Daylight savings

I really don't understand the idea behind daylight savings. Setting the clocks back just means that the sun sets at a ridiculous 5.30pm, shops get to close earlier, and everyone who wasn't paying attention in general arrives an hour early for appointments, looking really stupid. Just like the ten or so people who walked in halfway through the 9.30am service because they thought it was the 11.30am.

Maybe students'll actually be on time to lectures tomorrow - just for one day, until they catch on of course, because it's impossible to have the whole course turn up for even one lecture on time - it breaks all the laws of reality. Haha.

Oh, and Happy Halloween.

Stone-age speeds

I've been waiting for Gunbound to download for two hours. Weng's asked me to play with him because no one wants to be on his team, so how could I say no? Anyway, I've also been downloading and installing a whole bunch of other stuff because when my computer got violated, it took away all the essentail setup files and left me with a useless bunch of crap - or that's as far as I can gather.

He's playing GB right now and I swear he's on auto:
Me: I think I should change the picture on my blog, it makes me look really fat.
Him: Fat? No, you're not fat. It's a good picture.
Me: Hey, can I have my waterbottle? (right next to his computer)
Him: Huh? What? Waterbottle? Don't you have it? It's not here...

I'm still really bored. I overslept this morning after forgetting to set the alarm last night, and made it to school in fortyfive minutes - Weng packed my lunch and made me a hot drink (the darling). Caught the second half of what felt like a completely unproductive tutorial - I did half of a question (that still isnt right) and learnt about another project and yet another deadline. The afternoon wasn't much better: Managing People in Organisations, which I didn't attend. I mean I can read the text in ten minutes, why sit through an hour of him reading it out to us.

Aboslutely thrilled about the progress tests coming up, I'm all ready to break the monotony of our daily lobotomies. Wahey.

Laundry madness

It's the attack of the dirty laundry. It's spilling out of bags, out of the toilet door, almost out of my room. I don't even know where it all came from! My piles of clean clothes on my shelf doesn't look any less, yet the laundry pile seems to have propogated. It's driving me nuts - no matter how many loads I do - and I'm washing and hanging as fast as I can, I can't even seem to put a dent in it. I didn't come here to study, I came here to do laundry...+grr+

I've also hit a cleaning phase and it's suddenly dawned on me that we don't have a living room, we have a rubbish tip.

It's a boy's world

I think guy blogs have a much easier time entertaining the masses than girl blogs. Yet another inequality that, due to years of social inbreeding, has run completely rampant and is now rearing its ugly head in cyber society.

Guy blogs just have to mention sex, cars, and anal leakage, and they're set. Girl blogs have to work twice as hard to sound half as clever and they cannot use any of the aforementioned words. Sex would indicate we're whores, anal leakage would drop our sex appeal below earthworms, and cartalk makes us sound like male wannabes. Girl blogs are all deep and meaningful and 'complicated', and guy blogs are a pretty basic 'I got laid' skew to it and they're the heroes.

It's a dire predicament, ladies.

Microshit

When it rains, it pours. On the happiness vs. time graph of my life, I've swung into the negative and in a big, careening, out-of-control way too. So after the heartbreakingly mysterious disappearance of my camera, I've lost one of the other loves of my life as well. Microsoft killed my computer.

Actually, it didn't kill my computer, instead, the Windows XP service pack 2 left it a mere shell of its former self. A vegetable. And I'm still struggling with the Windows reinstallation simply because in order to finish it, I need service pack 1, which I can't get because I need to download it off the internet, but I don't even have the capabilities to download it off the internet and install it because I need the service pack. Tadaa. Welcome to the sheer moronicity that is Microsoft.

I can't believe that they have the nerve to promote themselves as a 'fast and reliable' OS, that they DARE encourage you to download service packs to enhance the stupid thing, and that they have all kinds of disclaimers to keep them out of court. What kind of sick freak can sleep at night knowing that he's costing the world's economy trillions of dollars in tech support?!

We should just all live in nests in the trees with the animals without any kind of electronic devices because they only seek to bring grief to humanity.

...and I have unidentifiable soggy lumps in my tea...wonderful.

Plugged in

Thanks to the valliant efforts of Goh Han Wen, we've overcome the adversity that is technology and the 4someorgy network is up and running with internet. You can credit the name of our network to the equally illustrious Darren Tan.

Anyhow, I can finally check email, write blogs, and chat without feeling like other people are peering over my shoulder or around their computer screens to kaypo at mine, and I promise that the MSN minesweeper challenge shall be resumed shortly too. Ahh, internet!

