2008

Life is always so full of ironies. I've been putting off blogging for the past few days, so to save time for today's post, being the last day of the year. Originally, I had wanted to write about a (ahem)contemplative and retrospective reflection on my year that was 2008. This kind of deep thinking (ahem, again) usually takes a while, and since I've been out of the house for most of the day, and I have to get ready to go for New Year's Eve mass in about an hour, there really won't be sufficient time.

So I'll just keep it simple. It really just feels like another day, even though the next day I'll be stepping into a brand new year. 2008 was the first year I'd spent out of school, and my first year as a college student. Though I have to say, I feel like I've been studying more than anything else. The only difference is that I am more independent, and there's no longer the burden of school uniforms.

And this year I feel as though I've really grown as a person, more figuratively than literally (I think I've already maxed my height. Oh well.) I don't really know how to explain it; but I just feel less afraid of being open with people, of trusting them, of being friendly and proactive. Not completely anyway, I still many ways to go. And I've also learnt the value of good friends and family. There, I hope I've managed to say it without getting too schmaltzy. And there's a bunch of other stuff too, but I can't really fit it in now.

So I think I'm more or less ready for 2009. Hopefully :)

Knock Wood, Knock Wood

I just found out that the AS results would be out tomorrow (that is today, 22nd Dec), and really not in a way which I would have thought. Wynxon (thanks a lot, man) typed it in passing while commenting on, of all things, a picture of an infrared lizard. At which when I saw his comment, I gasped very audibly at the computer screen and immediately chatted him up, which went something like this:
Me: AS results out tmrw?!
Wynxon: (long explanation which I am too lazy to post)
Me: omh
omg
seriously ah?!
Wynxon: huh?
So as one can easily deduce, I momentarily (and completely) freaked out. Still a little jittery, to be honest. This is coupled with the fact that I've haven't really studied much of A2. This is the first time that I've ever felt so unnerved about receiving a public exam result, mostly due to the possibility that I may have screwed up pretty badly.

I can actually get by tomorrow, or I can just wait until the new semester begins. I usually believe in getting things over and done with quickly (most of the time anyway), especially when it comes to receiving exam results. But I don't think that I could spend the rest of the holidays asking myself every 'what if?' question I can think of. So for now, I think I'll wait till after New Year.

Edit (31/12/08): Well, this is a little late, but it was actually a false alarm. I can collect the slip to access my results online, which will only be available from 21 January, at 0900 hours Greenwich time. So I basically panicked for nothing. Oh, well. At least I got most of the nerves out of my system.

Blathering Rants

When I woke up this morning it was raining. Apparently it had been raining since pretty early this morning too. And it is still raining! Not very heavy rain, but steady enough to make the air pretty cool. But cool is good; it's the closest thing this country has to a snowy day. And I haven't seen a single patch of blue sky since, well, yesterday. Not that I've been able to check; it's hard to check the entire skies without stepping out of the house and getting wet. The assumption is based upon observations looking out the front porch window.

Frankly, the sky looks so dull and grey and gloomy that it's like it just went through a bad breakup. Maybe the sun had an affair with the moon during the last solar eclipse and the sky found out during the last lunar eclipse and is taking out its misery upon us poor unfortunates upon the Earth. That's just a theory anyway.

Concerning other matters, my phone has been acting kooky lately. I haven't been able to hear anything when making or receiving calls, but the caller or receiver can. Strangely enough, it works perfectly fine when I put the phone on speaker. I want to get it checked out, but I have the feeling that this will somehow get procratinated until the next blue moon.

Speaking of blue moons, I'm actually typing this post from my home computer (last post was from my dad's laptop). So yes, the home internet is running at a very respectable speed. Unlike for the past few days, when internet usage usually included the internet not responding, sending (or not) a report to Windows, rebooting the computer so that the Internet could (or not) work properly again, and repeating the process several times until I gave up decided to go watch TV instead. No doubt it will happen again, so I'm trying to savour the moment.

And last night the parents went to play Bingo in church! Hahaha. They didn't come home till one-thirty in the morning. It's actually a regular thing; Father Patrick has a Bingo set, and a group of them get together in the Resource Centre. It costs RM 5 to enter one round, so if several people play, you can actually win quite a bit of money! And no, the parents hardly won any money last night; Lady Luck is really quite very fickle.

