i'm on your back.
written: 11:42 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 07, 2005

1. In Ruishan's Tort tutorial which I attended. One of our tutorial problems involved this woman named Rachel who suffered a broken leg while trying to escape from a burning house and as a result, could not work for three months. On the day before she was due to return to work she went grocery-shopping at Cold Storage and slipped and fell while rushing to grab the last pack of frozen peas. So this guy was detailing his answer to the problem and when he got to the frozen peas part, he said (and I quote), "She ran after frozen peas in Cold Storage."

I thought that was the most hilarious thing ever.

2. At East Coast Park with Ruishan this afternoon. We were on the beach, standing in the shallow part of the sea, and there were two males swimming in the sea to our left. Ruishan tactfully went, "Oh my god that guy is so fat!"

HA HA HA HA HA. That's even more hilarious than the running-after-frozen-peas thing.

3. There was this tennis ball floating around in the water. It floated towards me while we were trying to bury our feet in the sand/water. The tennis ball floated through the space between my ankles. Ruishan went, "Goal!" and burst out laughing.

She's sooo easily amused. She was like, "I'm gonna blog about this! The tennis ball went through Yelen's opened legs!"

A while later she went, "That sounds sick."

Yes it does and I can't believe I ended up writing about it when I said I wouldn't!

**

Yes, I attended Rui's morning tutorial so that I can go ECP with her to cycle in the afternoon. I'm aching everywhere now, both limbs and legs, and it hurts to walk, even hurts a little to type. It's crazy. We cycled for two hours and at the end of it, she was like, "I don't feel like I've done anything."

Thanks a lot, really. Talk about rubbing severe salt into some very raw wounds! I was already smarting from my pathetic five-minute quasi-jog on Thursday, and now this. I so have to exercise! I'm too fat for my own good.

Anyway, today was my first time pedalling a bike in years. I've missed ECP, I really have. The jetty is awesome, but it wasn't awesome watching fish flap to death on the ground while anglers shook them off their hooks. Ugh. I was tempted to throw the poor fish back into the water. Ruishan saw a fish bleeding to death through its gill.

That is just sick. I yelled, "The poor fish!" while pedalling down the jetty. Rather obnoxious, perhaps, but who gives a damn.

There were no cute guys at ECP.

We cycled form 3.20 to 5.20 and some paths did not have huge trees on both sides and thus we (especially I) were cruelly exposed to the blistering sun. My skin tans easily. I was showering and towelling myself dry and I looked at myself in the mirror and FUCK a tanline! I was wearing a tank top and in the mirror there was a small patch of red around the shoulder blades and I could make out the outline of my top! And my skin watch is whiter than normal which means that my skin has become darker than normal. I hate being charred by the sun. I really do.

Oh, but it was fun. There was a group of people doing light aerobics on one of the field areas and we stopped to watch and I couldn't stop laughing. They started going "hey!" and Ruishan also started going "hey!" and I just looked at her like she's crazy.

Then again, she is crazy. She won't be Ruishan otherwise.

My legs are aching like mad.

And my butt hurts.

**

There were no cute guys at ECP but there was a super cute Malay guy working at McCafe. Yum yum.

**

I finally raised my hand and said something semi-intelligent during SLS today. We discussed the tudung issue and racial integration and I said something about how we shouldn't pretend that we're all the same because we're not, and that we should acknowledge our differences and celebrate them. I also posted for the first time in the SLS forum. How exciting!

Unlike that other time in which the professor asked me a question and I randomly read out a highlighted line from my Word document, this time round he didn't look at me like I was sprouting gibberish or like I was a complete idiot, and hey, he knows who Alfian Sa'at is!

Also, I'd like to say that some moron went off about cost-benefit analysis and how we apply that to the tudung issue and basically he said that there is no benefit in lifting the no-tudung ban.

WHATEVER. I was tempted to write this in my SLS post but I decided not to in the end, so I'll just say it here.

ONLY A CHINESE CAN MAKE SUCH A COMMENT. The professor was taken aback too, and that's putting it mildly.

**

Oh, and some other moron made a very unfunny joke about Sikhs. The question was, what is the material difference between wearing a tudung and wearing a turban? His answer, if Sikh men don't wear the turban they'd walk around looking like Sadako (that long-haired female ghost from this hit Japanese horror flick The Ring).

Call me uptight, whatever, but that was simply done in bad taste.

I don't like racist jokes of all kinds because I just don't find them funny at all, period. It appalls me that the joke was even conceived, let alone spoken out loud; but oh well, freedom of speech and everything. Idiots have as much of a right to say stupid things as I have to call them idiots for saying stupid things, right? Yes.

**

For the benefit of non-Singaporeans because I know there are a few non-Singaporeans who read this (thank you from the bottom of my heart), here's a very brief background info on the tudung issue.

First, a tudung is a head dress worn by Muslim women for religious purposes, and I have to qualify that by adding that I'm an ignorant Chinese girl who spent ten years in a school where there was a grand total one one non-Chinese student in my level (Rui correct me if I'm wrong) so I may be slightly wrong about that. From what I understand though there are Muslim women pushing for the tudung to be abandoned altogether because they see it as a sign of patriarchal oppression - but that's another issue in itself and not quite relevant to what I'm trying to explain here.

