The Caffeine Junkie and Her Escapades
“Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.” Ecc 12:13Archive for October, 2006
Episode 171: overhearing future ambitions
I really should stop blogging. But this is so hilarious and I can’t laugh out.
Housemate #2 is giving tuition to her yr12 girl and it is on probability…and she said “if I got one head, can I give you two heads?” AH HA, AH HA, AH HA HA HA HA HA. Ok I really should not have such a dirty mind… but…AH HA AH HA AH HA HA HA HA
And after seeing how housemate #2 explains probability to the yr12 girl, I think I could consider giving tuition too! Since I’ve never had tuition in my whole life (save for anal-retentive-curl-your-lazy-fingers-you-bag-of-filth piano teachers), I never ever had the confidence to give tuition. Coupled with the fact that friends tell me I morph into a tyrannical why-don’t-you-get-it-when-i-explained-a-gazillion-times-look-at-the-bleeding-axis-you-doofus person on normal days, I didn’t have the confidence to tap into the lucrative market called rip-off-secondary-school-students-legitimately enterprise called tuition. Maybe I should enter the hallowed guild of tuition teachers, going by the other name of broke-nus-undergrads. Man, today I am on a hyphenated-roll! I-love-stringing-verbs-and-nouns-together. I am sure lucre will grease my pleasant wheels very well…and I would not bite the victim’s payee’s head off.
And in other weather related news, it hailed this early morning. Rock on.
Episode 170: so long, farewell, au revoir, auf Wiedersehen
… I’d like to stay and taste my first champange…
just that my name is not Leisl, neither am I 16 going on 17, and i’ve already tasted my first champange.
but this song has much resonance today. Because today was my final class at melbourne uni, with hottielecturer to boot. we met outside Harold White theatre as usual, and then he suggested we go get some drinks and he treated us to wine at Animal Orchestra. The white wine was nice, Sauvignon Blanc circa 2005, from New Zealand.
but the company was nicer. ten of us turned up (out of fifteen)…and for half of us, it was our last day at melbourne uni. and the five of us were all the usual lunch buddies who bitched about preps who popped their collars, gossiped about hottielecturer and another lecturer (whose boyfriend we met today and hence dispels all rumours), worried about our postgrad futures toghter, discussed money saving techniques (like how R ate tinned beans for a month and H buys frozen chooks), and when R should marry her boyfriend (yes, she should!).
yay! hummus is yummus!
and the conversations we had around the table was nice. funny stuff like how hottielecturer went to class with alex-ferguson (or however you spell that Man U football person’s name) son and serious stuff like why the US foreign policy is untenable. oh and hottielecturer knows the other hottielecuterer back home!!! the one who wrote R and mine’s referal! OMG!!! i swear, all hotties know each other! hotties galore! me love me love! ok shall attempt to be less fan girl. but..me love me love!
so it was a really nice way to end a fantastic semester. and so i sing ’so long, farewell, auf wiedershen, adieu, the sun has gone to bed and so must i’… and thank you for an intellectually rigorous time, and good friends and great company every friday. 
Episode 169: bummed out
why, pray tell?
- ah mah is hospitalised for puking too much, which is not good for body-salt content (or whatchamacall it). but she is alright, or so they tell me. but since mummy is more kancheong than me, and she says ahmah is ok, then ahmah is ok. dont i sound like Ned Flanders already?
- me parents have to traverse half way around the world to go see her every night, which is not good for their physical and mental well-being either
- phone bill, girnomous phone bill, which became not so girnomous after some happy msn chatting, but still takes up three weeks worth of grocery bills
- which means…argh, is food going to drop from the sky?
- but i could just withdraw more money or use the good ol mastercard
- but i dont want to! i must learn to live within my means.
today, as i was prancing home from hottielecturer’s last class (for this subj, tmr is the final class for the other subj hottielecturer teaches. sigh, me miss u, hottielecturer, but i still havent written your geopolitics essay yet. and since this sidenote is already so long, what i read abotu geopolitics was seriously cool. that the US media portrayed the Vietnam War as “North Vietnam” invading “South Vietnam” to manipulate the public’s perception of it from a civil war to international agreession. semantics, dahling.)
