mnemosyne

2010-08-22T19:34:00.000+08:00

2010-08-09T16:17:00.000+08:00

yesterday i bought a hello kitty x gachapin and mukku lunchbox!
yay tokyo.

2010-07-08T19:46:00.000+08:00

2010-06-15T21:47:00.003+08:00

But being paid, —what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

Moby Dick~ Herman Melville

2010-05-09T20:27:00.000+08:00

Oh! This ranks right up there with Every Burger. Nostalgia! Haha.

2010-03-08T20:10:00.002+08:00

2010-02-14T21:41:00.003+08:00

Some time back, I bought the Illustrated Edition.

So on this first day of the Lunar New Year of the Tiger, the adventures of Piscine Patel and Richard Parker seem very befitting re-reads.

It has been quite the task to engage in many terribly exciting extra-occupational activities.
Muse highlighted my calendar of events in a night of strobe lighted brilliance but subsequent to that it slipped back to its premorbid insipid state. Oh, not helped at all by The Killer’s no-show.

I haven’t had brunch in a long time. I would also like to watch a movie perhaps. The last movie I watched was the dreadful Did You Hear About the Morgans? After Shabu on Friday, we thought we might catch some late night Imaginarium. But we ended up, nonetheless quite contentedly, at the Island Creamery with 6 scoops of ice cream. Yums. Some of my favourites: Burnt caramel, Apple Pie, Kahlua latte, Horlicks! Sel chose a coconuty concoction and when it melted into Nutella, oh it was strange on the tastebuds indeed. Haha.

Well yesterday I slumped out on the couch and watched Sin City which was very refreshingly gory. I have not managed to catch How I Met Your Mother Season Four; I still need to watch Zombieland, District 9 and.. erm, Fantastic Mr Fox. Soon!

I would like to have a day of play at Universal Studios! I am very enthused by Theme parks.

And recently, I have been in the mood for LVoe haha. Maybe I can pull along an Ion Buddy and go check something out during a free weekend.

2010-02-11T22:27:00.002+08:00

And though I couldn’t imaginably have procured my Muse bag in time for a shot at some poetic testament haha, possibly, nothing comes close. Far and away, best live act.

In other, less exhilarating, news: these gloomy medical days are plodding along, trampling upon my life, health and morale. Oh do I really have to be so melodramatic?

After a month long string of rounds and exits and calls and rounds and exits and calls, I burnt my first day off hibernating under blankets, dowsing honeyed water and syrupy pei pa kao in a frantic bid to be fighting fit by Monday.

The last of my manicure has succumbed to chip and flake..

2009-12-30T00:51:00.001+08:00

Today after work, I only wanted to pop a quick by muji so that I might buy some call foods and perhaps brown soy cervixes(?) for Sean.

After Cedele’s with Toe, I met Michelle. And while there wasn’t any soy donuts to be had, brown or otherwise, we got farewell snacks for the MOs :) the tea cookies are back! I also got some pea munches and they are as green as… peas, I suppose.

Then I remembered that gg5 was holding its sale. So I thought oh, how much harm can a little look-see, a brief pass-by do? I could almost hear the cards in my wallet whimper in sad resignation.

And so, my little look-see, my brief pass-by, ended me up with a gignormous paper bag about the size of the meowmeow one that zy brought back for me. I didn’t even know gg5 stocked paper bags of that size. I think I spent something in excess of a nano. :( and what with the Christmas expenditure, i dread to receive the monstrosity in an envelope that is December's Bill.

I’ve been considering to get a (new) nano but for reasons, I’ve not gotten round to the actual purchase. Because come that happy day when I join the host of people with Apples in their eyes and iphones in their hands, what then shall I do with my poor pinky nano?

But then again, I am the sort of person that likes electronic clutter. I like to have a camera, a phone, a music player as separates. As for my organizer, I like to put pen to paper and fill in boxes of days with appointments and meet-ups and to-dos. Resultantly, my bag is usually massively messy and I am fond of heaving about a big one. I can’t do tiny delicate pouch-like clutches with pretty clasps and nary the capacity for anything more than kiehl’s no.1.
My call bag itself can pack 3 days worth with space for lola.

Well, speaking of calls.. I’m up for my last o&g call tomorrow! so i shall be off to fall asleep to strains of the Killers. I wish i had Midnight's to read a bit of.. and i used to be such a rapid reader. Now, i can't even finish a library book by its due by date. oh. cranial atrophy.

2009-12-01T23:58:00.001+08:00

Today was one of those sort of days.
From the moment I hit the hospital, I just really wanted to high-tail back home. I felt sallow and awfully tired; my contact lenses were parching my eyes. My eye bags were engulfing my face.

Upon impermanent escape from the discharges, we had breakfast at level 3 and I ate enough to feed a small family: A slice of toast and a runny egg each for Daddy and Mummy, Baby can eat my crunchy cereal; coffee for the dog. CPD hips are spreading into NVD hips. My recently acquired Starbucks guzzling ways aren’t helping either; in the past month since they launched their festive offerings, I must have drunk my weight in toffee nut latte.
When we zip up our dresses, we are going to zip flesh! Boo.

So the day crawled along. And at 5pm, behold, the shuttle bus queue. I caved and climbed into a cab. I cabbed to.. town. I remembered that fcuk was having its sale and I wanted to get my brunch dress.

Oh I am doomed! Medicine is going to be a nasty jolt to the poor mush in my thick skull.

In the not too distant days before I devolved into this vacuous, OPI-obsessed being, I used to read tomes of very deep and philosophical works. Truth! I never used to be labeled a bimbo, I swear. The accusation is new to me haha. I have gone from Plato to Prada.

We’re going to watch The Killers and Muse! But as I’ve been fond of saying of late, I like Muse the Band but I love Muse the Bag even more. And I hope Brandon Flowers sings Girls Just Wanna Have Fun with all his spazzy moves.

My brother has introduced me to this silly game called Plants vs Zombies. It’s retardedly addictive and I’ve been playing it till just.
Argh. It’s 12am! I am an old person and I need to sleep early or I’ll be cranky and my bones will creak. Tomorrow is going to be another one of those sort of days.
Horrors; I am on call.

I shall go pack :( I also remember that I have no muji call food.. Oh but I have half a packet of Animal Biscuits. Marks and Spencer is the new Muji! I bought the animal biscuits because of a funny story my friend told me about somebody.

I pray for a tolerable call. Sometimes we have wonderful sleepover-like labour calls where we camp on the EPS couches watching cartoon network and eating muji snacks. My last call was peripheral and retrospectively fantastic. I slept for 7 glorious hours and when I eventually roused my sleep-suffused self to have breakfast with michelle, I wasn’t too angsty about the weekend cover changes and I was very pleasant to all the nurses.

2009-10-29T21:15:00.007+08:00

Some Saturdays ago, I was happy to finally meet my bow bag and bow flats. I have a fond affection for bows and am in excessive possession of many bow-adorned things. So expectedly and needless to say, I was rather enthused about the Ultimate Bows.

But these recent Saturdays I’m either on call or postcall.. Oh. I miss brunch. Although I can hardly keep to the time of brunch proper and it inevitably pans out more or less like lunch; albeit an early one. Well.

Still, this posting has hardly been cruel. We get to leave, on most days at least, at decent times and we can plan ourselves little movie and dinner outings. Sometimes we go shopping. Although once when I stepped out of the dressing room to swirl liana a skirt, my phone rang out its dinky Sound of Settling song. I answered it without misgiving and proceeded to receive one protracted, very angry tirade doled out upon my poor ears.
I bought the skirt.

On Monday I took my first mc. I was so nauseas I was convinced I had caught hyperemesis gravidarum from one of the patients in my ward. We had a lady who made the most horrific retching noises that you could hear all the way at the MO room and I had been secretly feeling very unsympathetic toward her. It’s karma.

For February’s intentions I shall endeavor to frugality and stop wearing my holidays upon my arm and on my feets. So I suppose too that I may not get me that prada from the Prada.  After some deliberation, I thought I’d save the purchase for a nasty day when I needed cheering. Maybe at the next earful or at my next absurd failure of fundal pressure. But people have been kind and my arms have been powerful of late haha.
Then I thought it’d be my (very early) Christmas present to me. Ahwell, we’ll see.

Shucks. I need to be off to bed.

2009-10-28T22:05:00.001+08:00

i found a new fratellis song that i like!

2009-09-29T23:49:00.003+08:00

Ahh.. the prada trolley series.

In these times of houseman hardship, I don’t think I could manage a rough and tumble sort of holiday. I am tired and old. haha.
I don’t want a pack upon my back; I don’t want the dust and dirt matted in my hair.
I would like sidewalk strolls in a maxi dress and shades; tea in a café; I’d like to visit the museums and the miu mius.. I want to tour happy lands like Disney and.. Disney. I want to be in just one place without haste or hurry.
Ohwell.

Or I’ll stay in Singapore and tour the happy land of the ion. Perhaps it’s but a phase. And maybe one day I’ll look back and grieve the damage wrought. How much healthier could my balance have been had I not submitted, with but a weak semblance of resistance, to such waylays.

I’m glad to be watching movies again.

The songs from my ride home have an annoying habit of sticking in my head. And now with Living on a Prayer blasting in the background, it’s a little incongruous with my nightly read of Midnight’s Children.

Sometimes I think about what I’ll entertain myself with during those (future) long journeys home from c g h. Maybe I should get a pod or a kindle. I am a good candidate for the shuffle because I could possibly put 4 Songs of the Moment in it and be pleased as punch replaying them ad nauseum.

But tonight I shall, most crucially, get.. some sleep. Last day in 42 tomorrow!

2009-08-31T22:03:00.003+08:00

The colonel dwelt in a vortex of specialists who were still specializing in trying to determine what was troubling him. They hurled lights in his eyes to see if he could see, rammed needles into nerves to hear if he could feel. There was a urologist for his urine, a lymphologist for his lymph, an endocrinologist for his endocrines, a psychologist for his psyche, a dermatologist for his derma; there was a pathologist for his pathos, a cystologist for his cysts, and a bald and pedantic cetologist from the zoology department at Harvard who had been shanghaied ruthlessly into the Medical Corps by a faulty anode in a I.B.M. machine and spent his sessions with the dying colonel trying to discuss Moby Dick with him.

Catch-22
~ Joseph Heller

2009-08-30T23:37:00.001+08:00

Hey, come on try a little
Nothing is forever
There's got to be something better than
In the middle
But me & Cinderella
We put it all together
We can drive it home
With one headlight

2009-08-23T22:22:00.001+08:00

Blue blue, monday blues..

Saturday calls are the pits. I believe the goodness or badness of a call is related to more than the sum of its parts.

But what can i say? For those 20 odd hours or so, i am yours to mistreat.

If, in the day’s wee hours, you fancy a myeloma screen after the patient has already been needled twice since admission and, with the flick of a pen, is likely to be bled again come morning, its not for me to protest. Now it isn’t that i think your clinical acumen is suspect (although you have spent more time in ortho than i. Haha. Joke!), nor is it that i am lazy to take the bloods; hell, at your beck and your call, i’ve walked from Emergency to the ward, i think it’d possibly make me feel better to actually do something and poke somebody rather than have gone all that distance just to flip through a file and note the scrawly handwriting.

Hmm.. okay perhaps and admittedly i don’t know what it is; maybe if it were anybody else i would have done a million myeloma screens with brimming enthusiasm. Maybe if it were anybody else i would have eagerly trawled the wards and begged patients to let their legs be dopplered.
Some people just rub you the wrong way; the tragedy is that it is hardly their loss. Haha. well..

Nevertheless, getting back to my bout of rant..

So i thought, it’s alright, it’s okay, the uncle is nice and his veins are nicer yet, so palpable and as thick as my finger; i imagine i could draw blood with my eyes closed.
But in a twist of ironic cruelty, the bedlights decided to blow. I half considered attempting to take the blood anyway. A stab in the dark. Hahaha.
Well, the nurse procured me a torchlight and merrily disappeared thereafter. I tried, failing foolishly, to kiap the torchlight under my arm. I tried to stuff it in my scrub pocket only to have my face glow ghoulishly from its beam.
No prizes for guessing who ended up holding it.

At 4 am, i was awakened by the Sound of Settling and summoned to Emergency. No, it isn’t my first A&E call, but is it yours?

Today we all drowned in changes i suspect were monday’s masquerading as sunday’s.
I get very seethe-y when particular characters try to shirk the workload.

Shucks. I don’t know what has sparked such uncharacteristic scathing angst. Really, I am generally happy everyday haha. I like most of the people i work with, i do. I love the usual gang of us and I love our CQ getaways.
I love ortho. Secret.

But yay, two days to leave! And no more trauma drama :)

2009-08-07T23:20:00.001+08:00

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

Their Eyes Were Watching God
~ Zora Neale Hurston

2009-07-28T00:03:00.002+08:00

I slept late the night prior and didn’t suppose how I might have survived yesterday’s call. Passive calls are anything but. And during weekends, time drags on in an endless day.

Still, I guess I have scarcely the right to complain. I am after all the ortho HO and I managed some shut eye. Around 3 am as I lay curled up on the bed with crocs donned, my phone rang and somebody asked if I was HO 5. I said, Huh? What is that? And the voice over the phone became very flustered at the sound of my bleariness. It asked if I was even a doctor at all, perhaps she had gotten the wrong number and dialed awake some poor random Singaporean. Well, yes I am a doctor and I am on call, I replied. But I am the ortho HO, probably the only HO in this hospital who is sleeping tonight and thanks to you that is no longer so! Haha, I didn’t say that.

Oh medical calls are going to be murder.

So after 2 weeks of B sided bliss, I’ve come round once again to a rotation of asc-sda. I like scrubbing up at the asc and when I get redundant and, consequently, bored, I admire the smooth gown cuffs under my gloves. I am very proud of my un-runched up cuffs.
I am not a very accomplished leg-holder though. As they are backslabbing the leg and mummifying it, I always hope they don’t notice as it descends lower and lower; I pray they don’t realize that I’m panting haha. I feel quite slighted when the surgeon asks his MO to relieve me of my leg holding duties.

And while it isn’t ward-work kind of tough, the sda is no walk in the park either. The most I’ve suffered was 29 patients.. Ops get cancelled for reasons of UTI, URTI; I cross my fingers and hope I don’t get a tantrum thrown in my face. Some patients, as my marker hovers poised over the site, decide that maybe, perhaps, actually, the left side hurts more than the right; Missy, can change operation to left side instead? Can not? Horrors.
Other patients decide to un-NBM themselves with kopi, or with carrot cake, or...pizza. Erm. Who has pizza for breakfast anyway?!
I also thought I could wear my heels but then I considered all the tottering about I’d have to do from the sda room to the day room to the sda room to the day room. I think I might possibly fall flat and end myself up on Monday’s trauma list.