That's the good news. The bad news is that I've lost my baby. My little Canon Ixus +sob+. I can't find it anywhere. I'm absolutely devastated...if you've seen it, let me know?

Apron strings

My parents are always really really worried that I'm going to get distracted and flunk out of college, or that I'm going to get pregnant and lose complete track of who I am and what I need to do in life. In all realism, I'm extremely thankful for their concern, and I'm sure some of the 'we think you should focus more' speeches and emails actually do sink in, I mean they take a lot of care to phrase it very tactfully, but it does get irritating sometimes.

I'm used it, to a certain extent, I guess, I mean I get it at least once a term, but the most I can do from here is give them a vague 'Yes, Mum, I know' and hope that they accept it. It's what they want to hear. What else am I supposed to say? But how many times, do you think, will I need to reassure them that I haven't gone crazy, or worse, that I'm +gasp+ failing? I don't think it'll ever stop.

But I'm not sure I mind all that much. It used to drive me up the wall because even after so many years of top grades, they still feel the need to lecture me. I love them a lot and I do everything I can to not disappoint them. Sometimes the speeches hurt because it feels like they don't trust me, but I can understand how paranoid they are. I blame that on the media. Teenage girls are nothing but putty. Soft, impressionable putty. But not this one.

Is it halloween already?

Weng and I often exchange opinions on most of the fashion victims we see for want of better things to do. Anyhow, last night we attended the UCL boat party and while it wasn't as great as last year's, the crowd provided plenty of fodder as they trickled onto the boat.

1. Even if Elle or Cosmo says that tweed is in this fall, I'm not so sure they meant do it in pink and like your best friend, and unless you subscribe to the Airline Stewardess's Flying Fashions catalogue, please don't team it with a beret.
2. If you're going to wear a dress, then wear a dress dammit. What's going on with the jeans? Why jeans AND a dress?
3. Stilettoes are sexy. In fact, they can be SO sexy that guys will fall on their knees just to be near your feet. However, stilettoes are NOT sexy when your toes are oozing off the front of the sole and you look like you're struggling for traction on the slope.
4. Timberland hiking boots are amazing. So are mid-calf socks in dark blue. I really like green crepe dresses too, but put it together and it looks like a hillbilly fell into Monsoon or something.
5. Knowing a whole song, word for word, and then dancing those words with arm actions and lip synching in a black sparkly shirt makes for excellent entertainment.
6. If you're going to take the cap off your Harrod's bus conductor teddy bear and wear it to a party, aren't you taking the 'wear a hat' theme a little too seriously?

I'm not a fashion expert and I'm rarely ever dressed immaculately either, but for that one night, I felt all-powerful in my new, ultra-chic coat. Mwahaha.

Soapboxes

I don't know if students ever realise that because lecture halls are designed to carry noise i.e. the lecturer's voice from the board to the back of the hall, noise also carries, quite effortlessly, in the opposite direction. I wonder how many things a lecturer hears during the lesson are taken back to faculty meetings and laughed over in the Senior Common Room.

I also don't know how, if lecture theatres are designed as such, no matter how close you sit or strain your ears, some lecturers totally defy the physics of the architecture and spend the whole hour whispering to themselves.

There are so many lessons in which I've learnt more about the binge-filled weekend of a fellow coursemate two rows behind me than vector equations. As educational as puking technique can be, it nevertheless makes it very difficult to pass the math exam later in the year.

Meanwhile, I also find myself getting very excited by 'clever solutions' to tutorial questions, and reaching unbelieveable heights of happiness when I've completed entire tutorial sheets. I'm moving swiftly up the ranks of geekdom. I think I need help.

Twins

I have two current theories on partners:

1. If you've been with someone for a long time, you start to look like them, walk, talk, or even act like them. You start to become them.
2. The above point is easily helped along because you're inclined to 'get together' with another person who's quite like you anyhow.

I don't get a lot of people agreeing with me on the first one. Maybe everyone's just in a state of denial about themselves, their partners, they're parents, or their friends. It's pretty funny. My parents agree with me though - they even said that they got asked if they were brother and sister. I think Weng's parents kinda look the same, a lot of long term couples look very similar too.

Maybe it's because we spend far too much time infront of the mirror and it's essentially defined what we think of as attractive. Maybe, subconsciously, we know that if we pick someone who looks kinda the same, then the kids'll have a chance of turning out with more attractively balanced features. No clue really, but walk down the street next time and take a closer look at all the couples. People pick their pets like that too! +grin+

Moving along

FINALLY. We've signed up for Metronet and are due to be connected on the 27th, which means six days to get a modem. I cannot describe the relief that comes with knowing that there'll be internet again, soon.

