totally kick ass thursday.
written: 5:45 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 04, 2005

But then again, diaryland is choked with smack-happy and corny phrases since Andrew the founder/owner/whatever is supposedly a smack-happy and corny dude, so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised.

Fourth day of Law matric week and I left straight after Prof. Beckman's introductory lecture. Props to myself, though, for sticking it out at orientation for so long; going for the activities yesterday was certainly not in my itinery, and the Beach Bash was never something I'd voluntarily go for anyway. Was thinking of crashing the buffet dinner at Sentosa with some OG friends but after watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at Jurong Point with Clarence, the thought of MRT-ing from fucking Boon Lay to bloody Harbour Front finally helped me decide to come home.

And so here I am.

I got my timetable and tutorial groupings and I wonderfully found out that I don't know anyone who's in the same tutorial groups as me. Joy, happiness and love. Rui and Mag are together - so damn lucky that I could puke blood and die. I wish I could change, but most probably I can't, so I shall stop being a spoilt, insecure moron and just force myself to take whatever's thrown my way.

While boarding the bus out of NUS to Buona Vista MRT today two girls boarded and sat behind me. They were talking about some module called Film in Literature or something along those lines; a.k.a, two of my favourite things in the world in one sentence. Apparently the girl who's taking the module isn't very interested, and hearing something like that made me think, "Fuck, I can take it for you if you want." And then the uncertainty hit me all over again like a huge damn tsunami, for a few seconds I entertained the thought of transferring to FASS, I thought, This could be the biggest mistake I'd ever make in my life. I go into NUS Co-op and practically drool over the sight of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities selling for less than twenty dollars, but what I carry in my arms when I walk out are large, heavy books on Torts, Contract Law, the Singapore Legal System, Legal Writing and Analysis (and someone told me that Legal Writing is not writing at all and I don't find that hard to believe one single bit).

This is my life for the rest of my life. It's daunting; I'm half-regretting it; a part of me is still rather unwilling to embrace it; but I chose it, it's what I genuinely want despite my apprehension, and so I will stick with it and kick ass, no matter what.

Still, it's always hard, never easy, to choose Pragmatism over what you genuinely enjoy and love.

Then again, I don't know what it's going to be like starting next week. Who knows, I may end up genuinely enjoying and loving the things that I'd be studying.

But really, the whole point of this discourse is, change is fucking scary and now I'm still scared, and hopefully that's all there is to it.

I was trying to navigate the Integrated Virtual Learning Environment (as its name states, it's this online portal thing where you get readings and other things along those lines) and I got confused. I seem to be getting confused a lot this entire week. Getting out of NUS yesterday from the Law faculty confused me; attempting to find my bearings in the Business canteen yesterday confused me; and today's intro lecture on timetables and tutorial periods and whatever confused the hell out of me.

Lectures start next week, tutorials the week after, and something else four weeks later?!?! Huh?? I guess it didn't help that I was sitting right at the back, last row, with Rui. At times like these you really need good, reasonable friends who're willing to put up with your silly blur-ness.

I didn't stay for the sponsorship talk; picked up my bag and this huge stack of readings I found in my mailbox along with the timetable and walked out of the LT with Melissa (not my Melly Welly, sadly) after the intro lecture ended. Rui followed later and berated me for not waiting for her. Sorry! We went to the bookstore where we both got Neumann's book on Legal Writing and Analysis and things like that, which means robbing my bank account of another bloody 75 bucks, money I'd rather spend on a skirt or a pair of jeans (but then again the jeans I usually have my eyes on cost a lot more than that), to be perfectly honest. Oh god I feel like my heart's been brutally ripped out of my chest and stamped on repeatedly by millions of court shoes and devoured by smirking professionals in smart-looking black corporate suits! My hard-earned money squandered on textbooks! Oh the absolute HORROR!

My mom did say that she'll give me back the money but I told her, "Don't be stupid!" Sigh. Having a conscience really sucks.

Anyway, was fun hanging out with Rui, even if it was only for a while. Too bad we're not in the same tutorial groups. If I end up with shitty people I really will kill myself, ie. transfer to Arts. But I'll try to keep on truckin' all the same.

Fuck I gotta reformat my stupid laptop. It's been infected with spyware and other assorted viruses since time immemorial! It's so annoying and the people who came up with this ingenious idea of pissing people off the whole world over with this retarded viruses shit ought to be maliciously tortured a la Elizabethan torture racks and left for dead on Vlad the Impaler's stakes while I sit by and watch them die a slow, excruciating death and sip wine and champagne. One word: Assholes. And that's me being polite.

(The sip wine thing, I didn't make that up; I'm not that imaginative. It was apparently what he did, Vlad the Impaler, and he was the historical Transylvanian, sp, figure who inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula. The whole thing about Vlad impaling enemies and prisoners-of-war on huge stakes erected in the courtyard of his castle is, if I'm not wrong, the basis for the whole 'kill Dracula by driving wooden stake into heart' thing. I was fascinated by him for a while.)

Getting out of NUS and to Buona Vista MRT was surprisingly fast. One minute I boarded the bus; and virtually, the next minute, I arrived at BV MRT. Amazing. I reached Jurong Point at 12.13 p.m., way ahead of Clarence who just got out of a lecture at that time.

He showed up about fifteen minutes later though so I wasn't bored enough to bitch. Haha.

