ebony and ivory

Went for the Earth Wind & Fire (that's a band, fyi, not "some TCM technique", as the emcee during the backstage reception suggested some younger people may have mistakenly believed) concert today with my family, and against all expectations, I enjoyed it thoroughly. The music is really different from what I'm used to, but it was nice nevertheless. Philip Bailey's falsetto is simply amazing, the best I've heard. Sitting 12 rows in front of the stage and those giant speakers made my ears sore and numb afterwards (and they still are D=), but I would say it was worth it.

And it's kinda heartwarming to see the fun side of all the moms and dads in Singapore as well -- standing on chairs and dancing, and the like. :)

Although short, the concert was loads better than the pre and post-concert reception, stuffy full with a list of UBS's most valued customers, decked in long sleeved shirts (yeah, I had to wear one as well, although I ended up rolling the sleeves up. =P), suits, and all. Thankfully I think I managed to avoid embarassing myself (and my parents) in any way (I hope). Food wasn't the best (I ended up filling myself with sashimi over and over again), but at least we got to see the band members close-up and all. And we got a free poster + T-shirt + CD. =P
Plus point though: In polite society, they don't come up to you to ask if you're old enough to drink (champagne, that is) -- instead they top up your glass. Which results in teetering rather than teetotaler-ing. ;)

~ ~ ~

Hehe, Portal is fun, despite the fact that I had to prod Daryl to ask what to do at every turn (strictly speaking, it's still not referring to a walkthrough. Kinda). And I got cake! :D

And so in trying to make my holidays vaguely useful, on Weng Hong's advice, I attempted to learn some cooking today from my maid, and I'm just relieved I managed to avoid burns of varying degrees. Anyway, cooking did seem fun, at least, until I realise that I actually have to eat the food that I prepared.
Oh well, there's nothing a generous (very generous) sprinkling of various condiments and seasonings can't solve. And at the same time by of eating even seemingly inedible food I'm proudly living up to my Chinese heritage (Speaking of which, I just dreamt of taking the O Level paper again and flunking it. This doesn't bode well D=).

And that's just for butter rice and egg. If I ever manage to get to meat, I'm pretty sure the salmonella will get me soon after.

~ ~ ~


I'm pretty sure this made Tchaikovsky roll in his grave quite a few times, but it's hilarious still. Love his key changes :)

Previous holidays, homework, CCA and the like kept me sufficiently occupied, and I just hoped for one holiday where I would have nothing to do. I was hoping to detach myself from reality these 2 months, and coop myself up in my little hermitage. I guess I've done that, but now it just seems so aimless. I'm running out of interesting ways to waste and while my time away, and it's not even the end of November.

I see people getting internships, finding jobs, basically using their time to do something useful. I know I should at least be preparing for JC -- I'm taking 2 subjects wholly alien to me (Linguistics and Econs), and 1 that seriously needs lots of brushing up (French, with A's apparently in JC1 at that...) -- if not following suit and finding out how the real world actually works, not that I'm really looking forward to it.

But anyway, here I am, shutting my doors and not even building a car. Yes, I know I probably used that Chinese proverb wrongly.

I need to get at least one useful thing out of these 2 months. Somehow.

Popped down to Sentosa yesterday with my parents and their friend from New Zealand, and going there really seems kinda surreal. Cross the bridge and already massive colourful construction projects and rollercoaster frameworks litter the shoreline. I'm pretty sure I would never have envisioned a Sentosa anywhere near this when I was little, back when one still had to take a ferry or a cable car all the way to this little 世外桃源 for a nice short holiday with mummy and daddy :)

It's been ages since I've been to Sentosa (other than to the occasional restaurant there), and it was just a quick walk around, but somehow everything seems to give a sense of deja vu (I'm hoping it's not just the intoxicating chlorine from the water around the merlion). Attractions aside, even looking at the water slide at Rasa Sentosa brings back fond memories. Apparently, my parents used to bring my brother and I over pretty often when we were little, so I guess that in part explains the wave of nostalgia I get from going there now.

But really, Sentosa has changed a lot from the Sentosa of my childhood memories.

I really need to drag myself out of the house more -- Singapore's small, but there's still so much I haven't seen, like the Henderson Waves treetop walk thing. Which, incidentally, my mum is determined to drag the entire family to in the wee hours of one holiday morning. I think she should know by know that my body clock is tuned with clockwork precision during the holidays. (I've woken up between 11:45 and 11:50 for the past 3 days after recovering. Which surprises me, because I usually sleep in till, what, 2 or 3. Yes, I'm a lazy bum, criticise and laugh at me.)

