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 schoolschemoo
Episode 324: the commonplace
listening to: this must be the place
sometimes we forget the importance of histories of places and the struggles esconced in their untold stories, and we become indifferent.
having gone for the first time to sungeibuloh, it was an interesting sight/site right from the beginning. the initially scared but then friendly stray who escorted our motley crew for most of the 1.5km stroll to the entrance and seeing that the ginormous bird landing gracefully on the crown of the normal looking tree showed signs of the delightful surprises to come. there is no plopping-on-trees nonsense in the aviary book of style.
the magnificence of the birds aside, walking around, everything seemed ordinary, nothing new. gravel-ish paths, check. grass, check. monitor lizard, check. mangroves, check. (although the name of one of the mangrove, barubaru, is seriously disingenous. barubaru? i bet that was what they said the *first* time they saw it. but to make it a name? alamak).
amazing how a small word like ‘aside’ in the previous paragraph can shift the attention to the commonplace things, huh? 😛
but really, it is the commonplace things that make the ecosystem. and the story of place contestations and collaborations between environmental ngos and le big bro, resulting in the preservation of trees, mangroves, the river and its estuaries is oft untold. ok it is always ‘told’ if you take ‘changing scapes of this country’ but to fully appreciate the importance of the place struggles, nothing beats going there.
and i think the visit gave more impetus for the thesis to write itself (naturally, a source of concern) – the continued significance of non-state actors. the continued significance of seeing the importance of the commonplace.
A commonplace life, we say and we sigh,
But why should we sigh as we say?
The commonplace sun and the commonplace sky
Makes up the commonplace day.
The moon and the stars are commonplace things,
And the flower that blooms and the bird that sings;
But dark were the world and sad our lot,
If the flowers failed and the sun shone not.
And God who studies each separate soul
Out of the commonplace lives makes His beautiful whole.
—Anonymous
Episode 266: it’s like raaaaaaain, on your wedding day
The thesis topic is on religion and the internet, two everyday common place things/processes/ARGH STOP MAKING ME DECONSTRUCT THESE WORDS LA TOOTS. and it is part of studies in the wider realm of cultural geography and social life.
writing this conceptual framework, has however, sadly removed any semblance of my social life. And in another spin of life’s jokes, an anagram of my name is bledee. license to curse. Oh Alanis, thou art tres perceptive. Life is ironic.
V and i engaged in some johnnydepping of our musical collection after eco class on thurs. despite each thinking that we’ve the most chapalang music tastes (ranging from outright trashy ABBA *blush* to feelgood Bette Midler to funneh sounding band names starting with the…like “chalets, hives, muses, concretes”) we actually have many genres in common, which is quite fantabulous methinks.
and so i now have a new favourite song, with all essential elements of easy but haunting melody, lyrics that somehow don’t make and yet make complete sense all at once, and cute emo adorkable guy. WOOT! but, why are all the good ones gay? life’s mysteries…
playing with prodigal sons
takes a lot of sentimental valiums
can’t expect the world to be your raggedy andy
while running on empty, you little old doll with a frown
you got to keep in the gameretaining mystique while facing forward
i suggest a reading of a lesson in tightropes
or surfing your high hopes of adios kansas
(‘Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk’, Wainwright, Rufus, 2001)
the T monster is eating me up! Run, while you still can! garh
Episode 241: waiting
while i was waiting for my essay to write itself, my brain started thinking random thoughts. one of which included a retort. Should people blame me for judging them next time, my retort would be, “well, my parents wanted me to.” cuz well, they did name me after one. *smirks*
maybe i should be more active while waiting for my essay to write itself. maybe if i am not in front of the screen with a mountain of books and journal articles, the keys would go tippity-tappity and coax the essay out from the minds of my trusty Lenny.
i shall proceed to watch another season of Simpsons then. Toodles!
Episode 240: mopey
humphs. i is mopey. *whines*
this is the first time i encounter a prof from cretin uni bring forward an assignment by two weeks, which includes reading a 600pg book. so next monday, ism lit review, tues asshat’s TWO assignments, and friday, HT proposal.
coupled with my stomach sneezing, a fieldtrip and a career recruitment talk tmr, i deserve a chocolate cupcake with peanut butter frosting. or just any cupcake with frosting. or just frosting. oh but said stomach will sneeze it out “either end”… bah.
mopey. do not like life now.
mummyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. mopey.
mopey.
Episode 237: trying redux
i woke up this morning and thought it was friday. the events of every monday is too much to handle. and then the cretin from cretinuni came into my mind again. and i fumed the entire day.
so i decided to wear something as a protest against cretin.
so i wore a shirt where the print was two overlapping circles, each with a circle within them, and three spikes at each end of the outer circle. here’s why.
- the three spikes are anti-codons. message to cretin “all my RNA fumes at you”
- the larger circle is the cytoplasm. message to cretin “all my cytoplasm fumes at you”
- the inner circle is the nucleus. message to cretin “not only does my DNA fume at you, my children will inherit these genes/alleles/whatever and will fume at you too, from the next generation”
i was angry all the way to night. i don’t think i’ve had this protracted fuming before. quite tiring actually.
why, in the name of puff the magic dragon, do you exist?
Episode 231: a rose by any other name is just as sweet
well, not quite.
was supposed to learn how to bike today at S house, and while I was all dressed up and ready to go (with cute rainbow toe socks to boot!), the elements decided to conspire against me and the black clouds drove us geog people (R, S and psuedo-gay-class president) to holland v instead.