As I type this last sentence, it is still raining.

Advent

I know it's been more than a month since I last blogged, but I have some pretty good excuses. Firstly, exams. Secondly, my home internet only runs at a normal speed once every blue moon. Thirdly, I've just been a little lazy since the holidays began.

All right, so the last one doesn't really count. But yes, AS has finished, and the holidays have begun. I would blog a bit about my exams, but thinking about it will just bring 'what if I had done this instead of that' thoughts back to my head. So I'll just say: exams were ok, but could have been better; and leave it at that.

And I am officially 18 years old! Hahahaha. What's there to say about turning 18 and legal? Honestly, it doesn't feel like anything special. Perhaps the moment has passed; my birthday was almost a fortnight ago.

Christmas is just round the corner. Well, four weeks is a pretty large corner. When I was younger, it used to be my favourite time of the year, when the Christmas tree would be set up, I would be getting presents, there would be all sorts of Christmassy activities to pursue, and free time provided by the long holidays. Now, I really can't be bothered about the Christmas tree, presents and so-called Christmassy activities don't serve much importance, and the holidays are just quite a dull time. I refuse to say anything about the Christmas spirit, because then it would feel like I'm in one of those cheesy Hallmark Christmas movies.

And I have been tagged (by Kern Wen and Jun Yow)! Hahahaha. My first time, so this should be interesting.

Instructions: Remove one question from below and add in your personal question. Make a total of 20 questions and tag 8 people. List them out at the end of the post.

1. What’s your ambition?
To be the best version of me that I can be.

2. Who is more important to you? Friends or boy/girlfriend?
You can't choose! They're equally important.

3. How often do you think about suicide?
Never; though I have thought about quick and painless deaths.

4. What if you found out that your wife/husband is having an affair?
I don't know, I've never even been in a relationship to begin with. I suppose the logical thing would be to calmly sit down and discuss what drove her to have the affair in the first place.

5. How many babies you want?
Let's first get married and we'll go from there.

6. Favorite perfume/fragrance?
None, unless you count deodarant and the cologne my mum gave me several birthdays (or was it Christmases?) ago which I have only used once or twice.

7. What do you think will be your greatest downfall?
Incoherent communication skills and fickle-mindedness.

8. Do you believe in eternal love?
Yes, otherwise there would be no such thing as marriage, would there?

9. What's a perfect girlfriend/boyfriend like to you (List 10)?
Intelligent; independent; a quirky sense of humour; kind; equal footing; practical; mature but not uptight or condescending; not too emotionally sensitive; honest/trustworthy; a good listener.

10. What feeling do you love most?
Contentment.

11. What are your bad habits?
Avoiding a problem and hoping that it would just go away.

12. Is there anything you wanna tell the people who hate you?
Use that energy for something else. You might just do something worthwhile.

13. Do you cherish every single friendship of yours?
One does one's best.

14. What do you hate most in others?
Prejudiced opinions.

15. What have you secretly always wanted to be, knowing that it to be impossible?
To become the next Roger Federer. Hahaha..

16. What features/quirks do you find totally sexy on a guy/girl? Eyes. It's the only feature where you can tell someone's mood or personality.

17. Describe the person who tagged you in 7 words.
Kern Wen: somehow thinks he's the sexiest man alive.
Jun Yow: slightly mental and sick in the head.

18. What have you done to yourself to make yourself happy?
Becoming more comfortable with myself.

19. What will you become in another 10 years to come?
To have a successful career and be financially independent.

20. What is something you will never regret doing?
Getting my dog Suzie from the SPCA.

I tag... any 8 people who have read this and have nothing else better to do :) .

In Memory of Biology

Personally, I've always liked biology. Half the people in my class think I'm crazy, but there you go. Mr. Chuah was my biology teacher for Form 4 and 5 and had been a constant in the school since I arrived in Form 1. So it was strange shift in reality when I found out that he had left this year because of his health. We all knew that he had to be in pretty bad condition for him to stop teaching. But it still came as shock when Clement SMSed me to say that Mr. Chuah had passed away from a heart attack.

