nondescript in blue

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

For some comic relief, check out what I had for Japanese listening comprehension today:

「牛乳に相談だ」　(literally: 'consult with the milk)

Wait for the page to load, click on [TVCM], and view the TV ads (which they call テレビCM - I am just as befuddled as you are) by clicking on [CMをみる].

The Japanese seem to have some very bizarre ideas about TV commercials. And apparently, these won awards.

I have had more than my dose of entertainment for the day.

words were spilled on Tuesday, October 31, 2006

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Sunday, October 29, 2006

I have an organic chemistry midterm on Wednesday, and once again I feel like a second-rate overachiever. Deducing structures, developing syntheses and proposing mechanisms are all wonderful intellectual challenges, demanding a combination of chemical knowledge, logic, spatial reasoning, intuition, experience and persistence - which is all very intoxicating on a good day.

But right now, my syntheses look half-baked, my mechanisms hopelessly arbitrary, and I haven't started on revising spectroscopy yet. And this is just introductory organic chemistry, damn it. As one of my chemistry professors quipped, what we are learning is analogous to 'See Tom run,' while he has the equivalent of Dante's Inferno on his shelf.

... don't look at me like that. Academic ambition drives my entire existence. There's big money staked on my being academically brilliant. Thanks to acceleration, I have the semester standing of a junior (3rd year undergrad) now, along with all the associated academic expectations. Hell, I'm already preparing for my senior's thesis.

So why am I getting stuck on sophomore-level problems? This is unacceptable.

words were spilled on Sunday, October 29, 2006

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Wednesday, October 25, 2006

I got into trouble with my Japanese professor for submitting a script with unacceptable content, mostly the product of my partner's misguided notions of injecting fun and humour into what would otherwise be a routine exercise. As it turned out, of course, sensei was not at all amused. AT ALL. When she told us that she was 'very upset' when she read our piece, years of academic conditioning kicked in and I felt like I often did in primary school, where the teachers were demi-gods to be appeased and criticism From Above meant utter shame and humiliation.

In my mitigation, I did warn my partner that his personal sense of humour might not be the best approach to take for a piece of graded work, and it could have been much worse if I hadn't deleted some wildly inappropriate passages, but I shouldn't even have let his ideas prevail in the first place, damn it. Just because someone thinks I'm a boring person with no sense of humour doesn't mean that he's an astute observer of human behaviour, and that I should discount my personal opinions about the matter and submit to his supposedly superior point of view. When it comes to being a model Asian student and pleasing Asian teachers, at least, I would like to think that I have some valid notions. All those years of toil under Singapore's education system ought to have counted for something. Why the hell should I throw all that acquired wisdom (actually, just plain common sense) away just because some idiot thought that it would be funny to ignore Japanese social conventions?

Because I'm also an idiot, that's why.

I was so disturbed by this incident that I had to watch another episode of Ouran High School Host Club. And it's midterm season again, so I foresee more Ouran indulgence.

[edit] After sorting things out with sensei and some rambling around the campus with my camera, I feel much better. I've reassured myself that my 真面目な学生(serious student) image is still intact.

Now for a lightning trip to the supermarket for some badly-needed groceries. Being off meal plan, it's a constant effort to stave off malnutrition. I've been told that I've lost weight. If that's so, I really haven't noticed. Way too busy dealing with the daily struggle for survival.

words were spilled on Wednesday, October 25, 2006

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Saturday, October 21, 2006

'The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Complete Recordings' will be released on Nov 7. About bloody time, too. I have been pathetically scouring the net and pining after it for months.

Marco Beltrami (I, Robot, er... Scream, Resident Evil, Underworld Evolution... you see where this is going) is coming to Brown today. Of course, I'd rather have Howard Shore, Thomas Newman, Gregson-Williams, Alexandre Desplat, Michael Nyman or Brian Tyler, but a film composer's a film composer and since I've never met one before, the novelty still excites. Though if any of the above-mentioned ~~gods~~ guys were coming to give a lecture at Brown - I'll bouncing off the walls and scaring everyone with a hypermania episode.

words were spilled on Saturday, October 21, 2006

Monday, October 16, 2006

I find the summer course catalogue rather intriguing, and since I'll be spending most of the next summer at Brown slogging away at some research project anyway, why not take some fun courses on the side? Take for example PS0155: Intelligence and Economic Espionage. Better yet, it has no prerequisites - good news for a dilettante with zero Political Science background.

Though I'm not sure how kindly it will be Looked Upon.

(How I adore the passive tense.)

[edit] For the past few weeks, cooking (especially cooking for other people) hasn't been particularly relaxing. More often than not, it puts me into frazzled housewife mode: I circulate from table to sink to stovetop cleaning chopping rinsing cooking in a perpetual state of nervous panic, get snappish and irritable at people, try to do things as efficiently as possible while worrying that I'm way too slow, and that maybe all this is just a big waste of time and energy. And when I'm cooking, I'm usually incapable of normal conversation, which is a serious deficit - not to mention a significant source of stress - when you have friends over for dinner.

Recently, though, the thing that really gets to me is the sheer lack of basic kitchen etiquette as shown by some of the other kitchen users in this building, who casually scatter their soiled utensils around, and leave their mess for me to clean up. Why I should be the one to do this, and do it anyway, even after cursing them all to hell and back - I don't know. What can I say - I do things for inexplicable reasons that even I don't understand.