Meanwhile, keeping up with tutorials is like swimming in quicksand. You get the occasional 'easy' ones but the rest just demoralise you severely, reducing you to a gormless mess. I shall continue to stare at the wall. My brain shut down after stress analysis.

Hi, my name is...

I met a lady on the tube. 'Met' might be stretching it a bit, but I definitely knew all about her and the people sitting in her 2m vicinity by the time I reached Gloucester. She was loud, and to say she was gregarious would be an understatement.

The Picadilly Line is pretty quiet in the evenings, so there were quite a few empty seats. A couple got on at Tottenham Court Road, sat down opposite her and were forcibly dragged out of their privately sweet contemplation of each other and into a loud, brusque, getting-to-know-you session. Not only were they sucked into a malestorm of personal questions and shrieking laughter, but they were made to introduce themselves to the man sitting next to her. What could they do but comply? It would've been a huge social faux pas to ignore the man but to say "nice to meet you" would have been pure hipocrisy - both parties had the same horribly embarrassed squint on their faces. Either way, the unfortunate guy was not so good at hiding his irritation, which just drew even more chatter in his direction.

Sociable and outgoing? Or drunk and bored? Should we praise her effort to get to know everyone in London or see it as an invasion of our privacy? I mean it's bad enough that we have to use public transport, but must we really converse with our fellow commuters? Most people don't even like making eye contact, much less notes about how many children someone else has and how stifled they are in their current jobs or even in their lives.

Or did she represent the last shred of community in this huge city? Of showing concern or interest in someone else's life other than her own? Was she just not a self-involved person? Sometimes I wish I could do that, too not care what everyone else thinks of me, to stay truer to myself, free of the shackles of social judgment...But only for a day I think, because, inevitably, I'm really just a sheep.

Sheer magic

Being in love is like getting your very first snow globe. Being six years old again, feeling the rush wonderment as you hold the sphere carefully in your hands, mesmerised by the gently falling snowflakes that coat the beautiful fairytale castle inside. You shake it hard, watching the flakes blur into a flurry of whiteness, seeing it swirl in and around the dainty spires in a maddened dance that leaves you breathless. Then you watch it settle, the snow drifts down ever so gently, and a sense serenity and peacefulness steals over the tiny world you hold to your heart or display proudly on your shelf.

Have you got your snowglobe?

Show that blood + tears = zero

I worked pathetically hard on Saturday and have nothing to show for it, as evident in today's tutorial. I'm sure a lot of other people had more fun than I did over the weekend, and they're pretty much in the same state. Therefore, my frustration and stress were completely in vain. The time spent getting annoyed by a few printed sheets could've been better spent fighting with Weng over CM. That addict. QED.

Case of the ex

I wonder if anyone can truthfully claim to be on good terms with their ex(s). If you're the dumpee, you let this person rip out your heart and grind it into the dust; and if you're the dumper, you have to live with the twinge of guilt everytime you remember the bewilderment and hurt in their eyes.

Ask anyone about their past and you'll usually get a carefully vague answer from a completely blank face, or, in more extreme cases, a look of anguish or grimace followed by an all out slag-fest.

I guess in some cases, when one party's being all martyr-like, they'll be thinking well okay, so we'll be friends, at least s/he'll still be in my life, then the other party can claim that everything's just peachy. It's really evil.

Things can never go back to the way it was before the relationship. It's like having a stone in your shoe, and although the passing of time dull the awkwardness, I don't think it ever fully goes...

...And my lunch break's just crawling by...

A breath of fresh air

I've decided to change things around a little, namely the site's url. Just making it more 'me'. Part of readjusting my life after a couple of disappointments. I'll get over them though, just like all the other ups and downs in life.

I've resolved to try make some money this year, coz I suddenly feel incredibly enterprising. And I'm going to go running in the park, with Weng. This ought to be good.

I've won Manager of the Year. Yea baby. I never win that. And no, playing Man Utd or Real Madrid and winning manager of the year along with everything else doesn't frickin count. Now if you took Watford and led them to Premiership/European victory, then I'd respect you.

I'm glad I've finished The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara because it was starting to give me nightmares. I had dreams of magic swords, cyborgs, shape-shifters, and Mwellrets. I never want to go there again.