In all honesty, though, my liking for biology had nothing whatsoever to do with Mr. Chuah's influence. To put it bluntly, he was as uninspiring as a sheet of sandpaper. He was the perfect epitome of the jaded senior teacher, one who possibly had been quite enthusiastic about his profession when he was younger, and who'd seen far too many winters (or in Manglish, monsoon seasons) during his tenure.

His teaching voice, which I can never forget, was monotonous enough to put anyone who was attempting to pay attention into mind-numbing doldrums. More of often than not, most people wouldn't even bother trying. I still remember the very first bio class, when he spent an hour and twenty minutes droning on and on about the study and origins of Biology, which comprised of just the first two pages of our textbook. From then on, bio classes would be usually two periods of talking (albeit relatively quietly), playing our own games (quite discreetly), doing our own work, or just plain sleeping.

He should be given credit, though, for trying to make classes more high-tech by bringing in the projector to make things slightly more colourful and interactive. And it was, sometimes, when there were pictures of the weird and wonderful, and the videos which sort of interesting at times. Unfortunately, the lights would be turned off, which made the class even more conducive for sleeping or other stuff that wouldn't be easily noticed.

Strangely enough, he never did seem to care about people doing their own work while he was teaching, or even sleeping (he did have it in against Dennis Toh, though). Or maybe he was just plain oblivious, which I highly doubt (teachers, as I've learnt being a student for 12 years, are much more perceptive than we give them credit for). I remember once, having the sudden noble oomph to pay full attention, planted myself next to a friend in the second row right in front of the whiteboard. As always, the execution proved too burdensome of a task. I had a good sleep for about 15 minutes during the second period, and woke to hear him going on about the different types of hormones. Honestly, you can be doing add maths right in the front row, fully equipped with graph paper and electronic calculator, and he'd probably keep talking.

Which brings me to the next point. Being as jaded as he was, he was so cynical that he probably wouldn't be moved even by the thought of children in poverty. Oh all right, maybe not, but he was very, very cynical of our performances in exams. He frequently said things like 'half of you all probably cannot even pass' or 'most of you not are not even becoming doctors, so why bother to study biology?'.

And Mr. Chuah, never, ever actually smiled in class, even though most of us still tried joking with him and treated with some form of friendliness. His 'smile' was more of a grimace, where he seemed to force his cheek muscles into curving upwards. And when he did actually smile, not grimace, it was rather quite scary. I think, to most people, he served as a personal challenge, where they would try to make him smile or (gasp!) laugh, and pry him for his personal and family details. Of course, no one could get a peep out of him (to my knowledge, anyway).

I do remember, as he was becoming increasingly sickly nearing our SPM and he had to go on leave for an operation, we (or to be more accurate, I think, Cheryl and Leconte) got a get-well-card and had everyone sign it. When we gave it to him, there seemed to be a hint of a tear in his eye! No one was sure, but some weeks later, someone said he/she saw the card on his table in the staff room. Maybe he wasn't as cynical or jaded as we thought him to be.

As he was the only biology teacher in the school, the 4S and 5S classes (and maybe K and L) would inevitably be taught by him. I think everyone will say that it was a most memorable experience, though not necessarily in the good sense. But once you leave school, and especially now that Mr. Chuah is gone, we can appreciate for the job he had done, for teaching us Biology the only way he knew how. It was all part of school life. And we can look back on those memories and laugh at those crazy times Mr. Chuah spent teaching us.

I'll always remember you, Mr. Chuah. God bless you and may you rest in peace.

Exam Post

My sister was asked by one of her customers (rich malay pro-government guy living in huge bungalow and owner of 5 cars, including 2 Mercedes; go figure...) to cater for a function at his house for around 300 people this saturday. Apparently his guests include many, many orang kenamaan, so everything, from the toasted bread to the nasi lemak and butter marble cake dessert, has to be perfect. Not that my sister and brother-in-law care about the many tetamu kenamaan, they just want the money and customers.

Since my mum is the official cake supplier of my sister's kopitiam/restaurant, cakes have been flying out of my mum's oven so fast and so many that there aren't enough oven mitts to go round. Well, that's a bit of a stretch, but the bottom line is that my mum has been baking around 7 cakes a day since tuesday.

Many, many cakes... there were actually more than these, but my sister had already taken a few earlier in the day and yesterday.

