At Home

The sun streams in from a break in the white fluffy clouds, pouring over in wide golden shafts, illuminating the tall red and white buildings and casting shadows - lovely black pools of coolness on the asphalt ground. All is still, because it is a Sunday morning and no one's awake yet. Two small trees flank a single red building in the center, pale green with their spread of newly sprouted leaves, their roots cast in an island of splotchy cement, bone white where the sun shines and soft grey where the shadow of leaves shield the ground from the morning heat. A cleaner's rickety metal trolley stands under one of the trees, decorated with spots of rust from neglect. Next to it are parked several of motorcycles, quiet now, but ready to roar to life when their masters return.

Then, the stillness is broken, as a pigeon glides in from a break in the buildings, its white wings cutting through the light shafts. It sweeps over the trees gracefully, following the curve of the flats, flaps once, then twice before landing below a windowsill, where a few other pigeons roosted.

P.S. That red building in the center? It's a rubbish dump that acts as a traffic island for the carpark.

Argh!!

It is the middle of my mid-yrs. One would think that for better or for worse I should be mugging. Or least pretending to mug. Hah. I am traumatised. Me. Me would never in her life imagine misreading a crucial poem has misread her Lit Poetry Critical Appreciation paper. I am dead. It is probably the 1st time I'm saying it, honestly, my brains didn't even have to work so hard for my Geog paper. Now...why did I misread that poem? I figured on my way home after the exam that I had not only misread the writer intention, but part of the imagery as well.
What is the world coming to??
Sniffle.
In any case I figured that I was committing suicide by rewriting my entire essay in half an hour. By the time I was done, my thoughts were so scattered that I couldn' write my 2nd essay on the drama bit. But why blog about all this? There goes my 'B' for Lit anyway. I'm saying 'B' because I'm a goner for the rest of my subjects. =(

Happily, I will now blog about something other than my sorry state of academic affairs. My sis bought a new hamster. It's fluffy, brown and stripey, has a cute pink nose, a white paintbrush tip like tail, white ears and red eyes. Kawaii!!!! It's got this thing for the hamster wheel - kept playing with it last night before I went to bed; it was trying it out cautiously...this morning it was running on it so fast the hamster's just a tawny blur. Cute! cute! cute! No name yet though...can't think of any.

By the way...the poem that is the cause of my woes is called "Tithonus" by Alfred Lord Tennyson. It's good I suppose, but really, I'm too depressed to admit its anything better than that. Let's hope for better days...

The Great Hum

Imagine if you wake up one morning - a normal sort of morning, the kind with grey storm clouds overhead. You are eating a chocolate muffin and drinking tea, with honey [honey being nicer than sugar anyday; healthier too], when the kitchen light goes out. Great. They have started fixing the electric wires outside your flat, which implies them cutting off your electricity the whole day. So, with no TV, no radio, CDs or the Net, you are only grateful for the fact that there are no distractions to well...distract you from your revision. Then, you see that the goldfish in the fishtank are gulping air like crazy, since the stupid aeration device things all work on electricity too and are therefore not working. Oh yay. You are forced to manually pump air into the tank for the fish with a makeshift balloon pump your sis digs up in the store room. It is boring work, and you try to study at the same time.

Then, the grey clouds part and you start fanning yourself with the georaphy notes you are holding. You also realise that you cannot read the notes that you are fanning, and take out a second set of notes to fan yourself while you study, pump and complain that the goldfish are not your pets. You sister swiftly rebuts that they belong to your father and it is a gorgonic task for her too. Hah. I'll believe that. You two take shifts to pump air as your sis is convinced they'll die without human intervention on this electricity-less day. Afterall, the poor goldfish didn't ask to be stuck in a smelly tank did they? One almost hopes that they did, so that you can leave them alone. In the end, frustration sets in. The air is stifling and every external sound seems extra loud.

In the end, you wash your hands off pumping, studying and complaining and have a nap. When you wake up, you realise that an empty feeling inside you is gone. You eargerly test out the fan - it switches on! Yes! The Great Hum is back! The electricity that is your house's life blood is back after an afternoon's hiatus to wherever it is electricity goes. You can almost sense it humming through the cement walls, in their plastic and rubber casings.

Funny how we never notice that electricity is always present. I can imagine a world without electrical power. It'll look like the War of the Worlds, only its humans against humans. Haha. May electricity outlive us.

Suzy's Guide to Taking Buses

Welcome to SUZY'S GUIDE TO TAKING BUSES!!

First, lets assess your aptitude for taking buses.

• You must be dense!
• You must have no sense of direction!
• You must be lazy! The more the better!!