On postcall days, it’s rather like the lights are on but there’s nobody home. I am usually chirpy enough to see the steady stream of patients, and familiarity helps run things along like clockwork so I can sometimes get away with hitting snooze on my brain—I smile a lot, ink an arrow onto skin, ask the same questions and hope to get the expected answers. I check results, print a chit; pick a vein and poke to draw for gxm.
Except that today after filling the tube with red, I promptly popped it into the giant sharps box and proceeded to pack the butterfly into a biohazard bag.
I had to rattle up the box and fish my tube out with a pair of scissors. Then I had to reassure the patient that I wasn’t the one performing the surgery.

There are some foods I like having postcall or whenever I need a quick, cheap fix. They’re very mass-market, widely available but I like them anyhows. I like Crystal jade’s porridge, Mos burger’s ungai rice burger, Yoshinoya’s beef bowl, Yakun’s toast set, Breadtalk’s floss bun, Provence’s wassants, green curry from Thai express, Mr bean ice cream, Billy Bomber’s milkshake, Kenny Roger’s corn muffins, Popeyes’ buttermilk biscuits, Yami yogurt, donuts from Donut factory or J. CO, thunder tea rice from Food republic, QQ rice, the fruit cup from Houseman Canteen. More non-specifically, I like sandwiches, wraps and warm thick soups, milk tea from hong kong cafes and lattes, I like you tiao dipped in soya bean milk, I like mee sua and hot ramen. I like dim sum. Haha I also like alcohol and a good stiff drink, on occasion.

Off on a tangent, we checked out the ion after church on Saturday. I thank God for friends because although I don’t often, it’s sometimes nice to be able to talk to somebody. Maybe He’s trying to teach me something but I’m not getting it quite and so I’m put through it again and again and again. And still..
Well the Ion has four storeys up for the rich and four storeys down for the poor(er). Prada and Miu Miu, Marc Jacobs, LV, Longchamp, Burberry, Dior, Cartier; the Opera Gallery which I liked to wander by when it was at Taka. Beneath they’ve got the usual line up of Zara, Topshop, Mango, GG<5 and yay for another Muji. Dunkin donuts too!
Looking at the store list gives me palpitations. Haha. Oh, love.

But hey, today I signed up for a Save-as-you-earn account. Yup, I am officially going to start saving.. for the year end sales. No no, I kid. I’m going to save for a rainy day!

Alright, sleep.

2009-07-08T22:30:00.001+08:00

this was the first michael jackson song that i loved..

2009-07-04T23:55:00.001+08:00

Today I bought my jade bangle.

For the past some months, I’ve been wistfully telling friends and along the way possibly some random strangers that I would like a jade bangle. Sometimes I ask my auntie-patients where they got theirs from and how I might perhaps avoid getting cheated. I’ve done my research on and off when the mood comes upon me. Because of sgh’s proximity to jade bangle haven Chinatown, if fancy strikes me, I take a walkabout after work to wander into the shops and slip on a couple for fit.
They usually don’t.

After a barracks brunch (7 layer pancake! Woot.), it felt like a Holland v sort of day. I haven’t been there since I started work so I got the cab driver to stop me off.

I visited familiar shops, said hi to the ugly dolls at anthropology and bought some earrings from the bead shop.

And in pure randomness, I found myself walking into this jewellery shop that, in all my years of exploring Holland v, I had never previously given second look. I saw it behind glass and it was pale and slim and.. green. The owner folded up my hand into it and it felt right. Then it felt a lot less right when I caught glimpse of the little, meant-to-be-inconspicuous white tag which bore a rather frightful combination of tiny black numbers. But he made me an irresistible offer! And it’s a reputable shop, as far as I know. He also said that although it’s grade a, he’ll let me have it for much less because it wouldn’t fit anybody anyway and so he might as well sell it to me. And he said sometimes the jade bangle finds its owner and sometimes the owner finds her jade bangle. And there I was feeling incredulous that I was actually falling for it hook, line and sinker. Omg. Tell me I am not a complete sucker.
Then jenheng messaged me that the gst credits had arrived in our accounts. And it was like even the government wanted me to finally buy my jade bangle. So i did. I must have spent less than 15 minutes in that shop.
Ohno, I think there’s something quite pathological about my shopping habits.

But this leave has brought me many other moments of serendipity. And no, it hasn’t been all about me and shopping. Although another mention-worthy occurrence was when I was walking along orchard road and outside of tangs I stumbled upon a promotion they were having for lanvin’s, which I’ve liked for the longest time but been holding out on because I thought it was a tad pricey. A couple of smses later and I’d scored us a bottle each for a great price. Plus rebates on my tangs card. Yay! Haha.
I like chance by chanel too. I’ll get that next! Anymore gst credits coming in?

(oh I am some hungry. I think I shall go downstairs now to buy supper for my parents and me. Brb.)

Anyhows, horray for the gss. The different Sales of the Moment have been wonderful. Haha oh, I speak of it so warmly. It started with gg<5, then mango and now zara. Among others, I’ve bought ?seven dresses perhaps; two are maxi. I have an idea to convert my room into a walk-in wardrobe. I think I’ll just sleep on the floor in a sleeping bag.
I usually shop when I need emotional solace. So I get to think about something else instead of the uncertainty I’m facing. Okay, fine. I just like to shop. I shop when I am happy, I shop when I am sad, I shop with company and without. I also like to accompany friends who are shopping and I am very happy when they find things to buy. I just like to shop! Don’t judge me; I am the pillar of the economy! And I am actually completely capable of going for long periods of time without shopping. Truth.

Anyhows, as I was saying, this leave has brought some moments of serendipity. On the Tuesday before my leave, I was feeling pensive and apprehensive. I hadn’t really planned my leave. I just picked a string of dates I thought seemed appropriate for a break and then when it came around, I wasn’t really sure what I’d end up doing. Sleeping everyday? Pray, no. I guess I might have gone diving but I think I’ve lately sort of just become a giant puddle of nua.
So on Tuesday I went erm, shopping (window! I didn’t buy anything.) And at kate spade, I bumped into mel! Mel mel from secondary school long time ago mel. Suet and jenheng and mel! I love these friends.

In the 4 days of my first leave, I’ve been to.. amk hub (haha!), ikea, brunched at Dempsey twice; we’ve timbred with eic, we’ve had iguana’s ultimate margarita, I’ve had many sandwiches and wraps and smoothies! There was some new asia bar and some zouk. Haha which were not meant to be. Just as well. We’ve had our feet eaten by fish. Oh this isn’t the first time I’ve fed my foots to them. But the ante’s been upped with another pond housing bigger fish. They’ve hung a sign over it that says, bigger spa fish, bigger sensation! I thought, yay, bigger fish for the win. So leaving the smallies behind, I pranced over to the other pond and lo and behold, the fish were really big. Maybe not super duper big but big enough to freak me out.
Maybe 15 to 20 cm kind of big? Scary la.

Then with smoother feet, i flipflopped my way to a chinadoll haircut.

I’ve managed some errands too, like collecting my grad gown and I’ve also had to pop back by sgh for some files in my pigeon hole. Which reminds me that I’ve work to do. Well.

2009-06-22T01:20:00.003+08:00

Ohno i find myself unable to sleep, i hope i don’t have thorny changes tomorrow. And there cant be any properly legit reason; i have lola at my feet, and i have another more mouthless sort of meowy haha with a red bow, by my side, the room is aircon chilled and my blankets are warm. I have this peculiar habit of like, crumpling my blanket. i’ve been doing it since i was little and its just really weird.

Anyhows, i shall try to sleep by 1. i’ve been pottering around but i’ve about run out of distractions; so i figure i’ll flip open the laptop and tap out something rambly for the blog.

Today was my first sunday off since forever. Oh now i know why i cannot sleep! It’s the coffees i had after church! I had my own iced latte and a friend’s blended mocha. After shopping we went to this tucked away place at taka. I’m wanting to go back to try the sandwiches and cupcakes and a wrap thingy i saw many people eating.

My family then met up with me for a father’s day’s dinner at sun with moon. I think they do pretty good Japanese. For 4 of us it came up to slightly more than a call’s worth.

My meals lately have been nice. I know ‘nice’ is such a mild, nonspecific kind of weak attempt at description, but.. well.

One day i ate porridge for three meals. I like my porridge congee style; i like it completely whited out and i don’t want to be able to see any rice grain outlines. That day i had tiong bahru porridge for lunch, crystal jade’s for dinner and when i got home, i found that my mummy had made porridge too. So i had a bowl for supper.

We’ve tried other porridges on some of our postcall days but none of them quite make the cut. The Maxwell one is too grainy ricey and the chinatown one is too wholesomely bland. Oh but i really like the soya bean and curd there.

One friday i met my study buddy and on a whim, we thought to walkabout liang court. We settled on dinnering at some fusion restaurant whose name presently escapes me. It wasn’t bad.

And on a previous friday some friends and i had sandwiches and Max Brenner at the esplanade.

Last saturday (was it?) a bunch of us dim summed at dim joy. Haha it’s a rather silly name i suppose. My favourites were the egg tarts, the custard pao and a cup of very yummy mush with a pastry covering. It was delish!

In freer days past and gone, we had carl's jr; char and i once had ramen at the central. I've had my delifrance breakfast and bengawan solo too. Unfortunately, both times didnt go unnoticed.

During my sunday call, the nurses saved me an A class chocolate cake with vanilla sauce and the night became that much more bearable.

I have developed a very annoying craving for pao. Ever since my first active call when, to the mortification of my MO, i unmindfully consumed the purple pao, i have been struck by intermittent thoughts of wanting to eat pao. I like the tiong bahru market lotus paste pao.

i think i sound like a very weird and greedy girl.

Okay, its past one and i shall try to be off to sleep. Goodnight!

2009-06-12T00:30:00.001+08:00

With my present ward coverage of spine central, i have found myself an unwillingly active participant of the morning meets. Spine, trauma, m and m.

I am otherwise settling in reasonably, i suppose. I don’t get along too shabbily with the nurses and i have been fortunate enough to mostly catch the consultants on the upswing of their temperaments. The mos i’ve had to call have all also been very patient. The people i’ve had to inflict my blue letters upon have been tolerant. And us, orthopods, we’re a nice bunch; we help each other, we’ve had, and sometimes still have, fairly satisfying lunches. Haha.

Although i should not speak too soon, i do feel; well i know rather, that someone is watching out for me. He’ll never dish out more than my plate can hold.

Yesterday, after i received the message, i thought for a little and realized that well, i have so far managed to avoid a real chew out. My day has come. So i burnt myself a 7 song cd of wallflowers, fratellis, joshua radin and jet. I spun it and went to bed. More sleep makes for less depression.

Today i wandered into trauma territory for a breakfast companion. i like the breakfast sets but i don’t really fancy when the eggs are transparenty and uncooked. I like sandwiches. One day i’d perhaps have a delifrance breakfast.
Anyhows, i then returned to my ward to tank. But as things would go, there was none of the storm i had braced myself for. I don’t know why and i don’t need to. In the midst of imparting some postop to-dos, he hinted in a mildly roundabout, placid manner that sometimes i might want to think about calling the mo. Ahh well, damned if i do, damned if i don’t.

Last week’s friday unfolded less prettily. I saw no one but him that entire morning, that whole day. The third time i went to his side, as i put my fingers to his neck and felt nothing, i was truly and immensely frightened. But i guess with all the training and grilling, something indeed must have after all become etched. Somehow someway, we’ll find ourselves doing what we were taught a million times before. And at the most opportune time, the anaesthetist i had called, perhaps but five minutes ago materialized from behind the curtains and took the responsibility from me.
And even though things don’t always turn out okay and people don’t always make it, it’s enough, for me at least, to know that there was not anything i would have or could have done differently.
Well i guess there is one, but that will take me a little more time. i just find it very hard to remain impassive when everybody is so weepy and sad! And i know it can't ever be easy; the bad news keeps coming in waves.

I don’t know what the final report will read, perhaps we won’t ever know why or how. And come one monday, i’ll face a different sort of tension, in a different sort of room. Ortho patients aren’t supposed to die.

2009-06-09T23:22:00.001+08:00

i remember that i like this too! :)

2009-06-06T05:26:00.001+08:00

today was tough; this makes me smile!

2009-05-31T01:49:00.002+08:00

With my recent endowment of some spending power, i have gone credit card happy and acquired for myself a couple; i’ve been blissfully swiping and signing.
Today i bought a calculator. Besides my taking a sudden shine to its minty shade of green, i’ve also decided to do what responsible adults do and keep a conscious watch on my finances. I will give my parents an allowance; i will tithe. I’ll pay my bills on time, i’ll save for a big purchase and hopefully maybe i can also make a trip to someplace nice.
I suppose i’m not the sort of person who is intrinsically adept at saving and planning and calculating and balancing the cheque book. For one, my math is atrocious. For another, I really do like to shop. Lately i’ve come to the thought that i should like to buy some classic pieces; unfortunately, my ideas of classic are vuitton and chanel and hermes. Ohwell, with or without, it’s okay okay.

It’s coming close to a month since we’ve been haunting the wards. Well actually i spent the last two weeks not so much in the wards.

For a week i ran the sda and spent my days fretting that a certain surgeon would storm up in his scrubs and blue gown to unleash his wrath upon me. Nothing of that sort happened, thankfully, and i started to enjoy having my own little room with a computer; I liked seeing the patients and making small talk. Sometimes shahidah would come by to help me with the bloods and pre-clerking and to tell me about the manly surgeons in the asc. Haha then it’s a bit more fun and a little less lonesome.

Just this last week it was my turn to hang out at the asc.
But usually there are just too many people crowded in. One consultant plus a registrar and some couple of MOs makes for one very redundant HO.
Sometimes i go to the pantry to read newspapers ala yuzeng; sometimes i go to the wards to cover the postcall or to help with the brainless stuff. At other times i play suduko on my phone or i just watch the blood spray out of the little portholes and rain onto the floor making puddles with swirling marblings of red.
Still, it hasn’t been completely pointless. When i’m scrubbed, i try to stay sterile and not poke my unsterile face into elbows or the like. I get to watch the op up close and they let me stitch! I like that.