I also really really really miss my dog. And being able to go online in the comfort of your own home.

Halfway through

Wednesday afternoons are like shimmering white-beached islands in the damp, oppressing gloom of weekdays. A time for doing absolutely nothing, giving yourself up to a few hours of complete idleness, ignoring the books, the lecture notes, the deadlines...only to be bitchslapped into submission the next Thursday morning.

But it is Wednesday, and there are a whole bunch of tutorials and projects hanging ominously over my head, and I've got more laundry to do. It never lets up and if I don't watch it for a couple of days, the monster that is the pile of dirty clothes gets bigger and starts to spread out from its corner.

My brother's class though - 'Agent Ashley, have you received the package?'. Mum must've put him up to it coz he doesn't talk to me online otherwise, and she worries about things getting lost in the mail on the way over here. It totally cuaght me off guard. He must get his sense of humour from me.

Otherwise, team trials are tonight. I'm quite nervous even though it should be okay. Technically. Unless the whole ULU team decides to try out, effectively displacing everyone on the IC team who haven't already left coz they're really good. I dunno, we'll see how it goes I guess.

Nineteen going on twelve

You can ask all of my closest friends and they'll tell you that I've always had more guy friends than girl friends for as long as they've known me. I have no idea why, maybe it's just harder to really bond with girls, or maybe guys are less judgmental and more easy going, or less likely to bitch (some people probably think otherwise).

Either way, I've been surrounded by guys for much of my life, speaking their language and neutralising their lewd jokes. It even got to a point last year when they started to say I wish there were girls here...

Anyhow, I haven't been completely detached from the whole sisterhood thing my whole life; I can remember in primary school we were fully convinced that boys had cooties, and you could clearly see they were dirty anyway, so cooties (or any other unidentifiable disease) was a safe presumption, therefore it was all friendship bands and My Little Ponies. Sadly, we had to go our seperate ways after primary four, and it was boy-city from then on.

Lately, I've realised that I'm starting to go rediscover femininininity and I'm actually really enjoying it. It could be the sense of loyalty to my boyfriend that makes me a little less inclined to get close to other guys (not that he minds), but I'm so thankful that one of my housemates doesn't burp, fart, or have balls to scratch (before they condemn me to a week of chores, none of my housemates are that male). It's nice being able to compare boyfriends, talk about a magazine without having to make reference to that 'hot, nearly-naked chick', and talk about girly things in general. It's even more fun when my housemate's girlfriend joins us too.

It's like I'm reclaiming my girly years after spending far too much time lost in the jungles of testosterone.

I got up early to play

The addiction has started again. Addicted to a world where Liverpool are top of the premiership, blitzing Europe, and I'm winning Manager of the Month over and over and over again... okay fine, so it's not quite like that, Liverpool are barely keeping up with the top three, and I've only won Manager of the Month a couple of times, but I really wish I hadn't started playing Championship Manager again. Okay, I lie there too, I adore playing. Too much, I think.

In the real world, we're still struggling to contact the property manager now that our hallway's playing host to a mini-waterfall and the fridge still can't close properly, and the tutorials are increasing exponentially. There's no sign of internet and the future looks bleak.

I know I'm running out of things to say, and that all this verbal diarrhoea is really just a means of fuelling my blogging addiction, but I'll get a relevant post going just as soon as I get the words to line up right.

Routine

Everything's slowly settling back into the familiar routines of last year. Real lectures have formally started and we sit in our seats from early in the morning til the sun begins to set trying to catch all the rapid-fire information we'll need to pass year 2. Exam talk has started early this year. It feels like I'm already behind on my tutorials. It's only been a day.

Dance is back on track. Saturday was harsh and I spent most of Sunday wincing in pain as I tried to loosen up my hamstrings again. Weng was laid low with a bit of a fever and cough this weekend, so I was also busy convincing him to take medicine. I'm also the proud owner of a new bookshelf. It doesn't match anything right now and it's really unfinished-looking, but I'll eventually get around to making it pretty with colour pencils or paints or something. It took us four hours to assemble.

We still have no freezer and our property manager is a lazy cow, so we have to keep chasing her to sort out our flat, keep making trips to Sainsbury's for virtually every meal, and there's no ice-cream.

Happy thirteen months Weng, I love you so so much. Btw, you have to dry your hands before you write in my organiser coz you've left inky paw prints all over the pages.

Familiarity breeds.