~ ~ ~

The French Immersion people are leaving/have left this lonely little island, and now I'm sorta regretting not even trying out for it. True, I would probably have flunked the interview anyway, and even if I did manage to smoke my way through, there would be numerous embarrassing moments over there, but it still sounds an enviable prospect.

But now, I'm just stranded at home. I guess I'm enjoying the relaxation the holidays bring, but at the moment, it really seems kind of aimless. Maple starts to get a little boring after hitting level 30, and I haven't found the one source of entertainment to get myself addicted to to occupy my time as most people probably would have done. It was supposed to be NaNoWriMo for November, but, well... <insert excuse here>. Oh well, I shall resolve to using December to compose a epicly long piece of music or something, although I do know fully well I won't have the resolve, nor ability, to do so :)

I'm thankful for the brief respite which allowed me to pop down to school to hand in various convoluted, wrongly filled-in scholarship applications, but apparently, what they say about acquired immunity doesn't apply at all to my body. At least I learned to heed the warning signs for once, after spontaneously breaking out into cold sweat in places in which I never knew sweat glands existed, and decided to stay sleeping throughout the day, and tossing and turning, sleep quota breached, at night.

Of course, I missed the Leonids because I couldn't really get myself to feebly crawl out of bed, but apparently, there wasn't very much for me to miss anyway

Anyway, I'm better now, and I can return to Mapling :) I insist I'm not going to get addicted. I hope. But, well, hitting White Sand Rabbits and hear them cry in accompaniment to the Ariant background music is strangely fun.
Oh, and whoever wrote the script for the Aran tutorial deserves a huge clap -- It's pretty amusing. An awakened hero inserts occasional snide remarks (shown in brackets, of course), a seemingly-innocent girl suddenly goes all PMS and threatens to make the character kill 999 monsters "LIKE SOMEONE IN SLEEPYWOOD" (yes, there were caps, I think). Yep, it's all fun. Oh, and did I mention that there's a penguin with Alzheimer's? Yes, it's explicitly stated.

NaNoWriMo's gone awfully off-schedule because of HumProg essay and my falling sick after that. Should I try rushing it in 10 days? D=

~ ~ ~

Taking fLEEM in JC, i.e. H1 French, H2 Lit, H2 English Language & Linguistics, H2 Econs, and H2 Maths. I like the acronym :)

Yeah, I think I'm one of the few people crazy enough to take the maximum 12 units, not least when my French is disastrously bad, and I'm really hoping this doesn't backfire spectacularly. Although according to Martin H1 French/German A Levels are in JC1. Which means I have just about 1 year to bring my French standard up to an A from an O, or 0.

~ ~ ~


Scorpion Fire by Jun Wakita, from Beatmania IIDX

Okay if you didn't bother watching any of the other random videos I've posted, at least watch this one, seriously. Japanese are insane people. Very insane. And scary. It's one thing marvelling at people improvising, and it's another thing altogether watching people be able to do this.

Evidently doing well in Bio doesn't mean I know a single thing about my own body.

Woke up yesterday feeling pretty terrible, but (wrongly) put it down to tiredness, and instead decided to play tennis in the afternoon, which was definitely a really stupid decision. Felt even worse after that, and out popped a fever. I was hoping it'd be gone by today, but apparently not, and I've had to think my way through a HumProg essay and ELES personal statement with a half-fried brain.

Hope I'll be well enough tomorrow to hobble over to school to hand in wrongly-completed scholarship application forms. I insist half of the sections there are too vague D:

~ ~ ~

Collective nouns are wonderfully amusing. We've all heard of a gaggle of geese, a murder of crows, and found them entertaining enough, haven't we? But has anyone heard of a parenthesis of cellists?
A rand of objectivists, a snap of photographers, a promise of tomorrows, a whiteness of swans, an absence/indifference of waiters (I have a feeling somebody got bad service one day)...

Yeah apparently those are proper, valid, collective nouns :)

~ ~ ~

To supplement this short post, a video! Yeah, it's a filler, and I just browsed through my history to find the last decent video I watched, but it's quite nice nonetheless. Yes, as expected, it's some guy playing the piano :)



Fiddler on the Roof, the first musical I fell in love with, and I still love the music from it. Had almost forgotten about it until a couple of weeks ago, when Mrs Tan played Sunrise, Sunset in class though D:

Oh, and If I Were A Rich Man is really fun to play as well :)

Haha overuse of syllepsis is amusing :)

~ ~ ~

I guess Chinese O Levels were alright, although I'm afraid my zuowen was a bit too messy and lacking in focus. Managed to finish the summary just before time was up (really, just before. I finished writing my word count at the precise moment we were to put our pens down), so I'm hoping it still turned out alright.