ok, i forgot where i was. oh yah. today as i was traipising home from queensbury st, that i should be thrifty. not miserly/stingypoker/ex-housemate-from-hell-esque, but what’s with this whole preoccupation with shopping or material accumulation? walking past Lorna Jane as I was going home, i saw a rack with the sign “two for $60″. horse shit. they were just normal tanks with the word Lorna Jane on them. why would people pay so much for something which is not even their name? like i understand paying for indie teeshirts cuz you pay for the brains that came up with the witty slogan (like the threadless tee i love, “a city built on rock and roll is structurally unsound” –> urban planning, geography, rock&roll music, three of my loves, all in one tee. ok, threadless.com doesnt exactly qualify as indie since they’re almost becoming an institution to themselves. but still!)
and why can’t we all just dress and act our age? we’re 21 for goodness sakes! we don’t need expensive haircuts, or trendy clothes or having to eat out all the time! who gives a damn about how you look? spending 50 bucks on a top = 3 weeks worth of groceries! and possesions dont make a person. if you bloody judge me by the brand of jeans i wear, or how vintage (in the oh-so-sienna miller-way) my clothes are, or that it doesnt emblazon a rude FCUK across the chest, well (at the risk of sounding pottymouth), then continue on reading the brandnames cuz FCUK is a good one for you.
and this whole litany was brought about by the fact that i’ve finally finished budgeting for the SEP. good on me. to budget when i am almost through with it. and looking at it now, i was really silly during the first two months. and so now i will cook all my meals to make up for it. all my meals. and i will not plan to go shopping. nuh’ uh.
SGD7000 is alot to spend in six months. no matter how much i try to justify with “oh but i went on 4 holidays” or “oh the airplane tix and visa were really expensive” or “oh but i have to eat” (not that i dont! i just dont have to eat out!), or “oh it includes paying for Dec’s rent”, 7000 is still alot of money. i could have not gone for 4 holidays (ok technically i’ve only gone for one…) and the airplane tix and visa are fixed costs (and i did get the cheapest ticket!) and i could have gone home on 10 nov. but still.
i know i know, no one ever said going on exchange was cheap. but i intend to pay my parents back all before the end of next year. not that they want me to or because we cant afford it. but because i want to. because i am 21. because i need to take responsibility for my actions. my actions of rejecting the scholarship which would have paid for it (the guilt still plagues me) and my actions of choosing to go on SEP. it is a blessing that God has provided for our family so that they can send me here, but i am definitely not going to squander away their money aimlessly.
of course i am not going to be a scrooge and undergo self-flagellation for the next two months. i will still enjoy myself, sitting in parks, walking around, reading books. just no consumerism for me. and i will continue on with the determination to not lead life as the stereotypical asian intl student here. and this determination has manifested itself in many ways, and i am pleased with all of them. indeed.
i hate having to think about finances/cash/moolah in this way. but it is time to be practical and real and 21. even though banks still have many branches, money doesnt grow on trees.
Episode 168: news!
ok the fact that i’ve been posting so regularly means that i am not doing my essays. well at least the computer is on and i am not vegetating watching simpsons or futurama. well, not yet.
anyhow.. check this out! we had an earthquake, two in fact, on sunday night. housemate #1 and i didn’t feel a thing even though we stay on the 21st floor. but we did hear the explosions. ok more accurately, she heard the explosions (even though she was further away from the window!) and came out…while i just ignored it, figuring it was probably gun shots. although vic has an anti-gun law… if an earthquake happens on a larger scale (and explaning the richter scale to daddy on the phone was toughnuts!), we’re going to have a tough time running down 21 flights of steps. may that never happen. once was enough. I love doing these link things now that i’ve finally figured out how to do it. so yeah..link away i shall!
and in even better news, daddy got his Lay Leader’s license! peachy keen, jelly bean! yay you! i knew that long essay they made you write was worth it! only qualm now is that we’ve got to iron the look-at-me-i-used-to-be-a-bedsheet-but-now-turned-cassock thing every alternate sunday. So help me God. a hop and a skip and a shimmyshimmy! 
and in other news, oh pleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease say yes. PLEASE. PLEASEEEEE. i can only beg so much from this distance…it is very much like what you teach really, actor-network theory where the actor acts from a distance. so pleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease say yes. i tried to be as unobvious as possible although the email did sound like acadmic prostitution or something…look at me, you can book me.. hurhurhur. PLEASE SAY YES! *vibes*
okie, off to edit my second essay. and many more to come.
livelongandprosper! *spork*
oh yeah..and i baked a chocolate coffee cake yesterday in the microwave with the help of housemate #1. and it was good. ok, good enough for me. and as the saying goes… “chocolate, coffee and men. things in life which are better when rich”. muahahahah moolah-hahaha. ok i am going mad.