I just have to say this: Long John Silver's Original Fish and Fries Or Whatever Fuck Thing sucks major ass. They should tell customers that the fish comes with skin intact because there are people out there, like me, who absolutely cannot stand fish skin. It's disgusting and I hate how little grey bits stick to your utensil when you attempt to scrape it off. Ugh, thinking about it is making my stomach turn. Absolutely abhorrent, I say. And fuck, I paid like $7.45 for it (fifty cents for not liking Coke and requesting for ice lemon tea which is only marginally better; I hate non-Mos fast food).

But hey, like Clarence said, it perpetuated this odd trend of ours, how we hardly have a satisfactory meal together, so that was the bright side to the otherwise-shitty picture.

It came with wasabi sauce. Clarence dipped a fry into it and ate it which instigated me to follow suit. He said, take a bigger glob! It's not that bad! So I did.

IT WAS HORRIBLE! Yuck yuck yuck absolutely gross I don't understand how people eat that stuff. Wasabi-coated peas are nice but wasabi in itself is disgusting. I can't even find the appropriate words to describe that weird, metal-esque taste and how it completely DID NOT agree with my taste buds.

That'd be the last time I ever let him con me into eating strange foods!

Today's weather is so nice and cooling, but mix it with air-con and you get a freezing Yelen. It got worse in the cinema. I stepped in and immediately I started shivering. Craziness, really. Perfect time to sleep but who can sleep when watching a Tim Burton film with a hot guy next to you? (Ha ha ha.)

The film was amazing. It brought me back to childhood Roald Dahl-days where you believed the most implausible things without the slightest tinge of cynicism, how everything was so pure and untainted by the real world, the nice, cosy little cocoon that was your baby blanket. So pretty, wild dash of colours (the toothpaste factory was my favourite 'cause it was so prettily blue) and bombastic, insane music, and of course, Tim Burton's trademark dark humour. I laughed so much that I surprised even myself, and most of the time I was the only person laughing. There were additions to the original plot; they gave Willy Wonka a background, which explained his eccentricity rather well and he felt like a real character, and not just an odd caricature of sorts (which was the feeling I got when I watched the previous Wonka film). And despite the addition, the film was so loyal to the book in terms of spirit and the essential point that lies at the heart of everything: Roald Dahl's spunky, imaginative chocolate factory was so nicely encapsulated and brought to life by the vivid, gorgeous cinematography; the wide-eyed wonder of childhood, embodied by Charlie himself; and the whole thing about family and how family is ultimately the most important thing in your life.

It's a very masterful adaptation. I love how much heart it has and how quickly it engages the audience, even people like me who've read the book countless times. Never a dull moment (okay that sounded stupid).

Only complaint? It's too damn short, and hence the ending felt a bit stilted and forced. Won't give it away but I was kind of 'what the hell'-ing at it when it ended. But then again, they compressed two novels into one less-than-two-hour film and the more important bits are all in there, so I'll just take the good with the bad.

Johnny Depp is amazing. I love the 'haha' he did throughout, his quirky facial expressions, and that little jiggy-bob thing he did along with the Oompa songs. So awesome, so nice, totally loved it. Clarence thought the oompa dude was scary-looking though, haha. In certain scenes he did look scary (especially the segment after Mike was shrunk) but not enough to give me nightmares!

The oompa songs rock. Shit now I so feel like reading the book! Okay I'm going to buy it over the weekend. Yay!

Clarence kept me warm in the theatre. Clarence folded me a pretty rose in Mos Burger. Clarence's hair fascinates me. I love hanging out/being with him.

One last thing before I post this and go eat dinner: At Bukit Batok MRT station some Prudential dude was positively hitting on me. He wanted me to do the survey which I've done twice already, and I told him that. Then he went on to have this obvious "I'm picking you up" conversation with me in a mish-mash of weird English and typically-Singaporean Mandarin. He asked me where I'm from; I said, NUS Law, first year. He gave me this huge reaction, eyes widened and all, and then he told me, When I was studying Business at NUS I was always damn scared of Law students who sit together and talk their ang moh pai English, got slang and everything.

I tried to clean up the English in the above paragraph but it's a bit hard when I'm rushing. But slang does not equal accent. Slang is Singlish, slang is bling-bling, slang is not the way a person speaks English. An accent is the word you're looking for when you're trying to say that a person is speaking American-accented English. People always get that confused and it annoys me GREATLY.

So anyway, I was like, Yeah the Business canteen rocks ('cause I love their Beijing Fengwei stall because it has HAI DAI, which is a sort of seaweed, which is so Taiwanese and I love it, and liang mian too which is even more Taiwanese as they sell it in 7-11 over there and I had it every morning when I was there for two weeks last year and I love it and miss it like hell right now), blah blah, he told me about the savings plan, I said I don't save, he introduced himself and asked me what my name is, blah blah, I said, okay I'll see you around, and THEN he said, Why don't I give you my namecard and you can call me if you're interested in the savings plan.

Uh, okay. I said, Um okay, sure, and then he was like, Call me if you can remember me; I may give you a treat!

Roll my eyes and kill me. I was holding Clarence's rose (didn't want to squash it 'cause it's really pretty) and he asked me, You like folding roses ah?

I said, It's given to me by a...friend. Audible pause before the word 'friend'. Obvious look of mild disappointment on dude's face.

SO FUCKING FUNNY.

That's all for today.

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