Oh, and apparently it didn't matter if one brought in a transparent pencilcase or not, so I ended up looking pretty stupid carrying my stationery in a plastic bag that day because I was lazy to find a ziplock bag the previous night. :)

~ ~ ~

Grad Night was sorely disappointing, but at least it was a closure of sorts to our years in RI(S). Closure, not farewell, since half of the class popped over to Daryl's house for the rest of the night, and most of the following morning as well =)

Most of us attempted to stay up the whole night gaming (note, gaming mostly = playing Maple/button mashing on Soul Calibur), and hence were practically half asleep by 7am. Well, except for Weng Hong and Wilbert, who somehow managed to go for a 40 minute jog despite not sleeping at all D: *is amazed at scary level of physical fitness*

Managed to beat Shao Tong 5-4 in an epic 40 minute game of FIFA (=D) with a 90th minute bicycle kick from a corner kick. I promptly lost the next game as New Zealand against China and got 4 players sent off, but oh well :)
Oh, and I finally won 2 games of Mahjong in a row for... the first time. Yes, I'm that bad at it.

But yeah, it was great fun and all. =D

And I'm still going to miss 4C during the hols... :(

~ ~ ~

Collected my APR today, and was greeted with a 79 for History and a 24 for CCA (they decided to give me 1 mark for service, apparently). Not complaining though, I'm more than happy with my GPA (which has really gone up quite a bit since Sec 1), and a 4.0 for English is really going to help HumProg + ELES applications :)

Speaking of which, borrowed a couple of books on Singapore English today, and I really need to get through them soon so I can write my HumProg essay with actual knowledge of the subject.

(Hehe, noticed the pro-dropping of the theme-proper-oriented theme quite a bit in this entry.)
Okay, that was just an attempt at trying to pretend that I actually learnt something from the first few chapters. Esoterica FTW =)

~ ~ ~
=D

If you don't get it, think Sara Bareilles.
If you still don't get it, the Pokemon's name is Write-Chu Raichu. =P

3C/4C has really changed my life a great deal. I was a quick-tempered, vulgar, overbearing jerk in Sec 1/2 (just ask anyone from 1P/2P), and stepping into Sec 3, a new class, represented a chance for me to change myself, and hopefully I've done that for the better these two years. Of course, having great friends every step of the way helped immensely, and I think and really hope that I've mellowed in Upper Secondary and become a better person.

Honestly, there's no other class I would rather have been in these 2 years, and I think it's the first time in my life I've felt such a strong attachment to a group of people. Really, a big thank you to everyone from 3C/4C, students and teachers alike! =D

For once, I'm not really looking forward to lonely holidays, and, introverted as I am, I'll probably lose touch with those who won't be joining HumProg (assuming that I get in). I'll really miss you guys :(

I just felt drained after reaching home today, and collapsed onto the sofa for a nice long nap, and surprise, I actually dreamed of 4C. It was probably one of the most vivd dreams I've ever had, one of the few that I can actually remember, the only dream I could keep returning to despite being woken up every 5 minutes by my maid trying to get me to take dinner, and the only dream that actually ended.

( A figment of my mind... It's rather long, but yeah. )

3C'08/4C'09, I'll miss you guys! D=

Hehe I feel very greedy, not to mention very kiasu, for taking 3 scholarship forms (Humans, English, and MOE Pre U). I could have taken one for French as well, but i'd rather not face even more disapproving stares from the lady at the General Office.

Oh well, I know I'm going to screw up at least 2 out of the 3 interviews, so to me, taking 3 is justified. Kinda.

~ ~ ~

Ran into Daryl and people going to Daryl's house at the bus stop, and ended up tagging along. And guess what, surprise, people spent the time Mapling =P

Okay, I give in. I hope I won't get bored of it, but I'm going to try to rejoin Maple as well :)
I probably won't make it past level 15 within 3 days (anywhere near level 30 is plain impossible *coughWHDarylShaocough*), but, well.

*waits 1 hour to download the game client*

Now to think of a nice username :)

Hehe, thanks to them using the RGS system of best 7 subjects, I apparently have a GPA of 3.89. I would like to delude myself into believing that I've actually improved, but using the "new" RI system of best 8, my GPA would be 3.85, and using the "old" RI system of all 10, my GPA would be 3.72, mostly thanks to a 2.8 in French. A world of difference there.