I am still trying to recover from yesterday's disastrous chemistry practical exam. So many things went wrong that I'm not really sure how to elaborate. From the fact that I couldn't figure out the final answer from my titration experiment, to the horribly untidy and unclear observations for salt analysis, to my own careless stupidity of forgetting to write down the chemical properties of the unknown chemical FA5, and that somehow the range of everyone's answers was from the minimum of 1 to the maximum of 10.

However, I am slightly consoled by the fact that I'm not the only whose practical was one unreactive mess. There were leaking burettes (new, or so they said); one of my friends (who would probably prefer to remain unnamed) had to use her mouth (!) to fill her pipette because her pipette filler couldn't work. The worst case was when someone else ran out of chemicals for the titration experiment, and they weren't any extra, and she wasn't allowed to take any from anyone else! The icing on the cake (or salt rubbed on a wound) was that this was the AS exams, the big Cambridge exam which everyone had preparing for the past year, and an exam which could significantly affect one's academic future or even career. So absolutely no pressure whatsoever. Ironically enough, I actually thought that chemistry would be my best practical. Clement, Dennis Toh or Saran, if you're reading this, shut up!

Today we had chemistry lecture, and this is the advice my lecturer gave us (paraphrasing):
"You must all focus on your next exams, don't worry about the practical otherwise you won't be able to sleep wan... don't ask me the answers for the practical, if I told you even more cannot sleep wan..." '__'

And then there was pure maths. I actually thought I had done decently well, until everyone got into an intense discussion about the paper and I found out that I had made grievously, minid-numbingly stupid mistakes. Let's just say the mistake could have been averted if I had just cross-checked my answer with the question. It still hurts to think about it, to be honest. Lesson learnt, though: never, ever discuss a paper after the exam.

That's only 2 exams done, I still have 9 (I think) to go. Up next week: Bio practical and applied maths (statistics).....

On a completely unrelated note, I found this article on yahoo which takes to a whole new level the saying 'hell hath no fury like a woman scorned':
http://videogames.yahoo.com/feature/online-divorcee-jailed-after-killing-virtual-hubby/1259111

The Deep Breath before the Plunge

So... in approximately 8 hrs and 15 minutes I will be sitting for my first AS exam, pure maths. Strangely enough, this paper I'm actually the relatively confident about, but the nervousness is still there. In unpleasently large amounts, if I'm being honest.

But it is the first exam, so I suppose you could call it the deep breath before the plunge, when one is afraid of that the water's so cold one would have to give up immediately, or whether one makes a bad mistake and hits his head on a rock and won't survive, or whether one dives in too deep and starts panicking so much that everything that's been learnt vanishes with the one second spent too long underwater. Most of all, one wonders whether he or she has prepared enough, practiced enough, worked hard enough, to make sure these things won't happen.

But the nervousness manifests itself in a variety of ways, one of which is me blogging right now at one o'clock in the morning. The other is that I try to take everything I need and more, so that I am prepared for any possible disaster (knock wood).

So this is the checklist I was going through my mind when I was packing 30 minutes ago (in no particular order) :

1. Statement of exam entry.
2. Notes and past year questions.
3. Two calculators - 570MS and 350MS, in case of the occurrance of my 570 going kaput (again, knock wood).
4. Chewing gum, which helps me think more clearly.
5. 2-3 packs of tissue, in case nature calls (knock wood again), or anything other emergency.
6. 4 different types of pen, each type in black and blue, plus one red pen for underlining, two mechanical pencils (each stocked with sufficient lead) and one eraser; all placed in a clear ziploc bag.
7. Protractors, compass, set square etc., also in the clear ziploc bag.
8. Long clear plastic ruler.
9. NOT ALLOWED: handphone, calculator cover, papers or notes, non-transparent stationery case and any other electronic study aids.

Right, the list did not sound so formal in my head, it's just how I write any kind of formal list. Also, I think I may have succeeded in making myself look like more neurotically-obsessive-compulsive-kiasu-study-nerdy-geeky than I already think I am, so I should mention in passing that I am really not like that in real life. Seriously.

It's already 1.30, so I'd really better stop and get some sleep. When I publish this post, it will be approximately 7 hours and 30 minutes until I step into that exam hall.