After laughing over silly stuff, like how as kids we all practiced raising one eyebrow in the mirror (and today R and I just discovered we both did the same thing to curl our tongues in three. HAHA! yay my best friend rocks.) and how we people thought we were lesbian, and mimicking the ecstasy some geogprofs have over beaches, we came to the all important discussion of choosing psuedo-gay’s new name when he gets baptised next week.
the names ranged from the normal “James, Matthew, Mark” to those of the minor prophets flavour “Obadiah, Hosea, Zephaniah” to the really bizzare ones like “Seth, Zerubabbel and Nebuchadnezzar”. Because his surname is Lu, we thought he could have a post-modern name like Lu(ke); or he could be Theran, but that’d go against his current denomination. But in the end, it was unanimous. When we vote him in as class president on Monday and when he comes out of the baptism pool on Sunday, we will all shout “Nebuchadnezzar Lu”. HAHAHAHAHAH.
I’ve also decided that should I not get married but still decide to adopt a son, then I will name him Ram, and his Chinese name will be Bo Ge. He’s going to have hot buns.
I think I’ve not laughed so hard in quite a while. 🙂
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Some say God whispers through circumstances. It’s just that I had decided to scream at the top of my lungs. I promise I will stop screaming soon. It is just getting a bit too tiring on me lungs.
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If you rarely think about life in general, perhaps, now is a good time to start. 🙂
Episode 214: adios!
goodbye ye six-module semester from the depths of hell. the funny thing is the night before the last paper i am usually very mang zhang with mucho ants in moi pants. but last night, having to cram for a hist level 3 (and stupid K’s muneru valiba song in my head!!! silly indian boy!) and cultural analysis (and homi bhabha…baabaa black sheep homi wool u have?), i couldn’t even think that it was the last two papers. even after 3 pm and prancing from mpsh to forum with chowchow, i didn’t feel a thing.
but now. I ISH HAPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPYYYYYYYYYYY.
no more studying! no more being high strung with furrowed brows in the library! no more general anxeity depresssion (or whatever F called it) and chanting “i’mgoingtodiei’mgoingtodiei’mgoingtodie” the day before two papers.
HUP HUP HUZZAHHHHHHHHHHHH! (with additional lines by william shakespeare. teeheehee) i think i’m going to borrow all 5 seasons of black adder from cousin to rewatch again. since i’ve got so much time. cuz….SCHOOL’S OUT! 😀
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today i missed the 183 bus-stop, more like it didn’t stop at KRT but zoomed to heng mui keng terrace area. so had to trek back for hist paper. how silly.
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i had a really pleasant dream last night. but i don’t know what to make of it. left-hand drive? tres strange.
Episode 212: double double-jeopardy
*intro music*
Enters Regis, with wide smile, introducing contestants. Let’s begin a round of double-jeopardy!
A: Asean accepted vietnam, laos and cambodia into it’s fold because they became non-communist. (and then go on and on about it for a third of a term paper on why this makes Asean effective as a regional organisation as it interfaces with nationalism and globalisation)
Q: What is…stupidity? and carelessness. and ARGHNESS
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A: Lightning streaking across a clear blue sky when traipsing home from smcland. and there can be humongoid gray clouds over half your hdb block and shiny skies over the other.
Q: What is…mega freaky weather changes and screaming children? [it’s all your fault you people who use plastic bags!]
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A: e-z-link card issued by cretin uni which cannot be topped up at any amount less than $10 even though the typical minimum sum is $5. no amount of wheedling with mr-i-is-a-bureaucrat-masquerading-as-station-control-person that you’ve only got $5.95 and stupid machine refuses to accept your atm card helps your case. at all.
Q: What is…the duplicity of transportation policy?
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A: A dinner appointment being cancelled one hour before you are due at the place.
Q: What is…the height of bad manners?
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and the winner is, me! *applauds*
[all exit off stage]
all the world’s a stage, and all it’s men [sic], merely players.
Episode 211: randomness
walking to the toilet, this guy’s teeshirt read
Haikus are easy
Sometimes they do not make sense
Refrigerator
and my thoughts went:
um, yeah, whatever
you are totally bo-liao
Shiny marshmallows
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the bag is breaking, it is unravelling at the seams. one day, everything is going to spill out, and then, it’d be no more. no more. emptiness. a God-shaped vacuum. the butterflies will take the colours away with them.
Episode 209: in the end
22000 words, 6 presentations, 3 projects, 3 tests, 2 jobs.
it has been one helluva long semester.
Yet, after all that’s been said, done (and written), this semester was good. and mr c. s. lewis says it best in two ways
1) On friendship
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one.
Friends brought me through. 🙂 with all that “ARGH STAB YOUR STUPID EYEBALL YOU STINKING NUT FOR GIVING ME SO MUCH WORK” communal ranting, it was catharthic. more importantly, at the last lap, especially the last thursday of school when I had to wrestle with evil cultural essay from hell, when people said they prayed, i truly believed it.
oh and for posterity’s sake
2) Education
Education, without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
grappling with issues which went against the central tenet of what I believe in this semester was (and still is!) tough. I don’t know how I’ll answer my exam question, but I do hope the answer brings glory to God’s name.
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and at the end of it all, I can only say, God is good, He doesn’t send us more than we can bare.
What can I do
but thank You
What can I do
but give my life to You
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
What can I do
but praise You
everyday make everything
I do
a Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
(paul baloche *heartheart* and graham kendrick)
The Caffeine Junkie and Her Escapades 