Episode 167: 100
and i’ve been in melbourne for 100 days already!
does time fly or does time fly?
57 days more of shimmying to Matilda’s waltz.
Thank you God, I know You’re always here with me and that You’re the one who has seen me through thus far, and will continue to be there, no matter what.
Episode 166: an open email
I AM SO EXCITED. after praying for some time about God’s direction for my life, esp wrt to service, today’s church sermon just gave even more conviction to the past one half years… and so i immediately rushed back to shoot off an email to two people (huis and brian) and it took an hour to type!!! and since i am still excited but super lazy and with two more essays due before midweek, i shall just copy and paste the email here. beacause it makes me excited!
Greetings from i-see-kangaroo-as-roadkill land!
I don’t know who specifically to email this to in vcf cuz 1) i still cant for the life of me tell the difference between evangelism/missions hence i email fellowshorty since i dont know who the evangelism coordinator is and 2) well, Sir Brian, i think this falls under your jurisdiction and yet i am also unsure. well, this also kinda goes beyond VCF into GCF but ah, let’s just get on with it.anyway, here’s some boring background before I launch into what got me so super excited at church that i immediately email you guys…
after EARC and church camp (which was on social action in our church neighbourhood, potong pasir) in 2005, the whole idea of social justice and the need for us as christians, compelled by God’s love, to help others has always been bugging me continuously and in different manifestations. and i’ve been praying about my role in it intermittently since then. and more now, as on SEP i’ve got time away from the vcf system and just ask God where He would think I can be of good use for Him…
So today was my church’s 141st anniversary and the senior pastor preached about the Beatitudes in relation to the Great Commission. [and now a bkgrd to my church: we're a church with a strong international presence, about 30 nations..and they help out with refugees and stuff. and I think Peter Pang is somehow affiliated to the church (Swanston Street Church of Christ) cuz his work in FES (and hence you guys!) appears on our bulletin as prayer points]
and he talked about the Micah Challenge (do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God) and the need to help others around. And then he went “you could help in ways like…” and he listed things like teach english, medicine, building, science and technology, development, business-setups etc…and cuz i am doing a subject at melbourne uni on development, i naturally thought about the other disciplines he mentioned as well. and then it struck me!!!! they all relate to different faculties in a university!!!
AND GUESS WHAT!!!! that is what VCF can be positioned for! cuz VCF has a presence in EVERY SINGLE FACULTY/SCHOOL at uni!!!! we’re the privileged in soceity to be able to study at a univeristy, and we all graduate with skills. ok, the cynic may think that yeahyeah, big fat hairy deal…what can a person do with an arts degree in geography? Well, HEAPS if we all work togehter!!! not only as students while in the university/vcf, but more crucially when we graduate with professional degrees from all the different faculties. and if we can come up with a framework/body/organisation
/system to tap into the expertise of vcfers and the knowledge they embody (hehe..embodied knowledge i say! go Nigel Thrift!) then this would be an effective system for reaching out to the disadvantaged in singapore as well as in places like East Timor etcetc.
Do you get the idea???? arghs i wish i was in sg to explain it more clearly! (ok i dont really wishWISH to go back sg, but you get the pic). as i type this now my heart is beating super fast cuz it never striked me before, that here in vcf, we’ve the resources we need. we’ve got the people, the knowledge, and we’re all going out into the workforce soon and hence we would then accumulate expertise in our area of study (hopefully..and not waste our lives becoming taitais or something..) and in a world mediated by power relations, we’re the supposed ones who have the upper hand in power relations, and by God’s grace we can extend a hand to help other around us, if we capitalise on the combined efforts of vcfers from ALL facuties (incl, and esp, law school..)