As mentioned during English, I really do regret not paying much attention in Sec 1 French, and playing tic tac toe instead. It would probably have continued throughout Sec 2, except that Weng Hong was smart enough to abstain from wasting Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, which pretty much allowed me to pay just enough attention to learn something from Sec 2 (Thanks for that! =D). Then came Sec 3/4, and being around more enthusiastic French people kinda resulted in a diffusion of interest, and I'm really glad I stayed on. I really hope that I'll be able to juggle H1 French with 4 other H2s in RI(JC) RI, but with my current GPA, I think I should be able to offer the 12 units needed :)

~ ~ ~

Tomorrow's effectively the last day of school, or Year 4 at least, and I really think I'm going to miss the class during the holidays, but hopefully, some of us will be reunited in HumProg next year =P.
I'll probably embark on a lengthy reflection on (the first 4 years of RI) soon, but I'll leave that for later.

~ ~ ~

I was really hoping to go for Rafflesian Spotlight tomorrow, but since my Chinese tuition couldn't be changed (as with last year), I'll have to give it a miss again :( I still bought a ticket though (for the vote; Daron was being very convincing and persuasive *cough* =P), and gave it to Rong Jun (although I have no idea who he's going to vote for =P)

At least I got to watch the RS particpants' performances at the atrium today, and I was really impressed with Chia's, both in terms of singing and playing =) For one, he was the only one to use the piano, and whatever he was playing (which was really nice as well) was completely improvised on the spot. Add that to the fact that he had only decided on the song to sing half an hour ago during Chem...

Wow.

~ ~ ~

Meh, was on the brink of rejoining Maple, when I realised the thing that brought back the most good memories was the music, rather than the gameplay and incessant farming =P


One of the nicer Maple remixes :) Yeah, all of my characters seemed to be perpetually camping in Ellinia to train, wonder if it's in part due to the nice music?

Tried to remix the Ellinia tune, but it didn't seem to be turning out very nice, so I'm leaving it aside for now. Will probably return to it once Chinese Os are over, when I have more time to source for inspiration.

Rong Jun: "Secondly, IgG also makes the Mycobacterium tuberculosis go boomz, also effectively removing it from the body."
Marker's response: "Only if the pathogen happens to be Ris Low & IgG is rad."

Rong Jun's Bio EOY Win =P

This is pretty much proof of the effectiveness of the age-old adage that one should try filling in answers even when one has no clue what to write.

~ ~ ~

English, as well as the Sciences, were returned today, and I'm pretty satisfied with them (unlike the Humanities returned last week), with the exception of English, with which I'm very satisfied, and very, very relieved.
Yeah, 62/75 is pretty far off the top mark in the class (*looks pointedly at WH and his scarily brilliant mark =)*) but at least it's a 4.0, which has allowed me to convince myself that my level of comprehension of English isn't at the 55% it was apparently at the start of the year.
*is wonderfully relieved by the allocation of 15 marks to language*
More importantly, it's helped me to maintain my 3.6, which means... Linguistics! (which at the moment is pretty much the only subject I'm looking forward to in JC) =D

Comparing results for Sciences against results for Humanities has thrown up another dilemma, however, because at the moment, it's the Sciences which are pulling up my GPA D=
I've always had a love for English, from Primary School and before, and I guess that extended to Literature in Secondary School, but as for other Humanities such as History... let's just say I would by far rather do Geography (which I dropped only after and because of a traumatising half-year with GM food) in JC than continue with History.
As for Sciences, I've had a passionate hatred for Physics since Sec 1, but once that was negated by my dropping of it, I've actually enjoyed Bio and Chem largely. I would say that my results show that I can do Sciences (although I admit I was really fortunate they dropped the synapse question, which I had no idea how to do), and if not for HumProg, I really think I would have liked to continue with Chem in JC D=
There's no denying that JC's an imporant juncture, because from here, it's either Science or Humanities. But still, I can't decide which one I'm more inclined towards, both in terms of results and interest...

More pointless existential angst soon enough, not that one should be especially looking forward to read this.

~ ~ ~

Oh well, away from this, it's time to do NaNoWriMo Chinese mugging.

Right.

