Inflation woes

The egg prata from the prata shop near my place now costs $1.40!! And the kosong prata costs $0.70! Am I that old? They cost $1.20 (egg) and $0.60 (kosong) just last year. I mean, I remember when it used to cost $0.80 and $0.50.

Sigh. I sound exactly like my dad when he tells me that 10 cents got him a large bowl of fish ball mee some forty to fifty years ago.

I should have eaten more prata in primary school.

Five ways to beat inflation, by Ms Nomer

1. Buy stackloads of those stamps for local use only. You'll still be able to use them in ten years times, and by then, you'll be gloating how you got your stamps at "half-price".
2. Spend now, use later. Your dollar is bigger today than tomorrow anyway. Need a coffin in approximately fifty years time? Why not buy it now?
   
3. Invent a time-machine.
4. Migrate to a rural town in Africa.
5. Go Malaysia.
   

Things fall apart

I was walking in the rubble when I saw this face.

______________________Staring at me from the rubble.



It got woozy...






...and fell apart.

iamnotanartist 2008

Line drawings

Caliban

Lion:
Bad Hair Day

iamnotanartist 2008

Jer 29:11

[Source: climate.met.psu.edu]

"For I know the plans I have for you,
plans to prosper you and not to harm you,
plans to give you hope and a future.
Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.
You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.
I will be found by you, and will bring you back from captivity."

I don't know why but this makes me proud to be Singaporean

Perhaps because of the common cultural currency, idiosyncrasies and all.

This is an old one, btw.

Emotional resilience = Nil

I start teaching next week. I'm seriously wondering if I have the emotional resilience to deal with it right now.

I was waiting for my dinner at the coffeeshop earlier. They were really packed, and so I waited about 40 minutes, standing by the road with my heavy laptop bag. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a traffic police jumped out of a van and started punching in the numbers to "summon" the car right beside me. The stall keepers noticed and started yelling out "Summon! Summon!" This middle-aged man noticed it a little late, but still managed to get to his car on time. He drove his car away. When he came back later, he made a comment to the stall keeper that "people who wait for their food never say anything when they see the summon man coming." What the heck! Is it my fault you didn't hear the stall keeper yelling? How am I supposed to know that it is your car? If you want to park your car there, you bloody well keep an eye on your own car!

Then I realised that people coming in ten minutes ago were already getting their food, while I was standing there waiting for 40 minutes, and it made me madder. And then when I got home, and the house was empty, I cried.

Things like this don't usually bother me. I'm just not well enough or strong enough right now, and I'm afraid of breaking down in front of the class over some stupid thing. Like a PMSing woman, like a pregnant woman, like someone whom I don't want to be.

I want to go for a run so that the stress can drain away. It is the fifteenth day of Chinese New Year and there is a perfect moon hanging in the deep blue night sky. And there is a strong wind making the immense pine trees sway. But I have an essay to write.

I want a miracle.

Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert

This book is about how the human brain imagines its own future, and about how well it can predict which of those futures it will most enjoy. I think the book's premise is that human beings are surprisingly bad at it.

All I got out of it is that the frontal lobe is in charge of planning. They used to take out a part of the frontal lobe to treat anxiety and depression, not realising that the poor fellas with frontal lobotomies, while happy as clams, could not imagine the future. To them, thinking about the future was like walking into a room and being asked to find a chair that was not there.

That's about as far as I got in the book. I will need to keep reading... BUT NOT ENOUGH TIME!!! ARRGH....

(will update post if possible)

The Passion, by Jeanette Winterson

I confess: I skimmed through this one. I've just been too busy to read a storybook properly.

The Passion is set during the Napoleonic wars. I think it has something to do with identity: among boatsmen in Venice, only boys get born with webbed feet, all except for cross-dressing Villanelle. But it is so much more than that too.

I think you're better off reading the blurb here.

I'm telling you stories. Trust me.

Words can never be consequence-free

Sometimes I am glad that my real-life friends don't read my blog. It gives me the freedom to write without having to worry about who my friends and family expect me to be. But of course this freedom is limited. Words can never be consequence-free. Words are powerful, terrible things, and there is no way I can just say what I like, and think that there will be no repercussions.

You musn't underestimate the power of words. The word of God is a "double-edged sword", dividing "soul and spirit", "judging the thoughts and attitudes of the heart". Just words, my friend. Imagine that. But we all know the feeling when words cut into our very hearts.

It isn't just the word of God that is powerful; the words we use are powerful too. James compares the tongue to the bit of a horse: a small part that controls the whole body. With our tongues we praise God and we curse men—oh the irony; with our tongues we can bring life and joy to our friends, or we can corrupt our entire person.

So, even in my descent into madness, I will try to keep a rein on my tongue (and my mind), so that I am not completely lost.

I will not go mad.

Gunning for Gold

Fluff(races) are going to be discontinued in twelve hours.

Olio's stats

• Total Challenges: 395
  
• Challenge Victories: 366
  
• Percent Victory: 92.66%

The turtle in front of me has a victory percentage of 94.14%.

I have lost 29 races. Therefore, I have to win 100 more races (and not lose any) to get neck-to-neck with the leading turtle.

29/ y = 5.86/ 100
Therefore y = 494.88

If I can only race 20 times per hour, it means that I will get the gold trophy in five hours time.

Fingers crossed.

[Something wrong with my calculations. It doesn't look like it will happen.]

[Didn't get it. Boo.]