During this one month i have also often felt very undoctorish. I think i don’t really look the part either; I have been mistaken for all sorts of other hospital staff.
Patients call me missy and ask me to help them switch on their light, switch off their light, bring them water, bring them diet coke.
In the sda, some ask me, with worry evident in their faces, whether i would be the one doing the surgery for them. They’re always, very visibly, relieved when i assure them that it most certainly won’t be me.

I have been a porter. One day i helped accompany a dil patient and after his scope, there was not a porter around so the nurse and i struggled to push his bed back to the ward. Poor man, it couldn’t have been a very smooth ride. And in the lift, because the nurse could not get in, i was left stranded with my bewildered looking patient. When the door opened at the designated floor, there was no way i could get the bed out on my own. Those beds are heavy!

On another day i was to draw blood from a patient. So i took the tray and the tubes to his bed. Upon seeing me, he proceeded to climb out of the bed and reach for his walking frame:
So, what exercises shall we be doing today?
Huh, uncle i need to take your blood..
Take blood? How come? What are you?
Uncle, i am helping my friend, but i am a doctor too..
Doctor? Huh, you are not the physiotherapist meh!

And one time, this young patient called out to me very urgently. So wearing my Concerned Look, i went to his bedside; and he started waving his charger at me and asked, eh here got any two pin plug?

Well, tomorrow i shall be bracing myself for the changeover to a month of centralling at 76 then 75. June is my tough month. Boohoo. Still, i shall try my best to have a life :) it's possible! i think..

Okay! Need sleep..

2009-05-17T01:31:00.001+08:00

This feels, disturbingly, like a medical posting.
After the handover i stood staring uncomprehendingly at the case notes open in front of me, at my poor patient before me.

Somebody once told me that i must learn not to let emotions cloud up my head and interfere with my ability to do the job. Today I really tried. So i spent my Saturday morning calling various reluctant people, and some who, thankfully, were less so. The bloods came, gs, neuro and ortho came, they decided for dil, the nurses put a tube down and i accompanied him to his scan.
I am so sorry.

Why do they take turns like that? This is going to make me completely ocd. I thought i was, but i guess not sufficiently. And it will happen when you’re post call and the last night was frenzied, when you think its okay because the patient has been stable every morning you’ve seen him, when we’ve been content to scribble: afebrile, vitals stable, awaiting nursing home, awaiting nursing home, awaiting nursing home (as is everybody else).
And now i feel very crappy because i really shouldn’t have slipped up. I’m not learning fast enough.

I confess that i used to think geri intolerably dull. But as a houseofficer with ortho’s overflow, i cannot be more grateful for their reviews. It’s one thing for me to puzzle by myself, to list and relist the problems and order a battery of investigations as per what 5 years of medical school has taught me to deem fit, it’s another; and comforting to know that somebody else more competent is watching your patient too; that someone’s got your back, that from a remote computer, they’ve also seen the results and before you freak out, they come by to tell you that yes, i think we shall taze the patient now.

The new batch is here. Please don’t be horrid to me, i don’t covet this trainingship and i am not looking to impress whichever consultant you’re with. I’d just like to survive, i’d like my patients to survive and i’m happy enough if i get to go out for lunch sometimes.

But it’s late and tomorrow’s my last day in 64, for now. Well, although i am somewhat glad for the relief, i think i will miss caring, as best as i can, for these same old same old patients. Haha i’ve grown fond of them and their nasty bloods. And the nasty referrals i’ve made! Oh that’s a story for another time.
Goodnight!

2009-05-12T00:11:00.002+08:00

So we’ve come to a week and a day of our gainful employment. And excepting the seven day work week, which hasn’t but soon will, take its toll; I cannot say that the job has been terribly unkind.
At the overflow, the surgeons pretty much leave us be; it’s sometimes a little scary to learn on the job. Well, I’m learning nonetheless and so far, thank God, at no expense to my patients, but at some expense to myself. Which, sigh, I suppose is ultimately okay. I have 8 and they’re mostly long stayers. I am a little paranoid that they’d suddenly decide to go unstable on me.. Sometimes their UECreats get a bit wonky, sometimes they get a bit febrile.. Sometimes they don’t shit for many days, sometimes they don’t pee. Sometimes they throw tantrums and fling their food around.

Today I had to make a dental referral for my patient because the MO decided that it is not fit for a man to have only one tooth in the cavity of his mouth.
It was an odd blue letter: Dear colleague, thank you for seeing this patient, 75 year old, Chinese gentleman.
Then I think, okay what next.. Do they need to know the past medical history? I write it in brief anyway.
Now admitted for: Multiple injuries following RTA. Currently stable. Alright..
However, on examination, patient noted to have but a solitary tooth. This tooth is located on his upper anterior jaw (Okay, I think it is perhaps called the mandible)
Patient has had a single tooth for a year and claims no difficulty in eating most foods. (He swallows them whole) However, he does, expectedly, complain of an inability to eat some hard fruits.

So the dentists have decided to extract my patient’s single tooth and fit him with a set of dentures. Yay.

And then I spent the rest of my day sucking blood, incurring the ire of ID, writing blue letters and summarizing my patients.

The annoyance with the overflow ward is that it has no dedicated MO room; everybody wants a computer to work at and everybody ks-es mine.
Migrating about clutching the files, imrs, temp charts, brown folders and the like, I’ve had enough of being that sorry sight. So today I dragged a chair over and parked myself in front of one of the corridor computers. And actually I think perhaps that might have been a sorrier sight because the chair is far too low and I am far too short; I probably looked rather stunted reaching for the keyboard with my neck cranned towards the screen as if watching a movie in the front row.
If there is one thing I am ocd about, I am ocd about discharge summaries. Until I can do it proper, I won’t do one at all. And though there may exist a previous one, I sometimes feel compelled to sort of re-do it and dig up the notes to check. On occasion I even spend some time to rephrase radiology reports. I underline headings and I bullet the points. Omg. It’s all fine and dandy when I only have 8 patients and my changes don’t inundate me. But the day my list explodes, this trait will be my undoing.

Calls are a separate battlefield altogether. I’ve done one. In all objectivity, it wasn’t what one might call a horrid call. I didn’t have to set up weird traction. I managed a bath and an hour’s sleep before being summoned to do a plaster cast. And suddenly I completely forgot how to do one; how many layers, what length, where does the cottony thingy go, do I put it in front or behind.. and after dipping the paris in water, it got really heavy! And the patient had a rather thick leg.
Postcall I was depressed because I thought that I had lost my bag. Oh but that’s a matter I am not eager to revisit.

Okay! Time for sleep.. another day; fingers crossed.

2009-05-11T23:53:00.001+08:00

i want gaga hair. haha.

2009-04-28T01:25:00.004+08:00

I haven’t been blogging. I realize too that the last post left off in a less than chirpy note, haha to put it mildly.
Well, anyhows, it has come and gone; we’ve gone and come (back). Returned to heat and humidity, returned to the imminent start of work, work, lots of it; and so, come what may, thank God and by His grace, I shall finally be earning my keep.

These past days have clobbered me over the head with a battery of admin matters and an endless run of lectures. In between, I try to accommodate a spot of shopping, a dash to the malls; I try to pack my room.
Today I got myself a corporate line and a new phone, I tried and ordered my grad gown. Yesterday I threw out 8 pairs of shoes. Now the tally stands at 15 pairs of heels which I hardly wear because they are quite simply too punishing for my arches. I don’t know why I buy them when I always end up copping out and sliding into a pair of flats instead. And as I enter overflow territory in ortho land, I don’t think I’d like to be teetering about 63, 64 and the rest of the far flung wards. I wish I could wear my birks.
But enough of that diversion.

I’ve only recently uploaded the photos and I do doubt I’ll be facebooking them anytime soon. Well, what of 3 weeks I remember I shall put down, for my sake more than anybody else’s; because memory, and mine in particular, should not be taken for granted to be terribly trustworthy. It is not my intention that this be a grippingly interesting account.

So! I remember the flights, to and fro. After travelling with many a budget airline, in flight entertainment, meals on board and those warm face towels were such welcomed delights. Going there I watched yes man and departures, coming back I put my eyes through a grueling 4 movie marathon with revolutionary road, Benjamin Button, bedtime stories and failure to launch.

At Auckland there was Seema and Freeman’s. I remember Seema having to climb out of the window. Oh, I remember the look on her face.

We soon headed up to Whangarei. I remember Little Earth Lodge. I remember the Poor Knights where my buoyancy was out of whack and I was bluey cold. I remember the kelp which I blame for making my face splotchy. That, or the mask.
The Abbey Caves whose waters came up to jirong’s anatomically dubious nipple line and where dq’s camera met its watery demise. I remember the glow worms which, for a few brief moments, we accused of being fake.

A domestic flight took us down to the postcard perfect South where driving anywhere was like cruising through a picture. Nature in a glorious, resplendent display. Never have I seen her more beautiful. But then again, I do live in Singapore.

I remember Te Anau and our laundry dry-washed in the dryer.

Milford Sound and our overnight cruise aboard the Wanderer; the streams that streaked the mountain slopes in crystal flowing stripes, like reams of ribbons let down; the rushing gush of waterfall spraying the deck.

I remember the snow freshly falling outside Homer Tunnel. Feather light and softly falling falling, to blanket the scenery in the whitest of whites. We made snow angels and a miniature snowman with gravel eyes, a nose, a mouth and stick arms. We saw keas.

In Queenstown, we met hail. Pelting pellets of ice dashed against our windscreen as we drove and against our faces as we walked along looking for Fins.

At Wanaka, we were tilted and dizzied at the Puzzling World. Then we just got really frustrated when we couldn’t wander our way out of the maze. It was like being lost in a wilderness of dead ends with repeated and exasperated exclamations of hey didn’t we just come from here? Not for 40 years, thank goodness; 40 minutes perhaps.
Upon a boat, we fished the lake Wanaka for trout: brown and rainbow. We caught 5, released 2, brought 3 back with us on the road.

I remember en route to Franz Josef and driving (not me) with the only illumination cast by our headlights and the moon’s beams; the road twists and winds. There are no barricades and there are intermittent signs that insist on impossible speeds like 15km/hr.
Dq suddenly man-screams from behind the wheel and us three sleeping at the back jolt bolt upright and wide awake. We think we are going off a cliff and are all going to die. And poor us, we studied so hard for the mbbs.
So it turns out that Dq has actually instead hit and killed a possum. Another roadkill splattered upon gravel.

At Franz Josef, I bit off more than I could possibly ever chew. With the boots donned and the spikes (they are called crampons! I have been calling them crumpets for the longest time) all fitted and weighing a ton, I could scarcely lift my feet off the ground, much less raise them high enough to haul myself over a trail of steps up up and up the walls of ice. Well a full day would have been just too much glacier for me. I halved my day and barely survived the trudge back; it was like a death march or something. Still, I can’t say I regret it because it really is one of those retrospectively awesome kind of things.

Coincidentally, we bumped into friends at a café along the street. Kailyn and I were nursing our sore legs, lamenting our stringy hair and musing how the guys were still somewhere out there on the ice.
A dinner meet up was set and for that we cooked up trout, pasta, soups. We also had chips and dip, salad, ice cream and lots of fun.

We went to church at Christchurch. It was Easter and I was glad for the message and service.
Christchurch is an awfully pretty city. I loved the botanic gardens, well, the little I saw of it. I am sorry to have failed in my endeavor to force everybody to lie on the grass and picnic with me.

Kaikoura happied our tummies with splendidly yummy clam chowder and crayfish. I still dream of the chowder. Their crayfish isn’t like ours; it looks rather lobster-y.

We traipsed about the Malbourough vineyards, sampling wines and maxing out our alcohol carrying limits.

Onto a ferry in our car for the North crossing. 3 bobbing hours and many games of bridge later, we docked in Wellington.

I liked our zebra outfitted hostel. We visited the Wellington zoo and saw its likeness. We also saw a kiwi bumbling about, rustling the leaves of its darkened enclosure. There were tigers, a bear; we fed giraffes.
I also remember the museum of Te papa and although we missed Monet, it was a very fine museum indeed.

In Napier we visited an antique store; rather disturbingly, the o and g instruments of old look hardly different from the ones of today. I bought a vintage bag which doesn’t match any of my existing clothes. Yay; an excuse, as if I ever needed one, to shop more.
In Napier I also wished I had brought more money to shop.

I remember sitting in the car somewhere along a road in Taupo and getting the call. One by one we all received news. The relief, oh the relief.
Then (with parachute attached) we hopped off a plane. It was exhilarating. Tumbling off in abandonment, falling desperately against and into an expanse of sky sky, the sky is everywhere, it is so blue. Land appears beneath as we plummet, the vast lake; the view catches your breath and takes it away. The opening of the parachute is abrupt and sends us hurtling back up. Then we float along, swayed by the winds.

Dq and jirong bungeed the next day. It looked, erm, very scary.

Rotorua smelt perpetually like eggs. We luged and saw some pukekos..
Oh we also went white water rafting. It was superly fun! I fell off the raft. I guess that part was a little bit less fun, for me, that is.
I also remember the Polynesian spa.

I remember grocery shopping, lots.

Last but far far from least, I remember our dear car(s) and their mishaps. Flat tire, flat battery. A day in Wellington when we had our breakfast interrupted by the sounds of one alarmingly familiar car horn. Looking out the window, we see, to our shock, horror and much disbelief that our car was being towed away. And in Rotorua, a paint scrapping sort of an accident.

And so it was, all in all, a fantastic sort of a grad trip.

I shall end rather abruptly now because I need to sleep. Tomorrow brings.. oh I don’t know what anymore. Well, bring it on anyway! I guess..

2009-03-16T00:09:00.000+08:00

The shit has hit the fan. And this week, it looks to be spinning at dizzying speeds.

Oh, who knew that 5 years would culminate in such manner of despondency?

Please pray

dance myself to sleep--ernie and bert

2009-02-24T01:05:00.003+08:00

we'll dance ourselves to sleep, oh yeah!
we'll dance ourselves to sleep, wearing our jammies..
we'll dance ourselves to sleep, and thank you, lambies.
we'll dance ourselves to sleep!

oh i do love this; it makes me smile. haha the boogy woogy sheep are a riot. poor bert!

2009-02-16T02:19:00.001+08:00

Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.
~Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

A day to a day of misery! Gah. And the sun is too hot.
So it goes that i am here once again to spew random musings in another one of these word vomit episodes. I gave in to an afternoon nap and now i can’t sleep. But neither can i study. Boohoo.

On the topic of random, i have recently succumbed and hopped on the 25 things bandwagon. Oh it is a crowded wagon, every person and his mother has done, is doing or will do the list haha.