I'm probably going to end up frantically cramming Confucius and His Sayings into my head at the last minute, and spend the next few days on Nano instead, the word count of which currently stands at a meagre 876 =)

Mrs Neoh: Don't come up to me and say 'ma'am, I missed my 4.0 by 1 mark'. If you think missing it by 1 mark is painful, then I can take away another mark to make it less painful.

~ ~ ~

As expected, here's the disappointed rant about results...
( Please ignore, even though I realise there's nothing left in this post otherwise :) )

At least the couple of days before were pretty fun... (Squash! Monopoly! Pokemon TCG! King of Fighters! Poetry in the Park! =D) Although I was pretty bad at most of them.

~ ~ ~

Edit:
'Since either massive hordes of water pokemon have congregated and used rain dance, or the clouds are weeping over their EOY results as well (and as a result are unable to ascend and become cirrus clouds {those are the high-up-in-the-sky clouds right?}), was unable to go to Night Safari, and so here I am spending the night at home, trying to flesh out a NaNoWriMo plot (which has threatened to become strangely inspired by Cyril Wong, i.e., warped tales involving creepy supernatural beings). I'm hoping to veer away from that, but at the moment it looks like the supernatural being will remain, albeit as a first-person omniscient narrator only.

Oh well, on to other things. I think I've mentioned this before, but it's amazing how musical motifs can stick in people's minds. Richard, Davin and I were at City Hall MRT after spending the afternoon at Daron's place on Tuesday, when three notes rang out from the TV as part of some advertisement. G# A E. Immediately all 3 of us turned to look, and asked ourselves, "Maple? O.o". Yep, despite not having played Maple for the past 4 years, somehow the Asiasoft/Wizet/Nexon introduction is still stuck in my mind.

Speaking of which, there has been a mini Maple uprising in 4C, and apparently Maple has changed quite a bit, Knights of Cygnus and all. Oh well, I'm probably not going to rejoin because I shall focus all attention on NaNoWriMo HCL O Levels. Yeah. Actually, I just get bored of MMORPGs once I can't level up within a couple of hours. Which explains my multitude of characters in random worlds stuck in their level 20s since 4 years ago.

Still love Maple music (especially Ellinia =P) though.

Spent the day at the Singapore Lit Symposium today, which was honestly a bit boring at some points, so I ended up daydreaming, or trying to think of NaNoWriMo plots, hoping the "literary" environment would incite inspiration, but still, nothing concrete came up D:

It started out pretty entertaining-- Su-Chen Christine Lim is really a amusing lady. There was a nice desk in the front of the room at which she was supposed to be seated at, but she insisted on sitting on the floor, leaving the facilitator all flustered and panicky. Oh, and she complained about assessment book writers getting upward of $2000 to teach "creative" writing, while writers were denied an honorarium because schools felt it should be enough of an honour for a writer, a Singapore writer at that, to get an invitation in the first place.

It got rather bland during the sessions after that though, with the exception of one question-asking member of the audience, who was amusing and entertaining for the wrong reasons. According to John, he had made his presence known in the previous concurrent session with Ovidia Yu, when he went on a similarly long rant about how Singapore theatre lacked any plays that were rewatchable. He was eventually silenced when somebody asked if he had watched Singapore theatre before in the first place.

During lunch, Yinan observed how the new Supreme Court looked remarkably similar to a revolving restaurant, which led to a flurry of rather lame puns. Food court, justice is served, course of action, service charge (community service), and, of course, (how can one ever forget) order in the court.

The second half was largely bland, and John, Yinan and I ended up skipping one of the sessions to walk to NLB (without going in) from the Arts House, and back. At least it got more interesting during the panel discussion, and we now know that MM Lee once regarded English as a "step-mother tongue" =)

Okay, I honestly have nothing much to write here, which is why I'm summarising the only thing I did today (which, honestly, I would rather have given a miss [as some wisely did halfway or otherwise] on hindsight. Of course, hindsight is a rather cruel thing that leaves one in a helpless position of regret. Yes, I'm aware I'm not making much sense at the moment.)

~ ~ ~

I'm bored... Fiction about trying to write Fiction! =D (Yes, it's going to be very bad, but in the spirit of NaNoWriMo and spontaneous writing-
Oh who am I kidding, I'm just lazy/unable to write something coherent.