Do you know someone so well that you can pre-empt their every move, every reaction? Do you feel like you know them too well? Then does the flame blow out? You start noticing their little habits that stop being endearing and begin to drive you up the wall – two or three misplaced words turn into cold fronts that stretch for hours.

You start to turn into yourself, looking for the answer, asking yourself where it all went wrong, when did it start to fade? Is it your fault? Is it his? Then you start to wonder, when you watch him talking to other people, ‘does his face ever light up like that when he talks to me?’ All you seem to have been getting in the last few days, weeks, or even months are scowls or complaints. You start to forget what the cuddles feel like, the sound of genuinely happy laughter, the gentle kisses, the want and need to be near each other, with each other…the absence of which is made all the more acute by the happy couples which surround you.

“Sometimes, even when you’re sitting right next to me, you feel a thousand miles away…”

So London

The first subject-related introductory lecture left me stressing out already; and it was only about how much the design coursework makes up of this year's marks, how much work there is to do, and how much of it counts on working at peak efficiency through the whole year. Not good for the heart.

Other than not looking forward to a full day of classes tomorrow (it turns out that I have more class in one day than some people have in a week), I've been trying to get around to contacting all the various parties that I need to contact to sort out pretty much everything.

The days just fly by - you take a break for lunch and suddenly the sun's setting, and, infuriatingly, the shops and offices are all closing. You find yourself waiting a lot too. For a service-based economy, they're hopelessly inefficient, even more so than Malaysians, but I guess it's because any amount of money excites Asians; anyway, I spent two hours at the bank just to change my address and withdraw some money.

The rush always starts early in the mornings. Weng pointed out today that the way they employ that straight-legged, hurrying walk to get to work/school/the playgroup on time looks like they're racing against each other. The woman with the pram had all of them beat by the first block though. In the wet too.

On the subject of wet, I never understood the British obsession with puddles until I realised that each and every paving stone is its own water-catchment area. It's impossible to walk down the street without your jeans soaking up half the water on the pavement, leaving you feeling uncomfortably damp around the calves for the rest of the day.

This autumn completely lacks the romance of last year's golden, sun-filled days. It's all crap weather, too many things to do, and not enough time.

Once upon a time

In the tallest tower of the tallest castle, in a land far far away, there lived a fair Chinese boy with absolutely no fridge or freezer space. We're in the process of moving Weng into his hall for the year and thus is our predicament. The strain of carrying all his stuff up four flights of stairs and finding a place to keep it all is enough to deter him (especially me) from considering switching halls next term, which would see us moving the whole lot back down all those stairs and probably up somemore in another tower far far away.

It's not a bad room, it's got plenty of floor space (relatively) and it has a very cosy feel to it. The only window is actually set in the roof though, so it's more like a slanting skylight which can open about two inches for ventilation and you can look out if you stand on the chair and tiptoe. It gets blisteringly hot in the day and really cold at night, but it sure makes a handy place to hang things to dry.

This is just a short break to sort out my internet withdrawal symptoms, and now it's back on the road again. Gotta head back to unpack all his stuff.

Still at Weybridge

I got two words for you...chicken rice +drooly+

I know I sound like a glutton, but all that really means is that you haven't tried the chicken rice here.

And Liverpool just lost again, but what else is new.

A place called home

There's so much stuff! I can't believe there can ever be so much stuff! Or maybe there's not enough space. More and more bags and boxes seem to keep turning up, it's like there is no end to the amount of stuff - not particularly important stuff either; a lot of it comes under 'I'll probably need this'. Pack rat or not, after 12 hours of unpacking, tidying, and moving things, I'm finally set up. Weng and I, well mostly Weng, even hauled a 24.7kg desk six blocks and then set the thing up in about forty-five minutes. Very impressive considering he could barely bend his fingers for half an hour after he put the thing down.

I'm pretty happy with my room. Even though it's really small, it's now very much a girl's room and cosy too; it even looks out onto the garden. It felt more 'mine' when Pate, Pookie, and Christmas claimed their rightful place on my bedspread. My room's my own little slice of heaven. I miss home home though. Like a lot.

Right now we’re out at Weybridge, Zone X. It's so beautiful out here, the leaves are starting to turn with the season, and everything's a riot of green and gold. It's such a wonderful getaway from the claustrophobia of central London - I can see why Tish loves it here. We're going to look around Royal Holloway tomorrow. I know that going to a university on a Sunday sounds pathetic, but because Tish has all of four scandalous hours of lectures a week, we'd never see the place otherwise. We're also going to the nursery tomorrow to adopt a plant, and it's nasi lemak tonight!