Initially i wasn’t too keen because it seemed too much like the sort of thing that tempts people into bitching about you. But i read a few of my friends’ lists and some were funny and some were heartfelt.. and really, its not like anybody is forcing anybody else to divulge scandalous secrets. (not that i have any)
So why be so uptight? Its actually rather fun; i don’t know why people give it grief.

Many like to state if they’re introverted or extroverted. Hmm.. i never really gave that thought. But after mild consideration, i suppose i am introverted around people i don’t know well and extroverted around those i’m comfortable with. I think that’s a good answer haha. It’s true. I like you but sometimes i’m really stumped for something to say. And more so of late, because i honestly think i’m experiencing some social skills regression from lack of environmental stimulus haha. I only ever see my cg mates, my parents, and lola; on the phone i only ever talk to char and sometimes yiwei. And suet is leaving tomorrow and i shan’t see her for forever. Boohoo, I am blue and friendless. Well at least my cg gets along pretty fine. I think it’s nice of them to be so smart but unselfish. And they’re full of shit hahaha; pardon my French. Oh Sundays i meet my church friends.. We practice a song that i won’t be around to sing. Sigh. (Erm, i realize that sounded like i’m dying or something. Well I’m not. At least not that i am aware of)

I don’t think i have many close friends. And even among the ones i consider ‘inner circle’ worthy haha, i don’t suppose i let in on much beyond the superficial.

I used to hate having to talk about my personal life. Like, i would get rather annoyed when friends confronted me and pushed me to answer thorny questions. Hmm.. haha i don’t know if that has changed much, but perhaps i have gotten better at deflecting questions and giving (what i think are) politically correct, non-committal sort of answers. Or maybe i’ve gotten tired and i’ve stopped caring about what gets repeated and what gets distorted and what gets gossiped about. Okay i should stop being so obnoxiously self absorbed and over-rated. Haha.

I think i am very good at keeping secrets! I have super secrecy skills. Everything told to me is assumed to be secret until proven otherwise haha. Okay, obviously not everything. What you’re having for breakfast is probably not secret. Unless its very yummy and you don’t want to share. And my breakfast tomorrow is yummy! I bought petit provence wassants which i shall share with my cg.. Unless i finish them all tonight.

Oh I miss the contentment of those Saturday mornings. When pleasantly stretched after yoga we’d sometimes join the ang mohs at a bready place for a cup of tea in a crisply clean white teacup, and a warm fluffy bun. And after that i’d go for a swim and i’d feel so fit and fresh. Now i am just blobby and anaemic.

Some tangentiality there. Anyway, besides my general disdain for talking about my feelings, i believe i don’t tell people things because they can’t be as secretive as i expect. Haha. And i don’t blame them, really. It’s probably my fault for having this sort of a hang up.

Maybe that is also why i am not close to too many people. Because people feel close to you only when you tell them things. Haha no, i don’t think the 25 count for much; Randal has dismissed them as ‘not juicy enough’ hahaha.
And i need constancy; if the foundation hasn’t yet firmed, you cannot come and go as and whenever. Haha wah, so demanding. Macham my friendship very great. (omg. Singlish!)

But through time, i’m grateful to have found friends whom i trust enough to confide in when the need arises. I think people are mostly selfish creatures, myself probably included. So its nice to know that there are some who genuinely wish for your happiness, who take your side even when you’re at your most paranoid and unreasonable, who respect your decisions but will always be there for you when they prove wrong. And to these, i hope that i am likewise such a friend.

I am still not sleepy but had better sleep anyhows.. another cdc day of lectures tomorrow. Oh! Maybe i shall get to see BigSpectacles.. haha yay.

2009-02-09T01:29:00.001+08:00

I put my ipod on shuffle and the songs that play always have an uncanny ability to match my mood.

My problem really is that once i start crying i find it almost impossible to stop. Sometimes, i swear, i’m not even that sad. Which is annoying because it makes me seem like some psycho-emo nutcase. Haha okay, maybe not that bad. At least i don’t bawl or like, i don’t know, sob in a very tragic manner. Still, there must be a dissociation between my frontal lobes and my tear glands.
But thankfully for me, haha and more so for my friends, i have never really broken the dam in front of others. It gets rather awkward, don’t it? Because people never know exactly how to react when another is crying. I know i don’t. I’ll hug my friend, offer some tissue and then i usually start crying too and it only gets even more awkward.
Ohno i am so weird. Some one should hire me as a mourner for funerals. And i have so many black clothes. Unless they want me to wear a sack cloth. I have never seen a sack cloth before though. I always had the impression that it looks like those brown sacks used to contain rice.

Anyhows, we’ve reached the 4 week mark, i think it is, and i’m running out of steam! The list of distractions i am so worryingly and avidly subscribing to grows longer by the day. I am also guilty of fantasizing (omg. i took very long to figure out how to spell that) what to buy with my first pay. I am thinking a miu miu coffer or a chanel wallet or ferragamo’s varina patent bow flat. Hahaha now i feel very sheepish for confessing that but its okay. i don’t think anybody reads this. Facebook so adequately satiates everyone’s voyeuristic tendencies that there is probably no need (or time) to nosey about blogs or the like. But my favourite sites are still postsecret and bagaholicboy.

Actually my first pay probably wouldn’t afford me the coffer. Maybe if i bought everybody’s calls and on-called myself till i looked like the living dead.
And i’d like to add that i don’t think i am materialistic. Its not that i have a bad case of denial but really, i think i could still be perfectly happy without all these things. My happiness isn’t tied to such and so, yup, i don’t think i am materialistic.
Yet. Haha.

Well some days if i can muster the discipline, i force myself to study in school. i try to hide in some corner because often i think i look like shit and i don’t feel like socializing haha. So forgive me if i’m not terribly friendly.

Oh i had better be off to bed. Infectious diseases for me tomorrow.
But speaking of that, i am upset! I have to retake my Hep B vaccination. The entire course. Unhappiness. As if i wasn’t already; unhappy that is.

I guess things could have been worse. One time during nightcall i did a blood culture on a very septic-looking patient and i had gotten splashed by the blood. Haha yes it sounds entirely slasher movie-like. I think i closed my eyes in time.
Sometime after that i was inflicted with my strange rash, as some might know. Then one night i awoke with a start and i was suddenly reminded of my splash incident. And with the rash pruriting me almost to death, i honestly thought i was seroconverting or something. Its not funny lor. The next day i went to see my dermatologist and he said he was "puzzled" by my rash. I remember those words, he said "Hmm.. I am very puzzled". At that moment, my sanity was hanging by a thread; dangling about precariously.
Well some might argue that the thread snapped a long time ago. Haha.

Okay. Enough enough!
Goodnight!

Jason Mraz -Life Is Wonderful (live)

2009-01-27T02:40:00.001+08:00

boohoo. life is not wonderful when i can't go watch him.

2008-12-25T02:40:00.002+08:00

God

the greatest lover

So loved

the greatest degree

The world

the greatest number

That He gave

the greatest act

His only begotten Son

the greatest gift

That whosoever

the greatest invitation

Believeth

the greatest simplicity

In Him

the greatest person

Should not perish

the greatest deliverance

But

the greatest difference

Have

the greatest certainty

Everlasting life

the greatest possession

Merry christmas, everyone! i hope it was as meaningful for you, as it was for me..

2008-12-15T22:40:00.004+08:00

Surgery test went pretty dreadfully today... There I was grappling for the history and beginning to feel rather tragic. Then there was the mass which threw me and had me deciding that the patient was just being fat. I am having a sinking feeling about the mbbs! And in culmination of various festerings, I’m very tired, of some, of others.. I guess it’s another one of those once bitten twice shy baggage and so if you’d please, I’d like mostly to be with the ones who don’t bite.. Haha oh why am I suddenly so emo? And perhaps I’m being irrational and very unfair.

Well we went to vivo city after and had marche and a frap; then a movie.

We watched nick and nora’s infinite playlist which wasn’t big on plot but sweet nonetheless.. michael cera reminds me of juno, which I did like very much. I want to watch zack and miri make a porno haha, and bolt in 3d.. ohwell.

I’ve been listening to the killers.. I’m liking them enough to maybe get their latest; because after I pirate enough songs from one same artiste I often feel sufficiently guilty to go out and buy an album. Thus far the guilt inducing qualifiers have been Rufus Wainwright, who is possibly my absolute favouritest, Damien Rice, Jack Johnson, U2, Radiohead, Jars of Clay and Embrace. I got Stephen fretwell as a gift and I remember someone asking why I listen to such sorrowful music. But I really did enjoy that album and still do. I have Soul Asylum’s black gold too but I bought that because at some time I was almost obsessional about runaway train. It is track number 8 and I kept it on repeat for so long I thought the disc might crack along the etching of that song.
I haven’t gotten a cd in ages. I’m always broke haha and i’d rather buy clothes and eat nice food and also I don’t frequently like every song on an album. Oh mraz’s was good.. but then I went and got it ripped.

This Christmas, I wanted to send out cards and bake gingerbread men with candy buttons and frosting; though I promised our cg’s bad karma boys gingerbread men with buttons of span K and eyes of mercury haha. But as it is I don’t think I’m smart enough to deserve this extended break from the books, which I fully intend to claim anyhows.
Nevertheless, I hope my Christmas shall be a happy one; that there’ll be warmth and contentment, that I’ll be reminded of things eternal.

2008-11-23T23:23:00.002+08:00

Sip days are over over.
And at the end of the more forlorn ones of ortho at ah, it brought me much cheer to meet my familiar friends..

Its suet season : ) and we’ve been out and about town..

Friday cruised us down the singapore river to timbre at the arts house. i love rides and we love timbre. suet was excited to hear timmy again and I was just very delighted with the river taxi ride haha. hmm.. I’m no authority and the arts house timbre is my favourite one, but I think timmy should continue at the substation; because the acoustics there are more blasty, the stage has more presence and the crowd more.. ?adoring. but anyhows, they’re fantastic no matter. They covered runaway train, high and dry, losing my religion, the freshman, mr. brightside, I’m yours; we had pizza and buffalo wings, tuttu and indigo. it was a happy friday, yups!

2008-11-13T23:45:00.003+08:00

And so on my postcall day, I finally managed to con somebody into watching tropic thunder with me! Haha it was crazy and rubbishy and idiotically riotous; tolerably crass and possibly the funniest movie I’ve seen. I was slow to catch on, I didn’t realise the movie had begun; I thought I was still watching real trailers and was rather flabbergasted and bewildered that such z-grade movies could exist. At the ben stiller scorcher trailers I was puzzled that I had never heard of that movie. At the jack black farties trailer, I leaned over to suet and said, hey at least I didn’t force you to watch that movie with me! It looks horrid! And she whispered, you know what, this is the movie; it has started! She still blames me for dragging her to watch borat.

Today we caught burn after reading; oh I think my brain has rotted away. Dear suet, I am so glad you are back!

I have also been liking to eat at hongkong café-esque sorts of places. I like the extensive menus and the thick toasts with peanut butter/condensed milk dripping over the edges. The other day, we tried the peanut butter ice blended and all my headaches and heartaches were vanquished. Haha true! Almost.

These days, with my dad overseas, I’ve had to independently transport myself to AH in the very early morning. Lest it seems otherwise, I must establish that I am not a spoilt brat and I don’t (ordinarily) have any (serious) issues with public transport. And apart from the bed to bathroom inertia, my mornings haven’t been too nasty. The ride is pleasant enough and affords me with the quiet to read a bit of daily bread and find my bearings for the day.

2008-11-13T23:40:00.000+08:00

2008-11-09T23:10:00.000+08:00

haha

2008-11-06T00:01:00.001+08:00

A whirl of days has passed; I spent my 2 week break miserably rashed out and suitably glum; post paeds test, we ate and shopped, we movie picnicked at the botanic gardens and bunked over at el’s with a wii and some from our usual-suspects repertoire of games.

Another round of sip has come by once again. The first day of workshop was actually quite fun, belying the tedious days that were to follow. In ways not easily expressed, it feels different from previously and, for the first week at least, I was less enthused and more than a little tired. The early morning wakings are rough, but I find that spinning some jack johnson helps. Ordinarily, I am sheepish to admit, I’d sing along quite chirpily. But at 5 plus in the morning I’m too much in a state of bleary wretchedness to muster any form of melodic effort. Well, anyhows, once the day rolls along, things start to flow and, painlessly enough, the changes are soon completed and the day concludes itself.
Nightcalls though, are another contention altogether.
In medicine, I thought like a naive medical student and masochistically hoped my nightcalls would be action packed haha; I hovered, a licensed vampire, smiling over patients’ sleeping bodies, butterfly and syringe in hand. I sprung awake to see the new cases. While the case was clerked, my eyes would wander over the tributaries and meshwork of veins that coursed across arms, mentally selecting the juiciest one.
Now during ortho my sentiments are more ho-like and really, I’d just like to shower and catch many winks. Let there not be new admissions, no passives, no bloods, no abgs, no cultures, please please I plead, no resuses.
And I am scheduled for 6 calls. Hello, this can only be the work of a truly sick mind.

The weekends are terribly precious and for the latest one, I am glad. It was Halloween at the night safari and it was a crowded affair. Then there was playhouse which we won! Supper and suppers; among my favorite late night comfort food is crystal jade congee.
Today I went to anchorpoint for dinner and ikea to walkabout; it’s nice to know that while the days may be undeniably hectic, with so many demands placed on so little time, there will still be the ones who check in on you just perhaps to offer some company, a little solace and lots of butterflies to make the AH blood taking that bit easier.

These days, I don’t know what’s eating me; I’ve been feeling moodswung, tear-ish and, horrors, overly sensitive. And I know that is possibly one of the most tiresomely annoying traits to have! Well I’m supposing it’ll ultimately prove all very hormonal; there’s nothing else to be done but sit tight and wait it out.

Oh I have written a lot; and yet I haven’t really said anything significant at all. Well, haha I’m not much of a heart-on-sleeve kind of person.

malapascua (2nd to 3rd june)

2008-10-24T18:59:00.001+08:00

We tarried but a day and a night at cebu, before setting ourselves out to our first island—Malapascua. I had intended to get myself advanced certified and so I did. I had also intended to catch some thresher shark action, but that I didn’t. I'm still a little cross and mopey. And so from here on I am intending to avoid the subject..

Well! The ride there was agreeable enough, retrospectively, given the much harsher conditions subsequent islands were to inflict us with, one in particular comes easily to mind haha. Oh! We’d never have guessed.. But I digress.