Looking out of the window, I marvel at the beautiful view of rolling hills and grazing farm animals my neighbour's house, yearning for inspiration to strike as a bolt of lightning would. Rather ominously, a large cumulonimbus cloud (I'm really hoping that's the type of cloud that appears during thunderstorms) materialises in a puff of white gray grey smoke, and a bolt of lightning leaps menacingly and playfully downward, riding on draughts of wind as it lands on a a giant, once-majestic tree, caressing its leaves, xylem, phloem, cambium, and central pith. The arboreal structure dissipates in a puff of white gray grey black smoke (and of course, flames), evidently having combusted incompletely, resulting in large discharges of carbon (*sings* Carbon in its ordinary form is coal! *sings*). I watch the smoke and think of the arboreous arbre-inhabiting ar... A(r)bras(?) a(r)bruptly... (meh, it's hard to think of words starting with "arbr"). A(r)bra-cadavers =( Oh well, I'm pretty sure all the Abras in the tree used teleport (and managed to avoid evolving into Kadabras cadavers). It's pretty much the only thing they do anyway. *rants about being unable to catch an Abra because they instantly teleport away*

Thinking of animals in trees reminds me of Maple and Ellinia (the music of which has started to spontaneously play in my head. Gah, earworm D=) Alright, they were mushroom, but, well, you get the idea =P

Hooray, my "story" has disintegrated easily enough. Good luck to me trying to write 50k =) (In 20 days at that)

~ ~ ~

Haha, I really love the xkcd tribute to GeoCities, even the tacky flashing stars in the background, the confused scripting, and even the advertisements =) Somehow triggers a wave of nostalgia in me (which says something about our generation, that the Internet can render one nostalgic. I can imagine ten years down the road, when Facebook becomes obsolete, the next generation looking back fondly at the time when people played an immensely addictive game called Mousehunt...)

Happy Birthday to Davin, Daryl, and Chia! =D

~ ~ ~

Whew, the EOYs are finally over. I really should be starting intensive Chinese mugging soon, but allow me these couple of days to relax, sleep, and indulge. Or maybe slightly more than a couple of days... :P

I guess I should get down to thinking of a feasible plot for NaNoWriMo, otherwise my even-more-painful-to-read-than-Stephanie-Meyer of a novel won't even last past the 5000 word mark. (Thinks back to last year when plot was hastily abandoned after 8 days. I got 40k in the next 22 days, which doesn't bode well for this year, when I'm attempting 50k in 20. Yep, I'm staying honest and refusing to cheat.)

*Is tempted to write a lipogram for the fun of it, but realises that side-effects would be worse than that of severe under/over-secretion of insulin/glucagon*
Actually, I've conveniently forgotten all 4 of them post-Bio EOY, but I'm still pretty sure writing 50k words without, say, the letter "e", would leave me a lot worse.

~ ~ ~

Pretty much decided on my subjects for JC already -- Maths, Econs, Lit, and Linguistics (MELL =D) after HumProg Open House. Now all that's left to do is get in... *hopes*
*ignores the fact that Linguistics is a pretty useless, albeit seemingly fun, subject*

~ ~ ~



Meh, just when one thought that a flash mob could actually happen in Singapore, one has to find out that it was actually a publicity stunt by HTC. And they just had to include Nobody as well...

Looks like Singapore will never have its own Improv Everywhere D= Too much disturbance to the public peace.

~ ~ ~

Edit:

Another video!



Yes, Friedrich "God is Dead" Nietzsche. (I had no idea he was a composer D= Forgive me if this was supposed to be common knowledge)
Honestly, it's actually pretty nice to listen to :P

Last two papers to go...

Anyway, History on Wednesday went pretty well (no doubt thanks to the efficient photo mugging session the day before with Richard, Daron and Davin), although I ended up sleeping sitting around for the last half an hour because I finished the paper early, for no reason other than the fact that I don't know enough History to write anywhere near 16 pages...

Maths today, on the other hand, was disastrous, especially Paper 2. I've really got to drill the fact into my head that (x^2)/2 is not x. Which pretty much cost me the marks for the last question, since I (rather intelligently) didn't bother writing down the working after getting an area of -70 =)
Whoops, forgot to write in units there...

Oh well, Bio and Lit tomorrow, best of luck to all! Especially to me and those who haven't read nor annotated Gulliver's Travels...

ADH(=D) <-- Me high on coffee.

~ ~ ~

Yes, this is a filler because I'm tired of studying.