One for the Singaporeans: All about what I think about noodles, whether or not you want to know; a.k.a my brain is a noodle

I have pretty fixed ideas of what kind of noodles go with what kind of dish.

For example, wan ton mee should be you mee.

Fish ball noodles should be either mee pok or kway tiao.

Bak Chor Mee should be either mee pok or you mee. (Some people like it with mee sua)

Prawn noodles should be yellow mee (dry) or bee hoon (soup).

Sliced fish noodles should be choo mee fen.

I get more and more opinionated the older I get.

Bruised tailbone

My tailbone sticks out. And it has been sticking out even more since I started losing weight about two months back. Which means that when I plonked myself down on the hard cement floor — at least that is what I think happened — I bruised my tailbone, and now it hurts to sit.

I am a very evolved monkey-species with a very sore butt.

A SURVEY: Fuzzy and Blue (and Orange!)

Love this Sesame Street clip! I wonder if it is indicative of the humour of a 30 year old woman though.. So this is a survey question. Please state your age and whether you

a. love it! digg it!
b. like it!
c. ok lah. it's amusing enough.
d. er... no comment

Thank you! Oh, while you're at it, please state your gender as well. It may end up being a 30 year old FEMALE thing...

Monster in the Mirror

I couldn't find the Grover "Near... Far" video that was the inspiration for this post so I'm posting "Monster in the Mirror" instead. This is one of my favourites. I remember sticking a post-it on my friend's mirror saying "Monster", or something along those lines. I don't think she was too flattered.

i before e (except after c)

i before e, except after c
or when sounded like an a
as in weigh, neigh, or sleigh.

drop this rule when -c sounds as -sh
like ancient, species, efficient;
but what do we do about
neither, height, leisure, weird???

Or abseil, albeit, atheist, beige,
caffeine, codeine, deity,
feisty, forfeit, heifer,
heinous, heir, meiosis,
protein, sleight, surfeit,
their—for crying out loud, THEIR, veil?

Oh poor me,
What do I do when I forget the words
that are pronounced with an a
like deign, freight, and vein?

What do I do if I apply the rule to protien,
Forget the rule when spelling concieve,
Mispronounce deign as deegn,
And spell it diegn instead?

Therapy

NEAR


FAR



NEAR


FAR

MacBook Air

A thoughtful review (thanks dubdew!)

Pics that may make you drool.

Apple has got me tied about its little finger. Every time a new product comes out, I find myself having to justify to myself why I DO NOT WANT it — even when it is plainly obvious that I DO NOT NEED IT, like an iPhone or the MacBook Air. Apple's genius is not in coming out with products that I need; it is is coming out with products that I know I don't need but think about anyway.

I am constantly justifying to myself why I DO NOT WANT Mac products.

Anyway, I'm not getting one because I already have a MacBook and the MacBook Air is just the emaciated cousin of my MacBook. If I were to want an anorexic lappy, I would get an UMPC instead, something like the Eee PC in the Mac version, which sadly does not exist. Besides —here begins the justifications— there is no optical drive (but no optical drive means no region code either: warped thinking I know); there is only one USB port (not like the two on my MacBook is that great); it is light (...) Oh wait, I think that last point is on the wrong side of the fence...

Anyway, the long and short of it is: I DO NOT WANT THE MACBOOK AIR.

Random thought

Keeping the bluetooth on makes me feel... connected.

It is a bit sad that words such as "in sync" and "connected" have been usurped by technological pundits. They mean so much: To be connected to one another; to be in sync with yourself; to have a network of people to belong to...

Now when I think of the words, all I have a picture of a ginormous network of computers in a seamless network talking to each other via bluetooth or the internet.

Therapy

I like working with my hands. I like fixing things up, cleaning things, putting things in order. Two nights ago, I stayed up late replacing the bridge and strings of a guitar I picked up (bridge: $2.50, ground floor music store at Peace Centre) because somehow, concentrating on not cutting myself on the metal strings, twisting the knobs, removing the funky sticker, manipulating the spanner, and tuning it exactly made me calm. The owner had put the wrong type of strings on the guitar and the metal had ruined the bridge and cut into the wood.



New bridge. Note my intricate knot-tying skills.



This is my fixed up guitar. And yes, it is sitting in my trash can.



This is my regular guitar. My aunt gave it to me for my 18th birthday.

Apart from fixing up a guitar, I also cleaned my Macbook. Today, I used my facial toner—Dewy Flower Fresh Toner— to wipe down my screen and the grooves between the keys of my keyboard. Sometimes I wonder about the effectiveness of keyboard covers. I have an aesthetic fitted rubber keyboard cover but it somehow manages to let the dirt in. Furthermore, I have a permanent imprint of the keyboard on my screen because the rubber cover leaves marks when I close the laptop. So what's the point, if you know what I mean? Apart from the awesome tactile feel and giving me an excuse to clean every three weeks or so.



The rubber covering my keypad whose only purpose is for the awesome tactile feel and the excuse to clean.



My clean keyboard. You can't really tell it is clean from the picture, but it is clean, excepting bacteria, dirt and coffee molecules below a certain microbe size.

You can't tell from the picture—come to think about it, you can't tell anything from the picture—but I have already removed the plastic cover protecting my trackpad. I was doing some vacation work that required an unhuman amount of scrolling in excel, and I couldn't cope with the extra lag caused by the plastic cover any more. So I stripped it. And my trackpad isn't any dirtier than what it was before.

So, what's the point?