We bobbed blithely along, a boat specked in the measureless blueness, the sky above tinged a shade paler, the clouds like parfait towers of vanilla and cream lightly whipped.

With time tight and none to squander, it was straight into wetsuits, fins and masks for our virgin dives in Philippine waters..

This is el the Mighty! haha.

I think this is me..

This is char on her Discover Scuba course. She looks happy!

And this is char getting hauled out of the water after an hour.. if you click on the photos to see them bigger, you'll see that she looks decidedly less happy and quite funny indeed. (she's going to kill me! but i really can't resist. and i don't think she reads this so i am rather safe, for now)

Lunch time brought us pancakes with chocolate syrup drizzling but no milkshake could be had, because there wasn’t electricity to operate the blender with. Serious. We asked twice; we thought they were kidding.
i had ovaltine instead. Ovaltine is so.. retro.

A couple more training dives followed, where i was made to perform tasks like finning through hoops and hovering upside down from a frame. I felt like a struggling sea lion.
I also had to complete a navigation exercise. if i can get lost in my neighbourhood, in the hospitals; it surprises me that i don't get lose my way around the house, what deluded me so to think i'd fare any better 20m underwater? Brimming with misplaced optimism, i finned merrily with the fishes, past rocks and corals and patterns in the sand. Till i was struck by the sudden unfamilarity. So there i was burbling bewilderedly through the regulator, possessing not the slightest clue how to get back to where i started.

Dinner was pizza!

We are the flowers of ging ging's garden haha.

We stayed in iffy little atapish huts and bathed with iffier water. It was brackish; so after showering keenly and expecting ourselves to be spanking clean, it was not so indeed. And in reminiscing, we’d muse over whether we preferred apo’s wormy rain water or malapascua’s brackish water. Haha. Nasty, both.

The next morning saw char locked out of our hut (hahaha). But she took some nice photos, so we didn’t mind her getting locked out. (this is a be-bitchy-to-char post)

This is me doing a timed task.
There was a slate with jumbled up numbers in bingo-like fashion and I was supposed to point to the numbers in consecutive order with the stopwatch running. I would do the same thing 30m in the deeps and it was meant to demonstrate how much slowed one’s reaction time would be underwater with the nitrogen in the blood and all.
But I think I was slower on land. I didn’t realize that the numbers ran all the way to 25. It was a 5 by 5 box so, nitrogened or not, I must be stupid or something. After pointing to 23 (Freud would think I’m subconsciously preoccupied with my age) I stopped. I turned to smile at my instructor in a very self-satisfied manner only to have her tell me that I wasn’t quite done yet.

Upon completing the early morning’s dives, I was pleased to be declared an advanced open water diver. Notably, it wasn't as sweet an accomplishment as my open water certification. Hmm.. maybe because the learning curve was less steep and i didnt have to contend with mortifying things like mask removal haha. or maybe, maybe it was because i didn't get to see the thresher sharks! dammit! I am angsty.

Anyway, I chose the year of the reef 2008 card. it recently arrived in my mail :)

Puerto princessa (18th to 21st june)

2008-10-22T21:56:00.006+08:00

Despite initial frets, we did after all manage to leave the hotel California of the Philippines that is Coron. And although I am still mildly regretful that el nido was just, quite literally, a touch and go, the aerial view as the plane propellered lowly over the green, blue, brown patchwork of islands, ocean, reefs was a breathtaking testament to creation’s miracle.
In between gasps and sighs of wonderment, I must have snapped a terrible lot of poorly focused photos on el’s cam.

I saw 4 separate rainbows! Arching stripes of the gayest (hurhur) colors which never fail to comfort me that the day will, somehow someway, be most fine indeed.
So, arriving in Puerto, we survived yet another dodgy plane ride.

After checking into Casa Linda Inn to unburden ourselves of our luggage, we set about to explore the town.

Their baragatan festival was ongoing and held on the grounds of the provincial capitol building. It’s just the sort of merry thing I love! There were stalls selling crafts and foodstuffs. There were little colored flags strung overhead and stages set up. There was a palawan pop idol and miss palawan contest! There would be exhibitions and parades and boxing matches and seminars on how to rear your chickens and pigs properly.
And there were men in uniform. haha. Campy.

We ate a dinner of street foods before absorbing ourselves in the atmosphere of good cheer and much gaiety.

The next day we were up early to venture off to the underground subterranean river at sabang.

In the darkness of the cave, the boatman rowed us along gently downstream and in halting garbled English pointed out stalactites and stalagmites that supposedly resembled various personalities. There were a lot of Jesus sightings, along with other biblical characters like the three kings and mother mary; tempered with inanimates like fruits and vegetable and mushroom and banana..

Thereafter, it was impossible to take a decent photo..

Along the forest trail, we saw komodo dragons slithering out slivers of forked tongues

my tongue is fat. oh at least it isnt forked. nasty..

Dinner that night we partook at kahlui.
it was el and i and mr. coconut whose face bore the brunt of our boredom; getting steadily uglier through the course of our dinner.

alas, he had to be sacrificed to provide el some much needed boob coverage. hahaha.

After dinner we popped by our abode with every intention to head out back to the festivities of the Baragatan. But well, a little too comfortable in our state of languidity, the scale tipped in favor of a shower and sleep.. Ohno we are getting to be like old people!

And like a crazed old lady, i started obsessively wrapping my shells in toilet paper, turning them into little mummified bundles.

We awoke to our last day in Puerto and it was simply just too soon.. Breakfast was jollibee pancakes and (dare I say it?) I liked them more than mac’s hotcakes. Indeed.

Feeling adventurous, we caught a tricycle ride into the outskirts of town. After walking around some and just before pronouncing the place completely uninteresting and our fare wasted, we spied a hair salon having an opening day promotion. El had been intending to get her hair cut and so pushing the door open we were greeted by a bevy of wrist drops!
Our morning was thus spent having foot spas, mani-pedis, hair treatment and cut. They even invited a priest and i had holy water sprinkled on me whilst i sat with the stylist snipping about. We were invited to the buffet spread; naturally, we didn’t refuse.

By now the foreboding sky had further discolored, turning an ominous shade of grey and releasing the first drops of rain from its feathery grasp. We hastily flagged down a tricycle to take us back to nccc mall at the town’s centre.

There, we utilized the most failproof of wet weather plans—shopping. And el pierced her ears! Boredom is certainly a great compeller.

In a sudden flurry of activity, the sales persons all gathered along the aisle as a ra-ra sort of song blasted over the speakers and everybody launched into a mass dance spectacle, complete with hoppity moves and hand clapping. We think it was some mass exercise thingy ala great singapore work out.

For dinner we dined at a Japanese restaurant. The rain had stirred the mosquitoes from the garden and they hovered peculiarly over our heads. We had lathered copious amounts of repellant on our bodies and it was as if they knew we were there but couldn’t bite us. So they could only frustratedly linger around our heads. But we took perverse delight in clapping our hands above our heads in an ape-like performance to try to kill some mozzies.

The rain had not let up. Unwilling to spend our last day holed up in the room, we armed ourselves with wet weather arsenal and mulishly set out for the Baragatan, sloshing our freshly foot spa-ed feet in the puddles and squelchy ground.. (its like we’re besotted with the festival.)

haha! scary.

And we were pleased to find out that there was a boxing match and rock concert on-going. Oh fun!

Morning came and it was time to leave Puerto and leave the Philippines. Boohoo. Well perhaps i shall be back someday for there are yet islands to traipse and depths to dive.

And so, thank you, babes for the adventures, the mishaps and the laughs; for a holiday very well spent indeed :)

2008-10-16T18:56:00.003+08:00

oh today i am severely distractible. i’ve been pottering about, rearranging stuffs, disturbing lola, reading snippets of books off my shelf: the missing piece, the missing piece meets the big o, the giving tree, the little prince, calvin and hobbes, the melancholy death of oyster boy, jimi and more jimi; okay so maybe i can’t recognize most of the words beyond the title.. but i like to look at the pictures. my favourite jimi book is the moon has forgotten; i can read most of that. i like it so much that i have two copies. i saw a cloth bound one when in Taiwan and had to have it. i think i may have borrowed money to buy it, not that that’s an unusual habit of mine haha.

this is my amazon order that dear sam lugged back from the states (i haven’t bought you a drink!)
a big book of pages upon pages splashed in stunning undersea photos.

i’d like to dive again.. i’d buy pink apollo biofins haha and a canon with casing. i want to see mantas and whale sharks!
but i bet my buoyancy will be all wonked and my stamina is probably dismal; i’ll have to rest on a rock and pant through the regulator.

2008-10-15T23:50:00.000+08:00

i think george harrison is my favourite beatle!

2008-10-11T23:20:00.000+08:00

i’m mighty pleased for this 2 week break! and although i have not the guts to take an actual holiday, i hope, some days, to be out about arab street, chinatown, holland v, and maybe some midnight mustafa.

after our test yesterday, we mashed ourselves into randal’s car for a provence breakfast of breads and coffee. bread is my favourite carbo!
leaving our bitching boys for a bit haha, char and i popped by the bead shop.. over their radio played a tune that stirred vague familiarity.
i first heard in the hall of the mountain king when i was in early primary school, i think it was, and i watched a ballet performance of the princess and the pea on tv. my memories of the show are hazy at best, but i remember erm, the pea.. and the high pile of mattresses and i remember the princess dancing in the rain to this composition. haha so drama. well.

anyways, we then went to plc at vivo to visit daniel’s fluffy angel. she’s sweet! i come to the idea that if one likes animals and should one have gone through a repertoire of various pets, it is likely that getting a dog is the eventual course of action.
when will my turn be? i’d get a pug and name it pugly; or a chihuahua. i carried one at the shop and its really tiny. i like the big head small body types. and its so portable i could pop him in my bag and take him everywhere; ward rounds, clinic, ot. hahaha.

i was feeling pleased about what a cathartic day i was having till, on my way home from ps, i realized that i had left my notes somewhere in vivo; i pinned down carl’s jr.

this is the second time in a month! there must be something wrong with me. the last time i left my camera at canelé.

both times, i’d give the shop a ring and by some miracle of grace, my stuff would’ve been found and kept by a kind manager. and both times, i’d pick them up the next day on my way to church. God must be trying to tell me something. oh except with my oxford handbook He didn’t try to tell me anything; well perhaps something along the lines of, i hope you learn your lesson. but i didn’t.

2008-10-07T22:14:00.001+08:00

The weekend past, already it’s Tuesday.

Tuesday is crime night! Hooray. I like watching csi and criminal minds.. I also like bones but they’ve stopped showing that

2008-10-07T22:09:00.001+08:00

bohol (4th to 5th june)

2008-10-05T15:27:00.004+08:00

After a squishy, bum paining sort of a bus journey from malapascua back into cebu, we were appeased by a very pleasant overnight ferry ride to bohol.

We liked the bunkers and thought the whole affair very quaint and titanic-y. Except the sinking part, we hoped.

On reaching bohol, we found ourselves accommodation at Everglory Lodge before hiring a tricycle for a full day’s tour of the attractions..

Our first stop was the friendship monument.. I don’t really know who is befriending whom.

Then we scootered over to the Church of the Immaculate Conception

I’m not Roman Catholic but you don’t have to be to appreciate the grandness of their history; primeval churches that instill a sense of awe and reverence. And sitting on the pews amidst the rich architecture, capped by the murals of the high ceilings, there is quiescence and calm.

Until the opportunity arose for taking unwed pregnancy confession box photos.. haha we stuffed up a ?jacket; i think it was.

Our tour subsequently took a bizarre turn when we were brought to see the largest python in captivity. More enthralling than the creature’s thick coils was its caretaker. (S)he was absolutely gawk-worthy; descriptive powers desert me. forget the python, I would have paid the 5 pesos just to watch her/his song and dance routine. and hey, you can watch it too on youtube! if you're feeling unkind towards your eyes..

Next up, to our thrilled delight, our tricycle driver took us to see the famed tarsier; Bohol’s much celebrated extremely wide-eyed mascot. At all the souvenir shops we passed by, it was pure tarsier overkill. i spent very long choosing which tarsier magnet to get and which t-shirt wearing tarsier boasted the most well-printed 'i love bohol' words.

It’s cute, albeit in a rather freakish way. Lonely planet calls it the product of an ill-advised one night stand between ET and a gremlin. hahaha.

Its disproportionately large saucer eyes are mildly unsettling and it can rotate its head almost 360 degrees.
hahaha this one looks very evil.

Lunch was taken on board a floating restaurant and included a river cruise, which is just the kind of charmingly artificial touristy thing that one is obliged to go along with. I enjoyed it! Accompanying the buffet spread was a singer belting out country tunes as we cruised cheerily down the brown river waters. My favourite, I have to admit, is country road! Haha it’s so dinky and sing-alongable.

Along the banks, the local children swung from tree vines to somersault freely, splashing into the river in wild abandon.

I like this series of photos we took with the standee. We were laughing moronically and trying to look as tarsier-ish as possible; much to the annoyance of our tricycle driver who had to wait for us.

After lunch we continued on to a rickety bamboo bridge..

..through the man-made forest, they call it that because the trees were deliberately planted there by well, man. The air was cool and clean, the trees lined tall and straight in rows flanking the road.

Our final stop was also our most anticipated one.
The chocolate hills are a peculiar spectacle of mounds and mounds of round-top knolls scattered in little heaps across the plain. We climbed an eternal flight of stairs (its like, the satellite carpark times ten!) to be rewarded by that curious display.

And it was a perfect stage set to take corny posed photos.. which, for some reason, i am not in possession of. el...

Day was fleeting and our driver was eager to head down before the way got too dark. In the coolness of evening we rode past the silhouetted hills and waterlogged padi fields that mirrored the sunset; so many instances during this trip have we had a glimpse of such splendor untold.

Oh Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder,
consider all the worlds thy hands have made

We killed a cockroach that night in our room. It didn’t stand a chance! It was quite funny rather. The moment we spied its ghastly brown body, after the requisite shriek of disgust, we declared war and sought to put an end to its repulsive existence. From both ends of the bed, with ardent avowals of how much we detested cockroaches, we clubbed the creature to death using empty plastic bottles. But after our, somewhat psychotic, frenzy, the poor crushed body looked a little sad lying there underneath our bed. Maybe cockroaches have families to go home to. Oh that is disturbing. I shudder to think that i could feel sorry for it. But I feel sorry for a lot of things, like bumped fruit that nobody wants to buy.. and snails. oh, i am so weird.

Well. Anyhows, that was the first of many cockroaches to come our way..

