chapped lips are bad.
written: 4:26 p.m. on Friday, Mar. 18, 2005

What I was trying to say was that I consider myself Singaporean Chinese, not Chinese Singaporean. As in, I identify myself as a Chinese first, then a Singaporean. If you place 'Chinese' in front of 'Singaporean', then Chinese becomes an adjective, Singaporean a noun - which was not what I meant.

It's interesting how such subtleties of the language completely escaped me two years ago. I wonder how much more of such things I'm still unaware of, and how long it's going to take before I finally get it...if I finally get it.

I can't stand reading those entries I wrote about the guys that I was with though. Oh, god; how saccharinely disgusting. It gives me a pretty good, solid reason against relationships.

Anyway, I'm off today and yesterday. I lost my lip balm, and since I didn't go out today and yesterday (work saps a lot out of me) and I forgot to buy one on Wednesday, my bottom lip is in an absolute mess now. I have this bad habit of biting dried skin off my lip whenever I don't apply lip balm, and so there's blood everywhere now. It's bad.

And it's become so agonisingly and unbearably hot that I've resorted to turning on the air-conditioning. I haven't turned on the air-con in the afternoon ever since...I don't remember when. Even during the A Level period I did so sporadically, sometimes never at all.

My mom said something today that made me feel a great though subtle sense of loss. We were talking about university (as usual; what else can I talk about nowadays?) and she was telling me that doing Law may not have very good prospects in Singapore, since our system is akin to only the British one; she also added that doing Economics may open more doors for me than Law, but I refuted that by pointing out that NUS' FASS isn't exactly the most renowned faculty ever, and that I concurred with what JoMel said about how going to FASS would be a huge waste of my grades.

This is the part where my mom said the thing that prompted the sense of loss. She said that it is quite a waste that I'd completely missed the application deadline to Cambridge, but then again, she was right all the same: How in the world was I supposed to know? And it's not merely about my not knowing that the deadline was that early, but also the possibility that I wasn't all talk and nothing more either. I mean, my 2003 entries basically said one thing: I was an egotistical idiot who believed that she was a genius but didn't have the grades to prove it. Like hello? Even if I had applied to Cambridge, my projected grades would probably be something like BCCE - which would've garned me an instant rejection.

All I can do now is to sigh in regret and feel slightly thankful that NUS Law is pretty good, although it's still not exactly Harvard Law. Still, I'm pretty confident of getting into NUS Law, if all they're looking for is a good command of English (according to the American professor who spoke at the open house). But that also poses quite a problem in itself: it's too easy, there's no challenge, I won't be fighting like hell to get in, and things that are too easy to me make me lose interest in them very quickly, hence my 'fuck FASS' sentiment yesterday. The only thing that's preventing me from saying the same to Law is the written test/interview component that makes up the selection criteria - which also conveniently means that I'd be ending my stint at StarHub a couple of days early, since the test/interview is on 29 and 30 April.

Sometimes I think I'm too ambitious, that my confidence exceeds my ability, sorry to Simon Cowell for copying him. In the first place, in a country where some schools have like 75% of their students getting 3A's, my grades aren't exactly anything to hoot too loudly about, and yet here I am, griping away ungratefully about not being able to go to Cambridge or any top-notch universities of the world. In the first place, how am I sure that I do have what it takes to survive there, that if I were going, I wouldn't ultimately flunk out? And I know for certain that if I were a random blog surfer reading my own diary, I'd definitely think that I talk too big for someone with extremely limited abilities.

But then again, is it so wrong to want to achieve things that are bigger than what you've got throughout your whole life? Is it so wrong to want to give yourself a chance a shot at the life that you could only admire from a distance and never call your own? In order to get anywhere in life, your reach has to be higher than your grasp, always; and that's all I'm doing, really. I can't be too easily contented, I can't be 100% happy about getting only three A's when there are people getting better grades than me, because when that happens, I'd remain stagnant and middle-middle class forever (not that I give a shit about class consciousness, but that's the easiest way to describe my current standard of living, sad to say).

Thus, I'm not completely happy with NUS, but I guess I'll just deal and hope that Cambridge would accept me as a transfer student next year (hell, I'm not giving up). If it doesn't...I guess I'll just deal.

Am I too ambitious for my own good though? And the only thing in the world that I really, really want to do is to write. I know that I'm going to regret going to Law and hence ditching Lit, but I know, too, that I'm going to regret majoring in Literature in the future. Either way, I lose; but the opportunity cost of doing Law is decidedly lower than majoring in Lit, and hence...yeah. Hence.

Have I ever mentioned before that I am a useless, good-for-nothing and shameless sell-out? Well, I am.

Anyway, enough boring uni talk and let's do random topics talk! Yay!

So my MSN high scores were all erased when my mom deleted my cookies and all in an attempt to rid my laptop of the pesky Spyware nonsense that infected my PC system - which fucking sucks, because my Zuma high score was like, 122000+++ and I had an ultimate trophy!!!!! I hate computer viruses and stupid bloggers who cannot design for shit!

I want to buy Ben Elton's new novel even though I'm currently at Chapter Two of Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations". I love buying new books and leaving them on my shelf for the pages to yellow before I finally get round to reading them, ha ha ha ha ha.

I watched The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen on cable a few weeks back and I must say that it was crap and that the special effects had no semblance to realism at all; it looked like a bloody low-grade computer game, for crying out loud. Stuart Townsend was quite hot but that was it. The plot wasn't exciting, the pacing left much to be desired, and Sean Connery is so way past his prime. It was a waste of time, that movie.

My job has become slightly more tolerable, mainly due to the people that I work with. Even though the bad Chinese and even more appalling English makes me cringe majorly, it's nice to be able to talk to new people.

Okay, I'm referring to only a select few...maybe 3, 4 of them. There are only two guys in my team and surprisingly, I get along better with them than the girls in my team, and most of the girls are JC students. The guys aren't. One of them has just finished NS and was a Poly student, while the other is a year younger than me, is a Secondary 5 student, and is going to Poly. I guess the idiom 'birds of a feather flock together' doesn't always ring true in all aspects of one's life.

Anyway, the Sec. 5 kid reminds me quite a bit of The New Kid in terms of sense of humour. The Sec. 5 kid is really lame! He has this thing for this bald Indian man working in another department on the same level, and whenever he sees that Indian man, he'd be like, "Ahh Shiny Head!" and start to wave his arms around in true fangirl fashion. It's really hilarious and it takes away a lot of the mundaneness of the job. Too bad, though, that he never joins the group for lunch/dinner; he always takes off on his own and goes to Times the Bookshop at Plaza Singapura to do some reading after dining by himself. Kinda weird, but certainly understandable, since I prefer shopping and watching movies by myself than with people anyway.

To be honest, I was very surprised when I found out that he was in the Normal (Acad) stream. I mean...okay, fuck it, I'm extremely narrow-minded and biased but whatever. My impression of all Normal stream kids is that they have bad English, okay? So this Sec. 5 kid actually has pretty good English, and even knows the meaning of 'euphemism', and hence my surprise. He's taken to calling me 'mu lao hu' (female tiger) though. Like what the hell.

I was singing Matchbox Twenty's "Push" last night and hell, I remembered all the lyrics even though I haven't listened to them in ages. Yeah, I just wanted to mention that.

That's all.

before sunrise // before sunset

Previously:
- - Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2017
I'm moving. - Sunday, Jul. 11, 2010
In all honesty - Tuesday, Jul. 06, 2010
What I want for my birthday... - Sunday, Jul. 04, 2010
On Roger's behalf. - Friday, Jul. 02, 2010