In 2001 three primary school Muslim girls were suspended for wearing the tudung to school, an act which was against the Ministry of Education's uniform policy which doesn't ban the tudung specifically, but disallows alterations to the school uniform. The tudung was apparently considered an alteration to the school uniform and there was a huge (well, as huge as Apathetic Singapore can possibly get anyway) furore over this issue for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, the tudung ban is inconsistent because Sikh boys are allowed to wear the turban to school (which is based on a rather preposterous reason, that the British have vested it in the education system since colonial times, to which I only have one simple response: "So fucking what?") which is arguably more ostentatious than the tudung, and Christians are allowed to wear crosses to school as well. These are religious symbols which are allowed by the MOE and the tudung is also a religious symbol...which is not allowed by the MOE? Personal opinion here: this doesn't quite make sense and if I were a Muslim I'd feel significantly outraged.

Secondly, Section 15 of Singapore's constitution states: "Freedom of religion
15. �(1) Every person has the right to profess and practise his religion and to propagate it.
�
(4) This Article does not authorise any act contrary to any general law relating to public order, public health or morality."
Thus it was alleged that the tudung ban was unconstitutional - a charge with which I find myself agreeing. Even under 15(4) the ban isn't justified; how does allowing Muslim girls to wear the tudung to school pose a threat to "public order, public health or morality"? (Answer: it doesn't.)

The purported reason for banning the tudung was that it was necessary in order to fulfill the government's objective of national unity and nation-building through integration. But I think if you want to ban one, you have to ban everything else; similarly, if you allow crosses and turbans, you have to allow the tudung as well. The former approach is obviously equal but unconstitutional, and I really don't see what is so wrong about the latter approach. Don�t push our racial differences beneath the surface and pretend they don�t exist; I believe that the key to true racial harmony (as opposed to mere lip service and sometimes, a huge clich� whose deeper meaning is lost on most of us) is to acknowledge and accept these differences and use it to build up a formidable national identity. Racial differences does not equate to an undermining of a country�s national identity and strength; in fact, it�d only make a country and a nation that much strong if it can survive and prosper with full knowledge and understand of each other�s racial differences, instead of shoving them aside and pretending they're not there.

Okay, I'm not gonna go on about this anymore. I'll just leave it at that.

**

Tort tutorial was embarrassing because I was talking to Ruishan on MSN and she typed something stupid which made me laugh and I was so engrossed in typing my reply that I didn't even know that the tutor was asking me to answer a question until Rui went, "Yelen he's asking you." To add insult to injury I had NO IDEA what to say and in the end my answer was fucking stupid and wrong.

Argh. I have to make up for this disgusting blunder next week!

I actually kinda look forward to Tort tutorials. I think they're fun and challenging, and Terry Kaan is hilarious. Today he wasn't as funny though; maybe it's just Rui's tutorial group (hahahahaha). But anyway, one thing I didn't like about today's class was that he used a graph to illustrate consecutive causes cases.

A GRAPH FOR CRYING OUT LOUD AND I WAS COMPLETELY LOST. He'd ask, "Can the plaintiff claim for this area?" and I'd be trying to figure out what that area was supposed to represent and by the time I thought that I was getting somewhere he'd already moved on.

The woes of being un-mathematical. Statistics and numbers and figures turn me off. The minute some MP uses statistics in his argument in parliamentary debates I skip over that entire paragraph and scan the page for chunks that are not mercilessly marred by numbers and percentage signs. I don't think they show anything, to be honest. Or they do, but I don't give the slightest fuck because most of the time they're hardly representative of the real picture anyway. The Straits Times likes to run stupid headlines that go, "Singaporean women shun hawkers and taxi drivers" and when you get to the article you realise, shit, they surveyed a grand total of a thousand women and most of them are probably more educated ones anyway so why did I just waste my time reading an article (badly-written too) based on largely-basless generalisations?

And just what is the point of such articles? Does it say anything important about society? In the first place your research was minimal and not exactly thorough; in the second place it isn't saying anything we don't already know. I don't bitch about opinion polls that appear in Time magazines which survey a thousand people in India asking for their opinion on whether India would become an economic force to be reckoned with, because at least I'm finding out something new. Articles about how Singaporean women are snobbish about marrying hawkers and taxi drivers are really just a waste of ink.

WHO EVEN GIVES A SHIT ANYWAY. Next time, please, for the love of this country's future and survival, do more significant surveys and write articles with more importance. Some examples: "SINGAPOREANS ARE NOT AWARE OF WHAT GOES ON IN THE JUDICIAL SYSTEM." "SINGAPOREANS DON'T CARE ABOUT POLITICS." "SINGAPOREANS ARE IGNORAMUSES WHO DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THE LAW."

At least then such incidents would truly represent the majority - and hell, I can say this and know it's at least 80% true without doing a bloody survey; before Law school, pseudo-headlines one and three applied to me too.

**

I'm going to watch Gilmore Girls now.

My Veronica Mars S2E02 download is taking forever. I wanna cry.

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