The next day, we were regretful to have to leave Bohol. Reluctantly, tiredly, we packed up yet again.. up and off to dumaguete!

2008-09-21T23:50:00.000+08:00

Ohgosh. I am superly depressed, and my unsympathetic lola is refusing to let me hug her.
my parents have gone to the airport to pick my brother.. he went to china! I hope he didn’t drink any milk and I hope he brought me back some Olympic mascot dolls. I wanted a jade bangle but I think that’s perhaps too much to ask. Haha. oh I’d like a holiday too.. some cheer needed.

Life has been a miserable shuttling from hospital to home. I try not to go gallivanting around after the day’s end; I head straight home to hit the books! But it really feels like I’m hitting a brick wall instead; my studying doesn’t seem to be very fruitful and I just end up feeling very isolated and forlorn. 25 weeks sounds scarily short but, truth be told, it’s going to be an excruciatingly long half a year.

2008-09-15T23:30:00.001+08:00

2008-09-13T01:29:00.000+08:00

all the very best, babe! love you much.

2008-09-06T00:40:00.000+08:00

my favourite chinese calender event is mid-autumn festival..
i love mooncakes and i like wandering through the sampling fairs and sampling myself into moon facie-dom.

for my birthday next year i’d like a giant snowskin mooncake birthday cake! and if its belated enough i’d like a lantern festival birthday celebration. oh that is assuming i’d get to celebrate it at all.

this year i wasn’t feeling enormously celebratory either. anyhows, after my sip day, i had a sun with moon dinner and cedele sea salt caramel ice cream and nydc boo chocolate cake. yummy fatty :)
thank you for all who called, smsed, facebooked their well wishes; thank you also to my friends for their generosity. oh.. so formal haha. well.

and because Singapore is born in august and we’re born in august too, we got to go up the flyer for free.. which is the sort of excursion-ish thing that i am a little sheepish to be so excited about.

2008-08-17T18:49:00.009+08:00

some weekends ago, well many actually, before sip unapologetically demanded of me my energy, time and social life, we visited the museum’s night festival.. there was the batiked david, a man in a little house who played a toy piano and served me tea; with the thronging crowd, we wandered through the exhibits; outside, we stood in bedazzled awe as the museum’s façade became a blank canvas for an extravagant installation of lights.. each transformation stunning and magical.

the lights would play through the week; and the next weekend, indeed it was as spectacular as ever, if not more.

2008-07-25T13:22:00.000+08:00

Every step is getting brighter
As the golden stairs I climb;
Every burden’s getting lighter,
Every cloud is silver-lined.
There the sun is always shining,
There no tear will dim the eye,
At the ending of a rainbow,
Where the mountains touch the sky.

Many things about tomorrow
I don’t seem to understand.
But I know who holds tomorrow,
And I know who holds my hand

2008-07-21T15:52:00.000+08:00

So here I am at day one of my two week hope-that-i-will-study break, with a very black face. Charcoal masked! Haha. I’d meant to be out running errands but the drizzling comfort of rain has induced a perfect inertia (and some verbosity apparently). Lola is sitting by the window gazing out and looking as pensive as a cat can.

Well.. the past month has initiated a gradual transition into the fifth year; spooning out the bitterness in small measured doses. These early postings have not been too hideous, save the massacre of one Friday’s test. I really don’t fancy derm; it makes me feel very itchy. But it was a forgivable posting, solely for the wonderful stock of samples all ripe and ready for the picking! Haha
And this photo. Which I think is funny.

I’ve been enjoying the liberty of pandering to other pursuits. (like blogging compulsively about the Philippines haha. Still a couple more islands to go but nary a hope that they’d be done before sip)
Some days I’d swim, some days a little yoga, some days a movie.. or two, some nights suppering out.
After school now and again, if it had spared me enough energy, I’d catch a bus or train and try to go shopping. But so far, I’m experiencing an unusually dry spell and haven’t managed to buy anything.
On other days, I fight the losing battle of packing my room. Some battles you are just not fated to win.
I’ve spent most of the weekends in the sun; sentosa, swimming, despite a dermato influenced paranoia.

Some Saturdays ago, I re-visited my primary and secondary schools.. we haven’t had the pleasantest of relationships haha, but i had purchased the obligate funfair ticket from my Sunday school student and I supposed there wasn’t any harm going down for a look see. Hmm.. actually I think there was some harm. To my skin! Boohoo I don’t really like being so chao tar.

I had fun!

Boracay (7th to 12th june)

2008-07-17T23:00:00.002+08:00

From dumaguete, in our apo island t-shirts and apo island dirt, we took a concentration camp styled overnight ferry into cebu.

The ferry reached in the early morning but we lulled around on the clammy plasticy mattresses because, really, we had no place to go.

At SM city mall, the travelers’ lounge was a godsend. Released from the ball and chain of our baggage, we could run errands and lunch unimpeded.

Our flight was via Asian Spirit. Char and el told me a joke the locals say about their carriers: If you fly Asian Spirit you end up being one. If you fly Cebu Pacific, you leave cebu to end up in the pacific ocean. Haha!

Jokes aside, we reached Boracay in human form and were just terribly grateful to be there. Boracay was hotwater showers and electricity, Boracay was airconditioned rooms and cable tv. Boracay was spring matttesses, soft pillows and the luxury of actually unpacking.

At the Boracay Peninsula, we were smack in the beachfront action of station 2.

The days passed in a blur of beached out bliss.
We’d wake late, only to slip seamlessly from the dreams of our sleep to the one of our waking hours: Walking barefoot down the beach path, dozing, lazing, on lounge chairs in the cool shade of umbrellas, to look out idly at a sun soaked scene of sandcastles, palm trees and the ridiculous antics of china tourists. The sea is sapphire and impossibly clear, cotton candy clouds streak the sky above. Along the horizon where the two blues meet, sail boats drift breezily..

We also shopped some, and their offerings were none too shabby.. although, come to think of it, i didn't buy much.
i tried to fight that familiar holiday impulse spending phenomenon.. too often have i returned from trips only to turn a critical eye on my purchases and wonder what possessed me to buy them.. but alas! today the converse is true :( i look at the measely few things i've bought and wonder what possessed me to not buy more.
damned if i do, damned if i don't.
well at least i didn't buy these! haha

Come late afternoon, our rumbling tummies would initiate the delightful dilemma of what we shall be having for lunch.. wandering inland among a dizzying labyrinth of food glorious (junk) food, the choice is almost impossible to make. The first day, I think, we lunched on the oily crispy goodness of fish and chips..

For the rest of our stay, we developed a rather predictable craving. We’d typically end up having a permutation of hotdogs and crepe, hotdogs and ice cream, burgers and crepe, burgers and ice cream, burgers and hotdog.. or everything in rapid succession! Yums! and perhaps some andoks because el must have her chicken haha.
We became such regulars that the cashiers (and cash registers too, I’m certain) would chime a chirpy “see you tomorrow!” And when tomorrow did come, indeed there we’d turn up at the usual times with gluttonous smiles plastered all over our greedy faces. It was quite disturbing.

Well apart from wholeheartedly giving ourselves over to flab and fat, we also enjoyed other activities like horse riding, a midnight massage, sunset sailing and deep diving at yapak.

And each day, the descent of dusk painted brilliant sunsets across the expanse of sky..

With night’s arrival, the scene shifted subtly as Boracay fulfilled her role as party central of the Philippines. In the clubs, djs spun, the ultraviolet lights and epileptic inducing strobes came on; live bands played in almost every restaurant and bar.

Red horse is beer at almost 10 percent alcohol content.

I’ve probably said this a million times over, much to the chagrin of char and el, but the Hobbit House is my favouritest place on (middle)earth! The waiters are the cutest, literally, and the band is purely amazing. I love the place; I think rainbows and magic beam from it haha. I absolutely adore the hobbits.

This is the musician whom we think looks like a hobbit gone wrong (read: Gollum)
Ohno now I feel very horrid for saying that! He’s friendly and I do like him. His voice is like warm milk with honey; soothing like a comforting massage. Accompanied by his godson who’s like, some guitar god, they played a fantastic selection of some of my favourite songs! A medley of U2, the Eagles, Jack Johnson..

Boracay is full of great music! On the first day when we channel surfed to MTV, they had R.E.M. playing live.. Losing my religion, imitation of life. We knew we had come to the right place haha.

Char and her chinabags left on a Wednesday whilst el and I tarried another day. We shifted out of boracay peninsula and onto the streets in an effort to cut expenses. (beach front is expensive, but beach beach is free!) Haha I kid. We found us an inland place that was pretty bang for our buck.

With the wet season nigh, the droves of tourists had dwindled to a trickle. I felt a little left behind. Where did everybody go? Overnight, the streets seemed so lonely.

But all’s well that ends well. For dinner we had fresh oysters served with reggae music at a beachfront restaurant.
(erm.. photo coming soon! haha)

and afterward we spent our last night at (where else?) the Hobbit House.
(For most of the day, I’d been having a faraway look and would tell el in an entirely pesky manner, how fervently I wanted, needed to go to the Hobbit House. Hahaha. El was very exasperated.)
We spent a dash of our last morning there too.

Ahh.. I shall always think of Boracay with fondness. When I am miserably mugging, when I’m plodding through the wards, a white coated pariah in abject depression.. Ohwell. There’ll always be Boracay.

Busuanga, Palawan (12th to 18th june)

2008-07-06T23:18:00.017+08:00

From boracay we flew in on a twin-propellered plane, onto a dirt track of a landing strip, to be greeted by a shack of an airport and a three storeyed stump of a control tower. Driving the nails into the coffin was a rusted plane wreck left wretched and abandoned on the green nearby. No kidding.

Then we waited like stuffy sardines in a jeepney for close to an hour, for the last plane to take off so that the staff could shut down the airport and join the only ride into town. Eventually, the plane spluttered off and the staff clambered up all sides of the jeepney ala zombies from resident evil.

Being devout lonely planet recommendation abiders, we checked into seadive resort.
They have an on-site recompression chamber and that is just very reassuring. They also sell little wreck stickers to stick in your divelog. I must admit, I appreciated those almost as much as the recompression chamber.

Coron Town of Busuanga island would be our jump off to dive the wrecks of Coron Bay and the unique sites of Coron Island.. Now for the longest time, I was hopelessly confused about the names and islands and where is where and what is what. There is Coron Town, Coron Bay and Coron Island. Coron Town is in Busuanga Island. Coron Island and Busuanga Island are part of the Calamian group of islands. Coron Bay is not an island, it is…a bay. They are all in Palawan province, that I am certain. But Palawan province is different from Palawan Island.
I think I have just befuddled myself all over again.

Anyway, our itinerary for Busuanga, or Coron, or whachamightcallit, was to dive dive dive; the wrecks, the lakes, the caves. Well, as we would come to realize, there really wasn’t much else to do. At all. Except using the free wifi.. and talking to interesting people with stories to tell. And hike, which I don’t do. Oh and one of the nights we went to a hot spring..

A little bit on the wrecks’ historical background..
During the Second World War, heavy air strikes against their ships anchored in Manila Bay prompted the Japanese to relocate their remaining navy to safer harbors. Coron Bay was thus selected to be one of these secure anchorages.
By 23rd September 1944, many Japanese ships had arrived in Busuanga and were camouflaged as islands. (don’t ask me, I don’t know how; possibly involving like, a lot of soil. Or maybe they disguised them as chocolate hills! Hahaha.) But U.S. radar detected something amiss: the islands appeared to be moving. So on the 24th of September, America conducted a surprise aerial attack on the Japanese fleet at Coron Bay. Fighter planes and dive bombers rained gunfire down, shelling the fleet mercilessly. The assault lasted barely 15 minutes but left behind a scene of devastation and carnage: sinking ships, ships ablaze. In all, about 24 ships had been sunk.

60 years on, the site has become one of the Philippines’ best wreck diving spots.

On our first day out diving, we went to the Atkitsushima, the Okikawa Maru and the Lusong gunboat.

The Akitsushima is the only warship of the fleet. It was armed with anti aircraft guns and carried a seaplane. Hit near the stern, she sank immediately and was almost torn into two. She lies on her port side. The crane is still intact and rests on the bottom. We penetrated into the engine room and at many times it was rather a tight squeeze maneuvering small spaces. I would inadvertently fin el’s face and fred would inadvertently fin mine. Because it was very dark we tended to stick close to each other’s behinds.

The next site was the Okikawa Maru (formerly thought to be the Taei Maru. Owing to the Japanese’s reluctance in acknowledging their role in the Second World War, it is difficult to verify the real names of the ships found).
The Okikawa Maru is the largest of the Coron wrecks. An oil tanker, she was alleged to have burned for 20 days, lighting up the whole of Coron, before finally succumbing to her watery fate.
We penetrated via the propeller shaft into the engine room. After emerging and swimming briefly along the deck, we went vertically back down into the darkness through a bomb shell hole. There were schools of snappers, huge batfish, and resident lobsters living in the nooks and crannies of crumpled metal.

Upon surfacing, it was time for lunch! Squid rings, chilli crab and vegetable curry cooked onboard by the captain whilst we were diving; ice-chilled bottles of sprite and coke.

Eat, sleep, dive. Sometimes life does allow you respite from all its crap.

The third dive took us to the Lusong gunboat. It was a simple, shallow dive which was just right for our postprandial state of nua-ness. Nothing much remains of the boat, save a rather skeletonish frame. The nearby reef however, was beautiful. We saw big bumphead parrotfish that really looked like they’d bumped their heads. Haha.

I was very pleased with the dives! It really is something. Descending into the depths along the line, the commanding presence of the ship looms into view: a monstrous hulk of ancient metal. They’re huge and you are never able to see the whole ship all at once.

After dinner we took a tricycle ride to the Maquinit hotspring..

The next day, the resort bustled with people. A large group of divers had come from manila and we joined them for the day’s dives at the Kogyo and Olympia Maru. Both are beautiful wreck dive sites. Not that the previous ones weren’t haha and I don’t know what it is, but there’s something fascinatingly different about these ones. Maybe being freighters they offered opportunity for swims through their large cavernous holds; and you could see the imposing framework still intact, swathed by corals and awash with fishes.

The Kogyo Maru was a freighter carrying construction material. Now she rests at depths of 30 plus meters, lying on her starboard side. In the second hold we saw an incline of cement bags and in your mind’s eye you could almost see them tumbling as the ship sank. There was also a small bulldozer.

