. For a quick mental picture of what my little ecosystem looks like, please refer to above picture.

Heh.

One hour from now

I will finish my 500-words.

Deal sealed, Unicorn bless.

I dunno :/

This week (or year) has been one messy chunk of time in the history of my life that if you ask me to recount   what on earth (or Kepler-22b) have I been doing for the past few days I would have described to you two or three 9gag posts that I absolutely adore. For instance the shit-in-the-bathtub comic. And the reversal-of-digestive-system-so-that-you-can-eat-shit-and-produce-burgers-and-bacon-from-your-anus comic.

Or this:

Actually my life does not suck. In fact, I celebrated the dawn of 2012 with an amazing firework display which made me puke rainbows and unicorns. 

Just to add a space-filler: HAPPY NEW YEAR!


Time to place 2011 in front of a mirror:

Achievement unlocked: graduated from high school. Obtained my driving license and organ donor card. Did some free labor (a.k.a. CIP). Went to school everyday. Did regular grocery shopping. Watched TVB dramas. Stayed alive.

Uhm, what else?

MLIA. Nothing to reflect on. No helping to construct schools for Nepalese children. No volunteering for Youth Olympic Games (In fact, I never knew when it started nor ended). No winning of competitions, big or small. No keeping up with current affairs (except when Osama's face was plastered across the front page of every single newspaper in existence). No lotteries, no injuries. Just you know, breathing and eating and drinking.

I am such a dispassionate freak that the only volunteering work I foresee myself doing is being all cynical about the volunteer works of others. The only skill that I have is probably performing speed mathematical operations which has been put into null use except to compare products during grocery shopping.

Why do I appear as someone who is totally unnecessary and that the only person who is happy for me being born into this world is myself?  #okay.jpg


Ok time to eat dinner babai.

Mandatory last-day-of-the-year post

is mandatory.

Happy new year!

Moneyline

So I've decided to adopt Timeline, knowing full well that this decision will cost me a humongous sum of money(time=money) koz I foresee myself painstakingly curating all aspects of my profile, especially the picture banner. So my life doesn't come across as messy. Or aimless. 

It's scary. Because of the ease of navigation of Timeline's layout. Because now the world, or rather your "friends" could have one-click access to your status updates in 2008, or when you first joined Facebook, whichever is earlier. "History" of your life that was once tantalizing to your stalkers (or your forgetful self) is now being presented as a free-for-all virtual scrapbook which pages could be easily flipped back to the day when your momma had her C-section. Although I doubt the authenticity of it all because after all, this history book is still prone to the editings and craftings of the vain self. Think hiding "un-glam" photos. 

I have no qualms about detailing personal information on FB. No, not my credit card nor my passport numbers. I mean the schools I've attended, or my religious belief (read: unicorns). In fact, this entire showcasing of life is of such irony that the more people know about you, the less they do. The world holds bits and pieces from the annals of history of an important person that is yourself, that it has, to borrow a GP prompt, "no idea what to do with the pieces".

Of course, not to the extent of Prof. Hasan Elahi who, since 2002, has been updating his whereabouts every hour or so by posting photos on trackingtransience.net. "So by me putting all this information out there, what I'm basically telling you is I'm telling you everything. But in this barrage of noise that I'm putting out, I actually live an incredibly anonymous and private lifestyle," I quote his TED talk.

Back to TVB dramas. Oh is there a Timeline social app for that?

The power of the internet

With a working internet connection and a legit credit card, anything is commercially available.

That said, I nearly bought a stethoscope with my name engraved.

Poem

I dig
you dig
he dig
she dig
we dig
they dig.


It's not a very good poem, but it's very deep.

If jumping makes one taller

why is Lamarck wrong?

Trying to understand

Islamic philosophy. And Traditional Chinese Medicine. And feng shui. And the Bible. And etc etc.

And I made a celtic cross today! Out of cardboard though. Can't find leftover wood. And I finished a HK drama!

OOh did I just spend four years learning mathematical equations and chemistry reactions and physics laws and biochemical pathways? :| I could have been a theology master! Or a craftsman wtf.

Attempted to fix

a leaking pipe today. Mom was upset koz Dad was away and apparently "females cannot fix pipes". There you go. Most females do not know a thing about plumbing/electrical wiring/car engines because they have never bothered to do so because these fixings of things belong to the male realm. There, there. Stereotyped beliefs have the power to become self-fufilling prophecies for behavior. Had I had enough sealant I would have sealed that damned pipe. And had I be a rebel I would have gone on to technical school to study my favourite subject during secondary school. Said subject is all about "living skills" which include plumbing/wiring/sewing/cooking/etc.

A teacher once lamented that females can't drive. Well, I think this applies to both genders especially with  the advent of oil-consuming automatic transmissions. I hate them, mainly because I dislike the idea of a machine controlling the driver's choice of gears.

That said, I haven't been driving for two days and I am beginning to miss my car. 

And HA! All it takes to complete them applications for 13++ colleges is seven days. I'm fairly proud of my tenacity to disregard advice from them elder beings who unanimously disagree with my decision to apply to an above-average number of colleges. Maybe I am just a stubborn snail who detests comments, good or otherwise, from any human being to who aims to alter my course of action that I have already decided. But hey, I ignored all suggestions from multiple teachers to improve my personal statement and still managed to receive offers. 

I think I sounded arrogant. :sad:

Since I have gotten them humongous application elephants out of my way, I now have the time to (finally) read books! Imma reading one on emotional intelligence which I am completely devoid of. I think my amygdala (the emotion center of the brain)is the size of a peanut. :|

But hey, why feel when you can think? Perhaps life would be better if everything could be expressed in sets of mathematical equations.