Popping in in the middle of EoYs after a long hiatus, fresh from mugging.
Fine, actually I'm fresh from scoring more than 250k in Bejeweled Blitz and managing to kick Paf Le Chien 2624m. It's for reasons like this I'm not doing too well, with regard to the first (or last) 3 papers (I've taken)

Apologies for the EoY rant, just skip this and go mug. Now. =P

( I mean it. Skip it and go mug. =) )

~ ~ ~

Oh well, enough of the rant. To all those stressed up about the EoYs, or didn't do too well for the first few papers either, cheer up! =D
Let's be thankful it's not O Levels we're screwing up at the moment, for no matter how important we may view EoYs as, it's never going to be anywhere as important as November 10 (leaving 20 days for NaNoWriMo but that's besides the point). Rant a little if need be to get it out of your system (yep, it works), and cheer up, and do your best for all the remaining papers :D We're all moving on to RI(JC) anyway, and honestly, I think most of us who want HumProg are going to get it (optimism, optimism), so.

Smile :) And good luck for Geog/Physics people tomorrow, History/Chinese people on Wednesday, everybody on Thursday, and Bio/Lit people on Friday. Oh, and AEP/MEP/MSP/CSP/etc. people next week :P

~ ~ ~

To destress on pretence of revising for Lit, courtesy of Richard. Hooray for Lady Bracknell! =)

[This, and probably the next few as well, is/will be a rather boring entry, so go and mug instead =P]

One week before the EOYs, and out pops RE Congress to waste an entire day. Was prepared to spend the time reading/mugging (other than listening to Weng Hong/Daron's group, of course =P), but Mrs Tan was sitting just two seats away, so...

And that's where the RE Congress booklet comes in really handy as a guise for taking down notes. Originally wanted to try writing a short story or something out of boredom, but no plot came to mind (as usual, wonder how I'm going to do NaNoWriMo in 20 days at this rate), so in the end I started my first attempt at composing music without actually getting to hear how it (is supposed to) sound(s). Was rather difficult to visualise the harmony between melody and accompaniment, but somehow still fun. Time just flew past until it was time for the last presentation, and I've now found a new way to keep awake during Chinese lessons (I'm sure Mr Tan can't make sense of numbers, dots and lines scrawled onto Chinese worksheets?)

Wrote down the music in SONAR when I got home, and it actually sounds pretty decent =D

Spent the second half of RE Congress sleeping, though, just in case I were to doze off during Ms Johnson's Lit lesson (which turned out to have been cancelled, but thanks to Jiarong's brilliant communication skills and initiative, not everybody knew about the cancellation, which resulted in a rather angry and murderous Jarret appearing in the Raja Block at 3:30).

Managed to get some Maths done in the hours after RE Congress, but eventually gave up and played frisbee with Weng Hong and Zydney. Ignoring my failure to catch and throw the frisbee in any vaguely accurate direction, it was fun :)

Yeah. No idea why I'm posting mundane daily events up here. Conveniently ignoring the fact that I procrastinate more than I mug...

Whew, 101 for Grade 8 piano exam =P

Yes, I know that's a really horrible score, but after the million and one ways I managed to screw up on that day, I'm pretty relieved :) Haven't gotten back the exact breakdown yet, but I'm pretty sure I failed every component except for sight-reading and aural.

Well. At least now I can play random pieces without having any moral (or monetary, rather) obligation to perfect them.

~ ~ ~

I really don't want to take my EoYs, with me not having started mugging much at all one of the reasons. Oh, and also the fact that I'm pretty happy with all my results except for English, and no matter how well I do for my EoYs for any subject other than English or Lit (the latter of which I'll end up dropping from my GPA anyway), I can't get a higher GPA than I have now.

Yes, excuses, and I really should be off to mug now...

~ ~ ~

Yep, anytime soon...

I refuse to use Rhymezone for the below, and pardon me if it's neither iambic nor tetrametric. The one in the play wasn't very either.