The Olympia Maru sits upright. oh wait. the picture shows that she doesn't. ermm.. i don't know. (random thought: now every time i say i don't know, i think of my dear hobbits haha) Anyway, we swam inbetween the two large boilers, through each of the holds. This is a very pretty wreck; it really was a crying shame that we both don’t own underwater casing for our cameras.

On sunday, we took a rest from diving. We also nearly got ourselves evicted. But Raffy, one of the resort staff, learned of our plight and let us have his room. Such kindness!
And us, we wasted no time in strewing our clutter about, making ourselves too much at home.

It was a hot languid day spent. El tried riding a motorbike, and I took a walk about the town, confirming my suspicions that there really isn’t anything to do here but dive haha.

And so with Monday’s (already?) morning, we went back out to sea.
the temptations of boracay forever on my hips.

Our first dive was at the Underwater Cathedral. From the open ocean, we swam into a rock crevice to enter a cave..
This is the dreadful misrepresentation I drew in my dive log and its almost sacrilegious. it does the amazing place an injustice!
From the hole left by the collapsed tree, sunlight streams through and you can see the thick foliage of the forest above. Bats roost in the high ceilings, bamboo poles are propped along the walls to assist the natives in collecting birds’ nests. Our voices echoed through the hollow..

lunch! once again, boat cooked and scrumptious.

The boat took us next to Barracuda lake.
We had to scale over jagged knife edged walls of limestone to get to the lake. Needless to say, it was most improbable that I’d survive the climb laden with my bcd and tank; still, I must boast that I managed alright with two unwieldy pairs of fins dangling from my wrists! And carrying his tank plus mine, our divemaster, Jaime, disappeared over the wall in a split second. I started to become very suspicious that he might not be human.

Then we put on our gear in shallow water to dive into the lake’s strange abruptness of thermoclines and haloclines. The first four meters is fresh water with temperatures of about 20 degree Celsius. For the next fourteen meters, the salt water runs warm at 28 degrees. The last 20 meters or so registered 37.5 degrees on the dive computer. You could literally stick your hand into cold water while the rest of your body remained in hot water. The bottom composition was soft mucky mud.
Jaime stuck his head in the mud and then he took off his fins to trudge around. It was very entertaining. He made our initials with the ubiquitous pointy little shells; we all held hands and descended into the steamy salty depths of zero visibility.

el lent me her berms so i wouldn't self combust in a wetsuit. thanks, babe!

Following a bit of a shore rest, we set off for our night dive at Arnie’s point.

The sun sank his golden head into the horizon, taking with him the light of day, heralding the fall of night. I was nervous. Because, well, it was really dark. And scary.

But it was an extraordinary experience. With nothing to illuminate but the meager beam from our torch, we giant strided ourselves into a vast blackness of sea.

We saw little seahorses, yellow and brown and blue, sleeping sweetly, their tails curled around coral branches. Jaime picked one up gently and put him in our palms. Also, the rare (or so we’ve been told) Mandarin fish, a large squid which darted around changing colors, trying to evade the spotlight and throw us off his trail. And cuttlefish too.
Jaime prodded a sleeping pufferfish. The poor creature bloated up into a spikey ball of angst, flanked by desperately flapping little fins. We bobbed the sorry thing about with our torches. No touchy. It was hilarious and I discovered that you could laugh through the regulator.

Tuesday was the day we intended to leave coron for el nido. What we hadn’t counted on, however, was the fickleness of the ferry schedule.
The afternoon crawled along lethargically; I was a little cranky about our stranded state and not being able to dive the Irako.

Dinner at Bistro Coron was a saving grace. Lonely planet had only good things to say about this place and we do agree! Their coq au vin was a dream on a plate. The meat is tender and moist; it simply slides off the bone. You can savor the distinctive taste of wine in the mushroom stew.

That night, I got nibbled on by a rat.
We had caught on to the notion that we might, unwittingly, have been sharing raffy’s room with the rascally rodents when we woke some mornings ago to find slivers and scraps of peanut kisses wrapper lying on the floor. Expectedly, the rest of the packet had vanished. We joked that perhaps the rats were from bohol and they missed the taste of peanut kisses.
The next night, I caught the furry culprits in action! I saw a little brown rat dragging the miserable remains of an apple core. Realizing its cover was blown, the tiny paws dropped the core and it scampered off, leaving me standing there with my mouth hanging foolishly open.

And so on the last night, the rat nibbled me. It was most peculiar. Roused from my sleep, I stared in bleary disbelief at the brown thing sampling my arm. Stupid creature. Do I look like an apple core? Do I look like freaking peanut kisses?! But it wasn’t painful or anything like that, and a small part of me thought the rat was quite cute hahaha. Then I was worried that I might have gotten Black Death or some other ratty disease.

Well, with Wednesday bringing our extended stay to its end, I felt a confliction of relief and reluctance.

We bid goodbye to the friends we’d made, goodbye to raffy and thank you so much for the room (we didn’t tell him there were rats; haha and we cannot yet exclude the possibility that perhaps our filth attracted the rats). Goodbye to our divemasters, goodbye to jackie’s videok.

Hello to another scary seair flight.

Apo Island, Negros Oriental (5th to 6th june)

2008-06-30T02:30:00.004+08:00

The fastferry from Bohol docked in the early morning at dumaguete.
After some headless chicken-like running about, with nary a moment to gather our wits, we were off to the pier to catch the last boat bound for apo. Suspecting nothing, we loaded up our bagpacks and (char’s!) china bags onto a little banca which looked disconcertingly unseaworthy. We presumed it was the transfer boat. Hah! Our countenances fell, just as our jaws did, when it came to our mortified knowledge that this wasn’t the transfer boat, this was the boat.
And you know you’re in for a rough ride when the locals scramble for the middle row and start putting on raincoats; the boatman points to the bag you’re desperately clutching and says, “this one, can get wet?”

It lasted half an hour. We got the worst seats in the house and by the end of it, I looked like I showered and forgot to towel off.

That was the first chapter in Apo’s introduction to rough traveling.
Electricity here runs for all of 3 hours each day. There aren’t shower heads; we bathed using bucketed water, which incidentally had some wormy looking wrigglies floating about in. My poor legs became a buffet spread for legions of sand flies to feast on. There was a cockroach near my bagpack, there was a cockroach in my bagpack, and, just so I shall forever be haunted by their revolting presence, there was one planted in my wetsuit as well. But by some miracle, I managed to stoically face the horrors. (okay, maybe a little less stoically than I would have myself remember haha)

We stayed at lonely planet’s recommendation of liberty lodge.

It rained that night. And through the thin walls you could hear the furious cascading torrent of raindrops; lying there in the pitch blackness, the sounds enveloped you and it seemed like everything else melted away. There was nothing but the rain.

The next morning felt crisp and fresh, almost as if the rain had scrubbed the scenery, giving it sheen and sparkle. It was lovely weather and I had a good feeling about the day’s dives.

Dexil of Paul’s Diving was our divemaster.

Our first dive was out from rock east to the marine sanctuary. The marine sanctuary is one of Philippines’ most successful marine reserves. Silliman University, in a bid to reverse the damage wrought by dynamite fishing, spearheaded the initiative, enlisting the help of the local community to repopulate the reef with corals and fishes.

And certainly, their efforts have yielded amazing results. The reef was carpeted in a spread of coral, a canvas of color unfurled, stretching further than the eye can see. Schools and schools of fish swam idyllically in the clearest blue, through fingers of anemone and branches of coral, a veritable smorgasbord of color, pattern and hue. Never have I beheld such beauty of nature. I was feeling very emotive and moved and would have cried. But then I’d have to clear my mask and I don’t like having to do that. Haha.

Our second dive was at The Chapel which was just off the coast. The richness of the reef paralleled the first. We saw a turtle on this dive. Dexil struck his tank and gave the signal for turtle. I was so excited I must have gulped down half my air.
The creature peered from a tuft of coral and seemed to be stuck. We watched, fascinated, as it squirmed and rocked itself from side to side. Its beaked face with clear black eyes, its shell, its flippers; all perfectly made and impeccable in every detail. Then it broke free and glided through the waters, kindly tolerating as I swam beside it for a little of the way.

An hour later, I saw a tanned pair of legs kicking in shallow waters and a child’s face dipped in to grin at us. I freaked out: how come got human instead of fish?! Only to soon understand that, unbeknownst to me, our divemaster had planned for us to surface on shore.

For the third dive, Dexil deemed us fit to face the currents of Cogon through to Mamsa Point for some big fish action. We dropped anchor at Cogon and would drift to Mamsa. So we sat, cupped in the invisible hands of the current; it carrying us along, weightlessly, effortlessly. Like being on an underwater travellator, we floated past scene after spectacular scene of beautiful coral and intricately painted fish. There was a wall of pink coral in every shade, every tone of the color. As if God had wanted to create a special marine bedroom for the female of the specie.
Then all at once we were encircled by hundreds of jackfish, a tunneling body of glistening scales and googley eyes, silver and black pairs of male and female, each a forearm’s length and just about that distance away from us. It was incredible, I scarcely breathed.

Apo island showed me exactly why I learnt to dive.

Too quickly though we had completed our dives and were out of the ocean and onto shore. It was a mad rush to “shower”, pack up and hop onto the banca back to dumaguete.

From the pier, we hauled our baggage and sorry soggy selves to the main road and onto a jeepney.

Reaching the town, we staked out Shakey’s for its comfort of mega meatballs and live music. (and also free tissue paper to wrap our shells in). Till night fell and it was time, once more, to get onboard another overnight ferry, this time bound for cebu.

2008-06-15T18:50:00.004+08:00

hello hello from the philippines! free wifi is love..

el is off hiking somewhere (i can't because i decided to wear a skirt today hahaha) so i have her laptop all to myself!
well we've been to cebu, malapascua, bohol, apo island, dumaguete, boracay and here we are now at coron bay, palawan.

oh its been a dream.. words fail me, for once haha. i got advanced certified at malapascua, held a tarsier and shat chocolate hills at bohol, staked out shakey's at dumaguete, dived with turtles and bathed with wormy water at apo island, boracay was bliss like i'd never known. here at coron, the fascinating thing about diving the wrecks is being able to visit that little part of history underwater..

alright. more updates when i get back. or not. haha.

2008-05-28T21:16:00.022+08:00

and this, possibly, could be the bravest thing i’ve done for myself.

my relationship with physical activity has always been acrimonious. i have the stamina of an eighty year old, i can’t run to save my life and i’m plagued by some serious psychomotor issues.

having sampled a fair share of outdoorsy, perspiration-drawing doings; truth be told, they look a lot more appealing as i watch other people at it. it isn’t fun anymore when i suck. it is not fun getting boinked by balls, it is not fun being towed headlong by a rope, it is not fun getting smacked about by a surfboard. sigh.

well. so i was rather nervy about this latest endeavor.

after watching the instructional dvd i developed a peculiar dislike for kelp. (in order of revulsion: zombies, cockroaches, kelp. they’re all nasty in a similarly disgusting way!)
and after the pool sessions, i was convinced i would meet my watery end in dayang. haha

but as things would go, my phobias and fears turned out (largely) unfounded. given, mask removal still was nightmarish, i habitually crashed into corals and finned myself, inadvertently, to the surface, i realized that 20 kg is a hell lot of kg and i need boathands to haul me up onto deck, i also had to apologise on land for my misdeeds underwater: i’m sorry i finned your face, i’m sorry i yanked your snorkel, i’m sorry my tank almost broke your nose.

that said, i think i could really like diving!
i made some friends during the trip. and even better than some friends, is one friend with underwater camera casing! haha :)

my instructor. (he certainly had his work cut out for him haha)

well, next i would like to go to outerspace.

2008-05-11T01:20:00.001+08:00

and as the skies flexed their might, the roaring thunders reverberating, lightning bathing the room in electric hues, it takes a thunderstorm to show up unbraveness. i curled into a cramp-inducing ball and was terribly terrified haha. i wanted to make a dash to my parents’ room and crawl into their bed but really i was too scared to move. its ridiculous and unbelievably embarrassing.
the storm raged on in such livid, irate fury that i started to suspect that it wasn’t a natural element kind of storm. i thought perhaps we had suddenly gone to war with our northern neighbour and nobody told me.
eventually though, i pried my limbs loose from their fear-stiffened foetal position to look for lola in case she was scared too.

and the moral of this directionless post of mine is that.. erm is that thunderstorms are scary.

2008-05-02T23:41:00.001+08:00

the weather is too cruel. but we spent the late afternoon splashing and sliding about on inflatable rings, bobbing upon man made waves as the sun beamed a rainbow through cascading showers. it was all so shiny and happy, there ought to have been carnival music piped over the speakers.

oh! it's once again time for travel and i'm wanting a beachy, live-in-your-bikini, cold-beer-in-hand sort of wonderfully languid holiday..
well here are some pictures from bali, courtesy of various cameras.. i know its immensely belated but i’m in the mood tonight. humor me.

2008-04-13T02:27:00.002+08:00

thank god for the weekend!
this week has been pleasantly satiating.

monday kickstarted my 3rd elective (time flies!) and i am very thrilled to experience the wonderfulness of ttsh and the company of 2 good friends..
on tuesday i decided to fight my procrastinating ways and get down to running some errands. my first errand was to eat j. co donuts haha.
wednesday released us early from the hospital for a lunch of pizza, chicken wings and fried scallops. at siwei’s house we aborted our presentation preparation plans in favour of vuitton chasing, saboteur and a bake out!

thursday.. what did i do on thursday? nothing. except ask my dad for money. i hate having to ask for money. and i keep needing money.
on friday i was glad it was friday. we shopped at square2 haha. then with different company i re-attempted baking chewy chocolate chip cookies. i must boast that they, mostly, turned out pretty alright! i have eaten 5 so far and have not died. yay. it hasn’t been 24 hours but i’m optimistic.

2008-04-09T23:21:00.001+08:00

and when life has dealt a cruel hand, at that cumulative point of a journey burdened with sorrow and pain, the pillowman comes to offer tragic redemption.

it was intriguing, entertaining and, thoroughly disturbing.

2008-04-03T21:31:00.002+08:00

But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.
Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

Matthew 6:33-34

2008-03-31T22:53:00.001+08:00

there are two creatures i am most afraid of: cockroaches and zombies. they’re nasty.
for cockroaches there’s always shieldtox and rolled up newspaper.. and against zombies, i’ve recently discovered, there are these:

i can sleep easy tonight.

2008-03-27T23:45:00.000+08:00

my dad is in the philippines and my bro is in thailand/myanmar. so its just us girls left: my mum, myself and lola. haha. we share the bed..