If you satisfy the above criteria, then let's go on to the second list of criteria!

• Choose somewhere pointless
• Go there and back again
• The going back part is highly important and is a prerequisite unless you want to sleep in the jungle opposite your BUS PARTNER'S poly
• Grab a friendly BUS PARTNER before you embark on your journey

YOU ARE NOW READY TO LEAVE ON AN EXTREMELY POINTLESS JOURNEY.
GOODBYE AND DON'T COME BACK.
p.s. don't forget your ezlink card. Costumer service hotlines are never open. Thank you.

That was written and inspired by an overtly pointless saturday of taking buses in the West of Singapore. SIM has lovely front gates...so imposing, and pretty too. It happened like this. We were to go to SIM for lunch, seeing as my friendly bus partner recommended it. IT was supposed to have cheap and yummy food. NOT. The place was closed. So we bused down to Bukit Timah Plaza for dinner. Dithered about the busy road, tried to cross it and ended up looking like a headless chicken. Complained I wasn't hungry, but ended up complaining I had not enough to eat. A fine garbage bin I sounded eh...how droll, bus partner. Anyway went to watch Kappa's school band concert. The combo band ensured that I lost my appetite. Everything else was ok though. Loved the Harry Potter Symphony Suite.
Schools can be so creepy at night. And I don't care if your convention hall is nicer than my school LT. So there.

Here ends this rather absurd post. Thank goodness. =p

A Day in the Life of a Bored J2

I can't stand it. The weather has been terribly cruel these few days. I have been trying to study under all the heat of the absurdly hot weather we usually get round June. Yes, studying, in advent of my MID-YEARS, after my oh-so-lovely-and-relaxing HOLIDAYS. It does not help either when the sky is loaded with highly inviting looking grey clouds that have been steadily increasing in all its heavy glory. But it is STILL not raining! Wait...it gets better! I have the amazing luck to be caught in the rain at Causeway Point, when I decided to brave the stormy wind-lashed unsheltered path from the mall to the library. I got my jeans soaked, on my first GSS trip.

That was yesterday. Today was spent complaining about the humidity, and trying to revise Geography. I did succeed to some extent, but spent the other half [the unsuccessful part] eating and feeling hungry. Clearly using your brain power requires a lot of nutritional input. In fact, I have just got off completing mind maps for Geography Lecture 5. I still have 4 more to go. Oh dear...

I then spent 2 hours watching Princess Mononoke. For the uninitiated, it's one of Hayao Miyazaki's finest films, after Spirited Away of course. What a lovely film. I don't know why my sister found it gross. I think the enormous caterpillar like things in Nausicaa were far worse. They look...eww. No words can describe their grossness. Pity they were the good guys. I'm not saying ugly people can't be the good guys, but honestly, they look a nightmare, of the kind I sincerely hope I would never have. Seriously, there was this scene where there was a baby Ohmu [that is what the caterpillars are called] the size of a minivan oozing blue blood and wobbling about. Eww. The adults are even more appalling - they are the size of a mansion. My nightmare!

OK, enough of disgusting things. Well yes. Enough of me for now. Ciao.

Down the Yellow Brick Road one last time

Yesterday was my Drama Club's Post Production Party [PPP]. It was ok for me, though some people might have trouble believing that. But for me, it was fun in a way that most people might not think so. We didn't exactly do much, just ate, talked and chatted nonsensical stuff. REALLY nonsensical stuff. Sometimes I wonder if being in the backstage crew distanced me from the cast. Although I've known these people for about a year and a half, I feel as if we are not a very close CCA - too much gossip I suspect. Or is this just me. Haha. I'm an introvert and I find that I seldom have anything to say.

Another thing. It amazes me how my classmate [a guy] can cook so well. All we had to do really was just sit back and let him get on with his job - an honourable one in any barbecue. What I admire though is not that he can cook so well [I can cook too, though its nothing to boast about], it's more of how he enjoys cooking, not to mention that he has a flair for it. I'd sooner blow up the kitchen than cook something in - that's what my mum says anyway.

And did I mention where we were? At my friend's house in bukit batok. Which is very faraway for most people except two lucky ones who live in nearby bukit timah. It was my second time there, the last time being for my class's barbe cue outing last year. We picked her house after Fish & Co. refused to do dinner reservations [Are they so popular that they'll reject a class of 20?]

Well, it really was a quiet event, pity some people couldn't make it. Just doesn't feel the same as pre production itself. Where at least everyone was there. The event was really an echo of the times we had before it all ended. May the J1s have as much fun as we did. Or more.