and now for all that talk, here’s some prelim ideas in me buzzing brain. i was thinking, you guys during an FT (are there even any more left? my swot vac strats next friday and i forgot how many weeks we’re ahead of sg) or during exco meeting (or is it called council meeting? are they synonymous? arghs bureaucracy!) run the idea by vcfers/ fac chairs. a call to people who are willing to commit their skills/knowledge for God’s purposes. but it should be strongly stressed that this is NOT confined to their undergrad life but importantly, it extends to their working life. Because that is the crucial point. we’ll come tog to form a group with professional skills/knowledge which we can use together as a team whcih was established prior to going out to work. ie, we establish our structure so that when we go out to work and want to continue to help society, we won’t have to be too caught up with tyring to get a structure up/trying to find people from different disciplines cuz we will have people in vcf who come from all schools and all faculties!does this even make sense? here are a couple of links to the Micah Challenge and Make Poverty History and Vision Generation
http://www.micahchallenge.org.au/pages/content.asp?plid=8
http://www.takethechallenge.org.au/
http://makepovertyhistory.com.au/coalition.html
http://stir.org.au/stir/Content.aspx?topicID=4oh sidenote: the makepovertyhistory site, whilst cooperating with churches in aust, is also linked to the UN by their vision to achieve the Millenium Dev Goals. ok i dont agree with the MDGs and neither do i think the UN is an exceptionately spiffy organisaiton, but still.. so yeah, the websites are just an indication of whats going on…cuz their concept of social justice goes beyond like community involvement programmes, but includes things like Fair Trade etc..whcih is cool..besides, fair trade coffee tastes great. heh.
i don’t know whether this can come under the auspices of vcf cuz you guys may think we’ve got too much on our plate etcetc or that an integrated faculty committee may not be good etcetc. and if this is the case, that the exco or whatever does not think it is a feasible/good idea, i do hope that you guys wil pray with me regarding this matter, as to whether it is really of God’s will that this sorta thing be carried out. cuz if it is and vcf has too much other commitments, i’ll go ask my church. still God’s people!
enough from me. now the ball is in your court.
love,
debs
YAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY! i hope they reply soon! and i shall do an uncharateristic thing of addressing the reader. if you are a christian/vcfer/interested person… tell me! but more importnatly, pray for the world you are in. because, like that OMF book many of us read as kids, ‘you can change the world’.
Episode 165: :)
HAPPY 50th BIRTHDAY DADDY!
You know how dearly loved you are! And I know how much you love God, mummy and me too! So here’s to many more good years ahead, filled with blessings, love, prayers and good health! muaks! *squirgy hug*
Episode 164: ah the joys of staying near school…
not that i don’t in sg *sniggers* but that here the weather is good (and it is good today, not fry-your-scalp-hot but nice 17 deg) enough to allow you to walk to school without appearing like you’ve just been through a car wash when you reach your destination.
and since i am, as usual, procrastinating on my work, i shall just upload pics of the last few days of me tassie tour!
i dont know what possessed me to do the Grease-esque pose…must have been the chocolate highway and the oh-so-yummylicious smell of cocoa wafting through the airrrr. grease lightning go grease lightning!
it was snowing! we were caught in a snow drift on mt wellington! super cool, i say!! upon watching the video i took, i realised i can get quite spastic when it comes to such stuff. all i narrated was “this is snow..snowww snooowwww”. ah yesh.
and that’s our dorm room in centralcitybackpackers!
yeah her entire candy store (the venus confectionary, which incidentally i used as my blogskin) sells pink candy. amazing!
and that all just goes to say that on the last day, we went to salamanca market and had a really good time soaking in the atmosphere, the good food (yummy organic boysenberry and spiced apple icecream!), the kiddie buskers (the small guitar toting boy stole my heart!) and had a good time. and of course, all wore the same teeshirt. YAY US!
Episode 163: i am hot
it is amazing how fast we change from heating to airconditioning. today i thought i was going to get sunstroke just walking from Bailieu to Archi…and walking home from school i thought i felt my brain burn. and burn it did. according to the news, it was 36 deg today, coincidentally at the time i was walking home too. and it’s the hottest day in 92 years. yay me! and random flies attack my face as i walk..so i have this spasmodic jerks where i attempt to walk, wave a fly away, keep my hair from getting too wind blown and use my hands to press my skirt down lest i flash more people (i’ve flashed 3 people here already). gah. multitasking isnt my sorta thing.
