nondescript in blue

Saturday, May 27, 2006

That's me - yes, me - at HOLLYWOOD, being the model tourist. Squint to see the iconic signage.

Frankly, Hollywood is best viewed on the screen. Take away the clever camera angles and lighting, the make-up and expensive gowns, all that red carpet dazzle, and all you have left is a couple of blocks of famous buildings along a street that is only impressive if you unfocus your eyes, blank out the dowdy souvenir shops, lousy diners and the vulgar tourist trap atmosphere of the place, and think glossy Hollywood thoughts - hard.

And that's just Highland Hollywood. A large part of Hollywood is a somewhat decrepit, sprawling town, indistinguishable from the rest of semi-urban Los Angeles. Or at least, the part I saw when I got off the subway at the wrong station and spent an hour wandering around lost with my roommate. You have to pay to see the homes of the rich and the famous, perched up high on the hills of Hollywood, away from the unwashed masses. No tales of celebrity spotting from me, I'm afraid. Besides, I'm so horrendous with faces that I probably wouldn't even recognise them anyway.

I actually find San Diego to be more appealing than LA. It has a cohesive, compact and aesthetically agreeable Downtown, beautiful weather and beaches, and is less... socially complicated. I can wander the city of San Diego in relative security, but I lack the street-smarts to tackle LA. The City of Angels has to be treated with respect and the utmost wariness, and is no place for a blundering tourist with the commonsense of roadkill. Like me.

[edit] If I don't screw up in The Biggest City in the World aka Tokyo and miss my flight, I am scheduled to arrive at Changi Terminal 2, 1:20am, May 31. The flight number is SQ 11. I am coming hooooooooome.

words were spilled on Saturday, May 27, 2006

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Monday, May 22, 2006

OK. I'm in LA, typing away furiously at a terminal with only 15min internet access, so forgive me for being brief. I will probably be going to Hollywood today, although the un-Californian rain does dampen one's spirits, and I'm lodging at my roommate's place in the East Los Angeles ghetto - which hopefully isn't as alarming as it sounds, but I do draw stares from inquisitive Hispanic residents wondering what the hell an Asian girl is doing in a neighbourhood like that.

Er. My time is running out. But I'm glad finals are over - all of them generally sucked, and I did my Japanese paper in a kind of half-daze. But now I'm in the Sunshine State, with the Providence weather on my heels. Oh well.

words were spilled on Monday, May 22, 2006

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Friday, May 19, 2006

後は日本語の試験を受ける。　今、大雨が降っていて、気持ちの悪いだ。　本当に夏休みを楽しみにしているけど、今はどうしても快活にならない。

でも、最後の試験だから、だいじょうぶだよ。　自信を持って、望みを失わない。

words were spilled on Friday, May 19, 2006

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Tuesday, May 16, 2006

I realise now that I am not one of those people who can thrive on irregular naps, sporadic meals and lots of caffeine - not even for a few days. It's not something I can keep up - it all quickly degenerates into recognisable symptoms of fatigue, inability to concentrate, irritability and moodiness which aren't conducive for productive studying so...

Back to work, because it seems to be the only thing that helps.

words were spilled on Tuesday, May 16, 2006

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Monday, May 15, 2006

The caffeine pills that I procured at the campus minimart are bright yellow in colour and horribly so. If I take all the pills at once, 16 in total - 200mg of caffeine each - I could attain the minimum lethal dose. But of course, I have 3 finals to go and I can't possibly want to mess them up like that, so I shall stick to the recommended dose and try not to distract myself too much cramming cell biology for tomorrow morning's exam. Wish me luck.

words were spilled on Monday, May 15, 2006

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Friday, May 12, 2006

My first final is 3 days away and I'm now in a healthy state of near-panic, because the last 3 days have been mostly spent valiantly attempting to conquer Japanese, with the net result being a woeful sense of inadequacy whenever I tackle one of the sadistically difficult translation exercises my professor seems to love so much.

I need to start seriously memorising signalling pathways and cell cycle protein interactions for cell biology - a boring course that is only hard because it isn't graded on a curve and the absolute cut-off for an A is plain ridiculous.

Organic chemistry... well, I've always had annoyingly high expectations for that one after getting a 102/103 for my first midterm, but that was, of course, a bad idea, because ever since then perfectly decent grades became hideous disappointments. I'm very much afraid that organic chemistry has caused me to revert to the bad old days of primary school academic kiasu-ism, at least where this course is concerned. I still find synthesis problems and mechanisms... interesting (not to use the word 'fun', but well), but organic chemistry has put me in a state of semi-despair and utter self-disgust, because I'd thought that I'd grown past petty grade grubbing, and well, no.

And, erm, the music course that I took pass/fail? Got a 97 on the final exam. And apparently my paper on "The Music of China's Minorities: Constructing Ethnic and National Identities" was "well-written and well-structured, with an excellent bibliography", when I was merely having fun with Chinese Communism. Needless to say, an A which isn't going to show up on my transcript. Nice.

Back to memorising more Japanese set phrases and paired adverbs which our professors completely glossed over in class. *cries*

words were spilled on Friday, May 12, 2006

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Thursday, May 11, 2006

午後、勉強するつもりで図書館へ行ったけど、コーヒーを飲んでも眠くて居眠りをしちゃったので、やっとドームに帰って、勉強をしてみた。

しかし、今、勉強するのがつまらないって思っているので、コンピュータを付けてブロッグをしている方がいいって。最終試験は来週で、時間がないのに、勉強する気がしない。でも、今、ルームメートがいないし、周りは別に静かだ。どうしようかなあ。

じゃ、そこまで。勉強しなくちゃいけない！

words were spilled on Thursday, May 11, 2006

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Friday, May 05, 2006

With finals one week away, the level of partying on campus seems to have shot up exponentially, if the racket going on outside (at bloody midnight) is any indication. The halls are probably going to be saturated with marijuana and strewn with empty beer cans and plastic cups soon.

I've finally been inspired to buy noise-isolating earphones. I will happily endure the discomfort of inserting those things all the way into my ear canals, because maintaining my sanity in these trying times is my top priority at the moment.

words were spilled on Friday, May 05, 2006

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Wednesday, May 03, 2006

I have this 5-page cell biology paper to write, about E-cadherin/catenin and its role in breast cancer. Which is a rather reasonable deal, really. The subject is understandable, not too broad, and sufficiently interesting. (And if all else fails, I have Red Bull and hyperactive anime music.) But to my dismay, I find that the very nature of research gets in the way of a nice, comprehensive paper. Because independent studies sometimes agree with one another, which is convenient and a source of great relief to the struggling student, but more often than not they don't. One study suggests that adhesion = tumour suppression, another one shoots back that adhesion is neither necessary nor sufficient, and a bunch of others say that everything depends on the type of cancer, histological subtype, clonal selection in cell lines, and finally some clever bugger proposes a mechanism of action that is missing some crucial bits that no-one has any idea about, and so on. And then you are faced with the daunting prospect of reconciling a more than a decade's worth of mutually contradictory findings within a 5 page limit. You can't tie everything up with a nice neat bow - science is too messy for that. Of course, I still consider it a whole lot less messy than the humanities, but for now, I just wish the journal articles would bloody agree on something.

Blast.

words were spilled on Wednesday, May 03, 2006

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