I guess we have ourselves to blame
Though still I think it's such a shame
And those long nights that we've put in
Have disappeared into the bin
I know we started rather late
I guess we did procrastinate
We changed our script too many times
For neither reason nor good rhymes
(Haha I just made a pun
To write like this is really fun
But back again, for I digress
This iamb gives me too much stress)
We flipped through forms of comedy
But couldn't choose what it should be
We wasted both of our tech runs
And still no script nor witty puns
Nor any humour, actually,
That tickled people quite silly
With three days left, epiphany
Then came our fourth script, frantically
We thought that it was good enough
To write another was too tough
Rehearsing late into the night
We gazed into the night sky bright
(I know that that made little sense
At present I don't give twopence
I'm trying hard to rhyme, with luck
Forgive me now, you silly... cluck)
Then came the fateful afternoon
I really think it came too soon
Our hastily assembled eggs
(I still don't know what rhymes with "eggs")
Looked too much like, say, durian seeds
Or giant dented orange beads
I'll skip ahead to save some time
(I'm sure that "bead" and "head do rhyme)
The sounds played less than half the time
I do plead guilty to that crime
Result -- the cues in disarray
The audience watched on in dismay
An awkward silence filled the room
(We'd thus been sentenced to our doom)
We thought it couldn't get much worse
It seems like Fate does plant a curse
On those who do last minute work
And watches with a joyous smirk
The glass came crashing to the ground
So on the floor, glass shards abound
The OD didn't help a lot
With questions we had never thought
To answer or discuss, not e'er
I guess we're just not that clever
(It's just to keep my rhyme scheme up
So no offence intended, nup
That word was "ever", by the way
I'm just quite bad at this, okay?)
We walked out feeling rather sad
Indeed our play was rather bad
We lacked all lustre, just sat down
Spinning pencils, we did frown
We didn't get through in the end
(This time, the rules, they will not bend)
But still, amidst, the mass dismay
There' something I'd just like to say...

To cast and crew, a big thank you!

~ ~ ~

I stopped the poem there because I couldn't think of anything which rhymes with "you", other than pretty much every positive quality you can think of =P
*needs Rhymezone*

Anyway, we've done the best we could, and although we definitely could have improved our process and efficiency, what we came up with was essentially a first draft, and a first draft of this standard is, in my view, brilliant already. I wish I could say we'll do better next time, but sad to say, this is our last project in LitRA, but well, hope to see some of you guys in HumProg (assuming Mrs Seow hasn't massively massacred 4C and 4B). Rehearsals, despite the stress, were kinda fun actually, and Weng Hong and John walking around the school reciting the poem is really quite cool (someone remind me to upload that soon =P) I know we're all rather disappointed, but well, I guess, given how late we started, we kind of expected this result. Yes, I know you were egg-specting a pun on the word "expected". But anyway...

Thanks for everything, guys!  =D

Parents: Try to sleep early or you'll fall sick.
Me: But I have to stay up today to edit the script and do homework. I won't fall sick so easily.
Radio: (interjecting in a rather freaky coincidence) Good luck to all those [...] staying up late today [...] and remember, sleep is the key to being healthy and productive.

~ ~ ~

Woah.

~ ~ ~

I feel extremely guilty for using ever-reliable psychoanalysis to analyse Green Eggs and Ham, and, as is expected with influence from Freud, the direction it took was significantly sexual.

( Quote from my conclusion, click at your own risk of being scarred for life, and precious childhood memories of reading Dr Seuss being tarnished forever )

Yes, I managed to get all of that from Green Eggs and Ham. Pseudo-science Science is useful.

~ ~ ~

I can't really post anything now without talking about Lit. Well, ranting, actually. We're getting pretty familiar with the security guards, especially since they routinely chase us out of Raja Block classrooms at 5:30pm, and out of the school compounds at 10:00pm.

It's really stressful, especially with the performance looming, and us being nowhere near (script should be finalised soon). It's our fourth script, from black comedy to farce to absurdist and back to farce again, but at least this time we're pretty sure it's the final script. Our group's really deprived of sleep at the moment (Thanks Weng Hong and people for staying up almost the whole night morning to finish the script), but hopefully we can just do our best on Friday, and find ourselves in slumberland for the next couple of days.

With my refusal to act I've found myself thrust into the role of director, although this has just served to show me how inadequate I am as a leader. Simply put, I can't make decisions. Heck, it takes me really long to think of an idea which makes even an inkling of sense. Thanks Jonathan for kinda taking charge of most of the blocking today while I was staring into space, not knowing what to do at all. I can't do blocking, I can't act, I can't think of ideas, I can't do oral defence (duh) I can't write a good script because most of the stuff I write is overly convoluted because of unnecessary verbose and long complex and occasionally wrong structures which makes it really hard for the actors to actually read the stuff out which is what actors are supposed to do... Well yeah, case in point (and here's POINT in upper case, but ignore me, lack of sleep has caused me to flit between grumpy and insane. Case in point, I think what I've written for Psychoanalysis is basically DMP suicide)

So I just sit there, staring at the script, closing my eyes to try to visualise something, fail, doze off, wake up, stare at the script, look up, look back down at the script. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Still, I can't deny that I'd rather do this than a similarly huge project of any other subject.

~ ~ ~

Oh, and just as encouragement, guess what comes pretty soon after we get over and done with Lit dramatisation?