And so I was looking

through droves of prom photos on Facebook. It was pretty obvious which albums were taken with a DSLR and which ones were not. DSLR: candid shots of prom goers, the ballroom setting, the stage, the food. Compact camera: faces, underexposed faces, overexposed faces, faces, faces, moar faces. In some exceptional cases, DSLR: faces. 

Plus, it gets really upsetting koz whenever I clicked "next", the same photo, albeit taken with a slightly different pose, propped up. But mostly it is the same pose, repeated in n photos. Worse, I had to tilt either my head or the computer screen to see them photos at the right orientation.

OK. It's the 21st century, and therefore I respect people's rights to rape the biggest button on their respective cameras. 

Back to them damned essays. O screw it I like a college because I like a college lah! How am I supposed to express my intelligible heartfelt emotions in 300 words? Hope that the admission officer of colleges W and M wouldn't be pissed by the words "gut feeling" in my essays. 

I am drained. Both myopically and vocabularily. Heh.

Rembulan merah di ufuk timur

My homecoming present turns out to be a total lunar eclipse. But it seems that whatever unicorns that are out there do not enjoy me enjoy the spectacular view of the moon turning merah and all, so they insisted on placing this veil of secrecy aka cloud in between me and the moon.

Lunar eclipse, Y U NO show yourself through clouds?!?

So I ended up watching the eclipse via three live webcasts from Sabah, Japan and some country somewhere in the Pacific. And chatting with random web eclipse watchers in Malay (oh! the pang of familiarity!) and displaying Malaysian (un)civilness by flash mobbing the Japanese chatroom. Heh. Arigato!

Anyway, lemme tell you the story of my bus ride back home. I spent an hour listing words that start with the letter E. The first few words were esquire, egregious, ebullient, epiphany.

Then I felt sad. Brain, Y U NO think simple?!?

And I listed egg, elephant, eel, easy. Of course there were words like energy, equilibrium and enzyme. But that's not the point. The point is: I need to get my simplicity back. It's funny how the education system strives to imbue our brains with knowledge! knowledge! moar knowledge! but robs them of the capacity to perform back-to-the-basics thinking. 

I thus based essay #3 on simplicity. And in the name of unicorns, that was not a simple task.

And eating durians in the middle of the night is simply....sweetjesushavemercy.jpg

Two down

10++ more to go. Now that I have overcome the biggest obstacle of writing admission essays-which is starting the essays themselves-I shall brace myself for a one-essay-per-day stint for the coming two weeks. There is still hope that I would be able to finish everything by Christmas after all. Praise the PG*.

In retrospect, I think it would be wise of me to invest in a waterproof notebook. Thought of wonderful ideas for essay #3 in the shower just now but have forgotten more than half of them. 

*Procrastination God

Trashed

My visit to the blood bank, that is. Save the trouble of someone receiving blood that is contaminated with the flu virus. And by-products of them lazy genes, of which I suspect have been converting themselves from hetero- to euchromatin lately.

Wore my mud colored (half) uniform for the absolutely last time to collect the diploma. O, two more pretty pieces of paper for me to keep and make duplicate certified true copies of and tuck them at one corner of my folder to cultivate some forest-green moss by the end of 2050. Lovely. In this way, I could help compensate for the environmental degradation that the school helped condone by printing certificate of achievements. Not that I have anything against the diploma; it just isn't necessary.

Addicted to the gooey and sweet and unhealthy Kinder Bueno. Bought three packets from the trade union's supermarket at a promotion price, but was charged the normal price during checkout. Wasted 6 minutes of  my fellow customers' time by making the cashier check and verify and refund me the extra thirty-five cents. And I was given The Frown by impatient citizens waiting behind. I am sorry to make you people waste additional ATP to contract your facial muscles. Maybe you guys should migrate to Bhutan? 

My room is in an utter mess now. Slime-infused tissue papers are heaped onto the desk, while plastics bags and empty files are littered across the bed and the floor. I could have finished packing by noon, but as a staunch believer of the Procrastination God, I shall procrastinate until desperation kicks in.

Turns out

that I did not have KFC. Instead, I ate a bowl of pork noodles in a Taiwanese eatery that is famous for their beef noodles but promptly chose today to run out of beef.

Spent the day meeting up with two relatives and answering questions pertaining to university choices and future plans. Recited my rehearsed answer of "Economics, University X". Did not want to enthusiastically tell anybody "Liberal arts in X college(s) in the US of A" only to receive raised eyebrows and gaped mouths as responses. 

Oh gawd I'd better take my contacts off now or else I wouldn't have the visual acuity to read 9gag tomorrow.

First

To my absolute horror, my Mandarin (M) writing capacity has deteriorated to a level where forming coherent sentences is no longer a natural task. Damn. There goes my nine years of pure M education. Although I still count and perform mathematical operations (in my head, that is) in M because of M multiplication tables.

So, there. I archived my old blog (which is completely written in M) in order to prevent the disruption of  the cultural and aesthetic beauty of Chinese block letters. 

After two consecutive interview days, I am officially down with a sore throat. Put myself on leftover antibiotics (Despite doctors' advice and science research findings and heck, bio lecture notes, I never complete any antibiotic course) and prayed hard that one single pop of the miracle pill could cure that damn inflammation in three hours so that I can eat my KFC Hot and Spicy later. 

Screw health. Imma eat my chicken no matter what.

I have been living my post A levels life in absolute limbo, despite them college application essays waiting to be written and books waiting to be read. And home waiting to be returned to. 

And I am yet to start my polyphasic sleeping routine, which methinks, would drive the last bit of sanity out of my already rotten brain.