(I do apologise for the excessive indulgence in italics. It's hysterical and unbecoming and - oh, I should just get back to sober, serious work.)

words were spilled on Monday, October 16, 2006

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Sunday, October 15, 2006

It's nice being the first one to be up and about and making (and eating!) lovely buttermilk pancakes while the rest of the dorm is still sleeping off the hangover from last night's exuberance.

Unfortunately, it also means that you get to be rudely greeted with the leftover carnage from last night, and it wasn't pretty. On the 6th floor, where I live, one of the exit signs was broken and dangling from the ceiling, and the sign on our suite's door, with our names on it, had been ripped off.

But better things awaited down on the 4th floor - the bastards hadn't confined themselves to mere public property vandalism, oh no. They had to make a public hygiene statement as well. Right in front of the exit to the terrace was a pile of extremely malodorous human excrement, which I had to avoid on my way out to dispose of trash. And there was a wet patch of what looked suspiciously like urine on the 5th floor, but by then I was beyond disgusted.

They can have their parties, get drunk, get high, whatever - I don't care, neither the noise nor the pot bothers me, as long as there's a locked, steel door between me and the pandemonium going on outside - but I really wish they could be more civilised about it. Faeces on the carpet really pushes all my buttons in the wrong way.

words were spilled on Sunday, October 15, 2006

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Friday, October 13, 2006

Toronto photos are up.

Somehow, maples seem prettier in Canada. Or maybe I've been brainwashed by their flag.

Had dinner at an Indian restaurant with Ann and JiHee, for the first time in what felt like forever. Just because you live in the same suite with someone doesn't mean you see each other all that often. In fact, paradoxically, you may even end up seeing each other less, because living together takes all the motivation out of initiating extra interaction.

I had 9 hours of sleep last night, and still couldn't stop myself from falling asleep at lecture. There has been, I think, a mild headache bugging me all day, probably from caffeine withdrawal. To make things even better, the suite downstairs is hosting a huge party tonight. By huge, I mean that the whole of Grad Centre Tower D has been invited. I may go, I may not - just to see the silly buggers who have been enriching my life with their late-night music-making and marijuana.

words were spilled on Friday, October 13, 2006

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Wednesday, October 11, 2006

After today's immunology midterm, which doesn't bear talking about, I needed a distraction that I could squeeze into the 50 minutes before the next appointment on my schedule, so I watched the first episode of Ouran High School Host Club.

... I think I need to go traumatise someone else with it.

words were spilled on Wednesday, October 11, 2006

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Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Toronto was great fun, although the travelling was as time-consuming and traumatic as usual. I missed my Northwest flight from Boston Logan to Toronto due to traffic gridlock on my way to the airport, but, thanks to airline staff competence and extraordinary good luck, managed to get rebooked on Air Canada - which was an even better deal than my original flight.

Photos will have to wait, because I'm back to being smothered in midterm hell.

[edit] Now that I've realised that there's no Physics lab for this afternoon and I'm technically free to study Immunology like I should have been doing since, like, the start of term -

I'm wondering why I can't seem to relax, or even breathe normally. The brain needs oxygen - fast, shallow and irregular just doesn't cut it. At least, there aren't any nails left to shred, although there's no telling what new, nasty nervous habits I am capable of acquiring.

Back to midterm hell, and I promise to stop procrastinating.

words were spilled on Tuesday, October 10, 2006

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Thursday, October 05, 2006

Tomorrow I'll be off to Toronto to rendezvous with Woon Teng for my Columbus Day weekend getaway. There will be the Niagara Falls, the usual touristy things to do, high living at a youth hostel... I'm pretty jazzed - or would be - if not for the necessity of getting all my piled-up work out of the way before I hop off for a blissfully unproductive weekend. And it's a lot of piled-up work, because I seem to be doing everything by fits and starts these days - alternating between periods of frenetic diligence and laziness. Bah.

The TV adaptation of Mists of Avalon is not very good, but entertaining nonetheless. It doesn't come close to Marion Zimmer Bradley's original epic, but who can resist seeing all that tangled Arthurian romantic melodrama onscreen, overblown to the point of hilarity?

[edit] I feel remarkably sober, for the first time in more than 2 weeks. Sober enough to sincerely regret all the hysterical dissipation that I'd been indulging in at the expense of good, solid, serious work.

Back to atonement.

words were spilled on Thursday, October 05, 2006

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Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Recipe for a wonderful morning: a shower, followed by hot pancakes, served with glops of butter and honey, and a cup of steaming Milo. To the merry accompaniment of Card Captor Sakura music.

My dinner for last night, sliced beef stir-fried with flowering chives, green onions and garnished with coriander -

Took me freaking forever from start to finish, but it was worth it.

words were spilled on Tuesday, October 03, 2006

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Sunday, October 01, 2006

Argh. I now know the... er, physiological reason behind the bad week I was having, and I feel like a complete fool, because it's not the first time this has happened and I ought to have realised it from the start. Damn.

I'm flirting with the idea of getting a diagnosis for PMDD so I may qualify for a fluoxetine prescription. Ever since Peter Kramer came to guest-lecture for one of my biology courses, SSRIs have been a subject of mild fascination. Of course the more sensible thing to do is to cut back on caffeine and scale up on exercise and get socially active. But still - hmm.

I've spent too much time in Prozac Nation, it seems.

words were spilled on Sunday, October 01, 2006

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