2008-03-26T22:56:00.001+08:00

these days have vexed and taxed me; and at the end of the particularly drawn out ones, with the rain relentless, insistent on impeding my way to rest and deliverance hurhur, i’d really just like to give in, give up and cry with the clouds above.
or, i could have a donut.

yesterday, i thought of j. co donuts the whole day. all would have been set right with just one warm ring of dough.. and a latte, better yet.
but it was late and the rain poured in a dreadful, depressing manner, we had to change location.
shielding against the watery assault with my labcoat, i made an apparition of myself dashing to holland v’s marmalade pantry.

desserts against depression.

then crystal jade for congee.. oh, comfort food and comfort friends make the world a bearable place to be in haha.

2008-03-23T15:11:00.000+08:00

i miss waiyuk!

2008-03-22T16:14:00.004+08:00

i cant decide which i like better..

so if you're lonely, why d'you say you're not lonely?

2008-03-10T23:50:00.002+08:00

i miss kk.

and though i think i’ve come to be quite so independent, i also miss having company. today i did a sumiko tan and ate lunch alone. i warned jenheng not to reply my sms like her friend did. i’d have bawled into my kaya toast and it would be soggy and disgusting. hahaha.
then i wandered into the pharmacy to steal...a hug from a carebear. haha gotcha!

ah well. let me hark back to gladder days when my electives were an almost seamless continuation of the holidays. when, subject to our caprice, we could take off to anywhere from novena to bugis and even the ulu i-swear-mas-selamat-is-hiding-here sort of places..

2008-03-06T23:42:00.009+08:00

one weekend later than originally proposed, we met for a day excursion to the museum to see the greek masterpieces.
we also chanced upon a surprise sighting of our pm! and so we felt rather safe and protected; i’m sure they made sure there wasn’t a mas selamat limping about the pillars.

it isn’t an exhaustive, extensive collection, just right for a couple of hours’ perusal. wandering among the still, silent statues, images and figures cast in stone, vestiges of antiquity.

and with these ones in particular, socrates and plato, it was quite something for me to come close, to stand just there..
if nothing else, my limited and abortive forays into reading philosophy have inculcated a sense of esteem for the teacher and his pupil.

from a kid’s activity guide, it came to my delighted knowledge that there was a little corner to play dress up! haha.

haha!

in our ridiculous getup, with much glee and little shame, we were gathering our skirts and shuffling ungainly about to take a photo with the exhibits. till the security guard, in his starched suited burliness, sternly told us that the costumes were not to be worn out.
and we had the cheek to bargain for just one last photo:

we also popped by the singapore history gallery and the museum shop..

and that wraps up our sunday museum visit. i love our museum!

2008-02-29T23:55:00.000+08:00

i reached kk at 10.30 am. some free breakfast later, we skipped hospital grounds to join others at an 11.15 screening of there will be blood.
the late afternoon saw us at ttsh (jump)queuing for halfpriced starbucks. then after kill-time shopping, my calves and arches were hurting, i ended the day at church
and that was how i leapt the year! haha.

2008-02-25T02:16:00.000+08:00

a pity, the plans that couldn’t come through.
i fell ill during the weekend. it happens; when i get to hanging around all that sniffling and coughing and rasping. and at night when sleep eludes me, i don’t know if it’s the fever or just humidity hanging heavy in the air.

and while i have yet to do anything wildly exciting this electives, it is enough that there’s been time for movies, for books, for going to town on whatever whim i should fancy, and for being reminded that, amidst and despite disappointments, disillusionments, there will always be somewhere to hide, someone to confide. by nature or by habit, i don’t often. but it gives me much comfort to know that, if necessity dictates, these offers would still stand. and for this, i am very grateful.

2008-02-13T23:52:00.000+08:00

we spent the second day of the lunar new year on the crowded little island of sentosa. it thronged and teemed with people; all dressed up and no one to visit? we were baffled.
true, there were angmohs and indians and malays and blangas and blangas.. and blangas, excusably. (i am not racist, there really were many of them. many.) but, unsettlingly perhaps, there was a definite chinese preponderance; in all their crimson new year finery.
where, pray tell, did all these people come from? oh well, after i put a lid on my bewildered stupefaction, we started to come around to enjoying ourselves. :)

and possibly the sweetest!
who wouldnt like someone to grow old with.. and take cute old persons photos with cheesy double-heart erm.. flower thingies.

2008-02-07T02:28:00.000+08:00

i havent posted proper since patho released its death grip.
but free from the throttle, with the pink returned to my face and the glaze melted from my eyes haha, these halcyon days have been blithe; prompting recurrent thoughts of incredulity: no tests, no exams, for four glorious months. somebody must love us.
but i do wish my electives could get sorted out, i wish the forms would sign themselves, i wish ucla would stop being a bother, i wish the pound wasn’t so strong.

anyways, from bali i returned to shopping, stayovers and suppers, and oh i am more pleased than punch. i’ve been to borders at orchard and parkway; i’m so geeky excited about all i plan to read.
i have books, dvds; i have freshly painted raven red nails. i have lola asleep on the whirlwind mess of my bed.
life is worth smiling for.

gong xi fa cai! enjoy the year of the ratty rat rat!

2008-02-05T00:48:00.000+08:00

a lovestruck romeo sings a streetsuss seranade
laying everybody low with a lovesong that he made
finds a convenient streetlight, steps out of the shade
says something like, you and me, babe, how about it?

juliet says, hey its romeo, you nearly gimme a heart attack
he’s underneath the window; she’s saying, hey la my boyfriend’s back
you shouldn’t come around here, singing up people like that
anyway, what you gonna do about it?

juliet, the dice was loaded from the start
and i bet, and you exploded in my heart
and i forget, i forget the movie song
when you gonna realize, it was just that the time was wrong, juliet?

come up on different streets; they both were streets of shame
both dirty, both mean. yes, and the dream was just the same
and i dreamed your dream for you, now your dream is real
how can you look at me as if i was just another one of your deals?

you can fall for chains of sliver, you can fall for chains of gold
you can fall for pretty strangers and the promises they hold
you promised me everything; you promised me thick and thin
now you just say, oh, romeo, yeah you know i used to have a scene with him

juliet, when we made love you used to cry
i said i love you like the stars above, i’ll love you till i die
there’s a place for us, you know the movie song
when you gonna realize, its just that the time was wrong?

~dire straits

i burned myself a full cd of songs; but it's been stuck on spinning this one.
another that'll be repeated to the death haha

2008-01-21T13:58:00.000+08:00

2008-01-20T23:59:00.000+08:00

i've always wanted to watch this show. oh but why now? gah.

2008-01-18T01:17:00.000+08:00

i’m not afraid of anything in this world
there’s nothing you can throw at me, that i haven’t already heard
i’m just trying to find a decent melody
a song that i can sing in my own company

i never thought you were a fool
but darling, look at you
you gotta stand up straight, carry your own weight
these tears are going nowhere, baby

and if the night runs over
and if the day won’t last
and if your way should falter
along the stony pass
it’s just a moment
this time will pass

2008-01-11T02:56:00.000+08:00

i love this series! very csi-esque, psychothriller.

this is a very bad time to feed an addiction to free online tv. and i hate having no one to burble excitedly to (believe me, i try); nobody shares my enthusiastic fondness for this show. its sad.
oh no i am so strange; its all that patho!

2008-01-04T23:38:00.000+08:00

i have a thing for gingerbread men. i like their baked brown-ness, round hairless heads, stumpy cream-striped limbs and their buttons. and they are gingery yummy! (i sound completely crazed)

i also received an anteater, its name is ants.
erm. some strange logic there. it’s rather akin to calling lola ‘fancy feast’; which might actually be an improvement. haha!

argh. i’m so bored.

2008-01-01T15:33:00.000+08:00

so this is christmas, and what have you done?
another year over, a new one just begun

so this is christmas, i hope you had fun
the near and the dear ones
the old and the young

a very merry christmas and a happy new year
let's hope it's a good one
without any fear

so this is christmas, for weak and for strong
for rich and for poor ones
the road is so long
and so happy christmas, for black and for white
for yellow and red ones
let's stop all the fight

a very merry christmas and a happy new year
let's hope it's a good one
without any fear

so this is christmas, and what have we done?
another year over and a new one just begun
so happy christmas, we hope you had fun
the near and the dear ones
the old and the young

a very merry christmas and a happy new year
let's hope it's a good one
without any fear

2007-12-25T17:31:00.000+08:00

and so i'm offering this simple phrase,
to kids from one to ninety-two
although its been said many times, many ways,
merry christmas to you!

2007-12-23T02:04:00.000+08:00

lynn helped snap this in the nursery. maternal me.

some parts trying, some parts gratifying, most parts rather exhausting
(no, i’m not talking about parenthood. haha)

well. o & g is, thankfully, over. oh what relief! and in a state of irrepressible delight, we made merry into the wee-er hours of the morning, which is later than i could ever study till.
traipsing from sushi tei lunch to national treasure movie to hotpot dinner to dempsey drinks to supper, my energies have always been reserved for such manner of expenditure.

2007-12-15T23:45:00.000+08:00

once there was a tree...and she loved a little boy.

2007-12-13T00:49:00.000+08:00

i’ve been reading the melancholy death of oyster boy and other stories. haha. oh its so tragically, frightfully funny.

2007-12-11T01:44:00.000+08:00

each night proffers quiet solitude; sweet rest from the weary day. cocooned in warm folds, spared the chill of midnight’s gentle wind, may sleep so restore the will to face tomorrow.

goodnight!

2007-11-30T01:52:00.000+08:00

my fuel has been a diet of chocolate, chicken essence and coffee. i am so heaty i feel an imminent eruption of ulcers in my mouth, pimples on my face.. and inches on the waist. boohoo.

today i hauled lola up onto the scale with me and teased the cat for weighing as much as a sack of rice. (s)he reared up and bit me on the thigh! touché.

2007-11-28T23:52:00.001+08:00

smile though your heart is aching
smile even though its breaking
when there are clouds in the sky, you’ll get by
if you smile through your fear and sorrow
smile and maybe tomorrow
you’ll see the sun come shining through for you

light up your face with gladness
hide every trace of sadness
although a tear may be ever so near
that’s the time you must keep on trying
smile; what's the use of crying?

you’ll find that life is still worthwhile,
if you just smile.

2007-11-21T00:42:00.000+08:00

truly scrumptious!

2007-10-30T23:59:00.000+08:00

our october holiday getaway took us to the islands of hongkong (and macau)!
we stayed in a fire hazard of a hostel and from day one it was go go go haha.
we filled tummies with dimsum goodness, trammed up the peak, burst a water pipe, exploded our large intestine, steamboated monster oysters, betrayed our amateurish crab shelling skills, ktv-ed till 5, worked out with the wii, oogled the venetian’s extravagance of replication, suffered the smoke of sands, won some, lost some.
and oh! as glittered streaks of fireworks flung themselves overhead sleeping beauty’s castle, as they sprayed out in starbursts from its walls, it was such a quintessential magical disney moment. i love it so much its disturbing.

a five day affair i wish could've been longer, it was, in any case, a very pleasing trip that merits more than mere photo-vomit.
haha but well, the limits of time allow for little else.

2007-10-18T02:50:00.000+08:00

so ends the bittersweet heartache that was paeds.
for a time after, i’d mostly been moping, lolling about like a beached whale.

but getting a move on, i’ve made concerted efforts to pack as much of a punch into this vague, 2 week pretense of a holiday.

4 scoops later, the swing swung a little lower, the chains creaked a little louder.

one of my favourite indulgences is just heading to borders for no greater purpose other than fulfilling a want to be surrounded by books (geek!)
to run a finger down their spines, to thumb through their pages of paper..

i found an interesting title.

haha. hmm..

2007-10-17T04:00:00.000+08:00

sometime back we caught resident evil. now when i walk past construction sites, i tend to mistake the banglas for zombies and want to hit them over the head with a stick. if i don’t scream in their faces first. i’m really not racist; it’s just that its so.. dark.

2007-09-29T14:46:00.000+08:00

we were on our way to luxy at the relentless insistence of one yuzeng. as our taxi met the red from a traffic light the driver said, wo hao wu liao, lai rang wo wan mao. (i know my han yu pin ying is terribly atrocious)
translation: i feel bored! lets play with cat.
so reaching underneath his seat, he whipped out the afore mentioned animal. witness to such magic, haha i swear my eyes widened to the size of saucers. i promptly grabbed the poor reluctant creature from him.

its name is hei mi. in my halting mandarin i overenthusiastically tried to engage the regretful driver in cat-centered conversation: wo ye you mao! wo de mao jiao lola! with yuzeng throwing me thinly veiled looks of disgust.

he later wondered what it’d be like should the driver have said, wo hao wu liao, lai rang wo wan she.
translation: i am bored! lets play with snake.
hahaha. it still tickles me.

the funny thing about this photo is that the hand holding the bottle isnt mine.

later, we played the sausage dice game and i won us some!

2007-09-26T20:53:00.000+08:00

bearing out a sullen spell of moodiness, last week was one of the harder ones to claw through.

on sunday though, i claimed the weekend’s nap hugging one rotund anodyne and awoke, 4 hours later, happy as a clam. (i don’t know why clams are happy)
redemption had come to me in widely striped breeches and wearing his woolly red hair in braids. haha

the perpetuity of my pathological incapability to grow up always makes me sheepish to confess. and well, its irony hasn’t completely escaped me.

this week up to present has, thankfully, been less hideous. i’ve had 881’s soundtrack playing for two days now. i did like the movie, with its garish costumes and raucous, bizzare camaraderie.

on monday, we caught joshua.

i have also been reading less of sunflower and more of this book..

portraits of soulless sociopathic children, pulverizing the seed of maternal instinct biology has so tried to plant. parenthood isn’t meant for everyone.

2007-09-19T20:20:00.000+08:00

i love my lola.. but today at the petshop i saw the adorablest fld. so i think i would (also) like to have a pug! a small one that never grows big.
i will call it pugly. hahaha

2007-09-14T23:21:00.000+08:00

dysmorphism:

craniosynostosis:

and as we leave kk for the harsher conditions of n u h, oh there are so many things we shall miss; we shall miss the mornings of eggmcmuffins, hotcakes and cappuccinos, we shall miss the happy happy little pony meals of lunch, we shall miss the free food, we shall miss the stuns we pull..

we shall, most painfully of all, miss these..

with relapse comes less shame in our employment of bold and brazen tactics haha. we have upped our game!

2007-09-13T23:21:00.000+08:00

tuesday's downtime at timbre art house..

i'm a sucker for waterfront-anything! haha.