AND
something just happened which totally upped my hot factor. The fire alarm in my building went off. I was dumb enough to not know that it was a fire alarm and thought it was housemate #2’s internet router making ‘taetaetae’ noises. housemate #1 and i trooped down TWENTY ONE flights of stairs (when we discovered all the other people used the bloody lift!) to find out that, and get this right, the reason why two trucks of hunky firemen came was cuz someone burnt his dinner. ah. ahhh. at least our apt didn’t burn down. Myer would have had a field day suing them.
i had such a fun time at the fluvial geomorph fieldtrip!!!! doing the fieldwork was alright, snagged my jeans on barbed wire and so my fav blue ones have a major hole in the butt. all those NSW people fault for not observing crown land (and also our fault for trespassing…oooops!). It was quite funny playing silly drinking games with our lecturers (and flouting all occupational health and safety warnings since they were our drivers home!!) and seeing how i-am-so-cool-and-sophisticated aussie guys are actually not very cool cuz they come up with drinking games like “oh, i know, let’s play the game furry animals, starting with, WOMBAT!”. i had to laugh. It was also very funny how when we played Mafia, the first one to get killed was the lecturer, and then the two lecturers turn back on us and went on a (and i quote their oral defense in the game) “it is a diabolical killing women spree”. hahhaha. i love the game Mafia, playing it at AnnTIC and with thurscg was good too. but this time cuz we’ve got a variety of people in a varied soberity states, you get reasons for killing off people was like “oh, he’s italian. mafia is in his blood. so we take his bloooood”.
and you know you’re with a bunch of geographers on a 350km minibus ride back home cuz when we played ‘i spy with my little eye something beginning with P’, you get replies like ‘paleofloodplain, pediment, paleoglaciated blahblah’ when the the word was ‘possum’. haha… oh and its good to know chinese here too, cuz when we played the ‘name countries of the alphabet’ (yes, we were playing that game at the suggestion of mr-i-look-cool-but-dont-have-cool-games-even-when-sober) and we were all stuck at X, i went ‘Xing Jia Po’. ahahahahaha.
could still tell that having different accents is a major communication problem. like when we played chinese whispers…what started off as “today we learnt that Ian (our lecturer) doesn’t know that Giordano is not American” became “today we learnt that Ian does not have a science degree” and I heard “today we learnt that Ian likes to eat korean spam” and Giordano thought i said “today we learnt Ian likes to lick his spam”. and everyone went “now deborah, how dirty of you!” and i was like “I DIDNT SAY THAT!!!!” but the chinese whispers got wierder and wierder. like how mr-i-am-cool had this T alliteration of something to the tune of “two teddies toddled towards the tightrope blahblah” and Tim, an engineer told me a sanitised version of “two times twenty two tau-crit totals…”
hahahaah
we stayed at a caravan park and slept on triple bunks! so super cool! and the way we woke up was Bec (who slept at the bottom) would wake up and inadvertently bump her head on my mattress (cuz i was sleeping in the middle) and then i would tell myself not to make the same mistake and bump! i’d hit Cathy’s mattress who would bump her head against the ceiling. all this while steph snores outside..haha
yeah we all had our own small view from our bunk but you’d get a neck strain when u try to look out without bumping your head…
anyhow, here’s my groupmates! we’re team outerbankwidth (yeah, name tells it all)
and since the river we studied irrigates the wodonga area, and aubury/wodonga has good wineries, we naturally stopped over before going home. and leached off the free wine tastings. and cheese tastings. i impressed myself this trip, to find out that my alcohol tolerance is still quite substantial and has not gone down despite the last major time being 2003. good on me!
since we were vagabonds at the winery, we had our picnic (we had picnics for all our non-dinner meals) at the pond by the winery..and there i saw duckies!
and now, i shall go convert the idiotic readings into trigo form. i had so much fun that the math ahead doesnt daunt me. nuh uh!
Episode 162: arrr arrr arrrrrrrr
and no, ‘talk like a pirate day’ is long over, matey!
arrrrrr!!! i really should trust my intuition to skip school. after freaking out that i was late and munching a haphazard breakfast and trampling as fast as i can to get to school, i reached the public lecture theatre to find ’soc+env lecture has been cancelled’. arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. i should have just slept in bed till 11! arrrrrr
and other circumstances are making me go slightly insane as well. i miss this..
and the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, kindness and self-control, against such there is no law.
arrrrrrrrrr arrrrrrrrrrrrrrr arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. i need ball guards..eyeball guards to prevent me from stabbing my eyeballs out. arrrr arrrrrrrr arrrrrrrrrrrrr. meow.
