nondescript in blue

Friday, December 29, 2006
Some snapshots of England

Cambridge






Liverpool - Anfield




Dover - The White Cliffs




The British Museum - The Reading Room




Covent Garden




Carolling at Trafalgar Square




Changing of the Guard




St. James Park




Leicester Square

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Wednesday, December 20, 2006

A few pre-departure notes

My contact number in the UK: +44 772 613 8773

Itinerary outline: London, Liverpool, Cambridge, Salisbury, Portsmouth, Brussels and Amsterdam.

Date of return to the US: 8 January 2007

And off I go. Wish me luck.

And a Merry Christmas to everyone.

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Monday, December 18, 2006

The sun has risen, a new day dawns.

And I am finally done with my tedious, repetitious, uninspired and frankly irritating paper. Hooray.

I need breakfast. And caffeine detox. And probably a brain transplant.

London beckons, just 2 days away. No time for daytime slumber - I need to attend to trip preparations, like compiling squee-worthy London walking guides for the terminally obsessed. In addition to the more mundance business of activating my UK mobile phone, confirming living arrangements, booking tickets, yelling at my sister not to overpack, etc. Hopefully nothing goes wrong with the air travel this time - that would just ruin the festive spirit.

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Sunday, December 17, 2006

Salmon with cheese tastes like heaven. I believe I may be addicted.

Meanwhile, I've procured 3 cans of Starbucks Doubleshot Espresso to sustain today's paper-writing marathon. The next 24 hours are going to be entirely focused on cranking out 10 pages of pioneering efforts in chemotherapy. Oh yes.

[edit: 11.30pm] Second can and third page, with an entire night and morning ahead of me. Life has never felt so good.

[edit: 5.15am] Third can and eighth page. Almost there, and still very much awake. Hooray.

[edit: 7.15am] Why do I feel the need to keep up a running commentary on the progress of a very insignificant term paper? Too much caffeine in the system, coupled with the tedium of a long but relatively straightforward paper and my glacial writing pace. Sigh.

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Saturday, December 16, 2006

After the agony, the ecstasy.

To celebrate this momentous occasion, I vacuumed my room for the first time in 2 weeks, filed away all my chemistry notes, and did my laundry. Don't look at me like that - it is a, uh, psychological thing: exerting control over personal environment as a way of wresting my life back from the tyranny of exams.

Aaaaaand, I shall COOK. On the agenda: chicken and salted vegetable soup, broccoli in (what else) oyster sauce and lovely, lovely steamed rice. Begone, miserable memories of subsisting on joyless ready-made salads and Starbucks!

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Friday, December 15, 2006

Here's a sign that I've probably spent my day productively:

Breakfast: 8 Digestive biscuits, 1 cup Milo
Lunch: Starbucks Iced Brewed Coffee, tall
Dinner: Subway 6-inch steak sub, 1 bottle Coke Blak
Supper: Orange juice

Drinking orange juice evokes vivid impressions of cramped cabins, solicitous (or not so solicitous, depending on airline) air stewardesses, ceaseless engine hum and endless hours of tedium. Dreams about airports and air travel etc. have begun popping up, right on schedule. I am also sleeping way too much for someone who's supposed to be cramming for finals.

Last exam is tomorrow, thank goodness, and then afterwards it's an all-nighter(s) rush to finish a term paper due on Monday. Which, naturally, I haven't started yet - but it's for a pass/fail class. (That's what I say now, but come Sunday, it'd be hell all over again.)

One thing I've learnt from this semester: choose study buddies well. My study buddy for organic chemistry is this grimly-driven PRC third-year Biochemistry major. We get serious work done, and there isn't a lot of irrelevant small talk - in fact when we were walking back to our dorms at the end of a full day's worth of organic chemistry (time at last for idle chit-chat, one would imagine), we were discussing Archimedes' Principle and how it relates to global warming and ice-cap melting. I made a mistake with my physics study partner, and (long story) ended up almost dropping the course 2 hours before the exam - which would have been a tragic, tragic screw-up.

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Thursday, December 14, 2006

Physics put me through the deepest hells, but hey, one more exam down and only (only?) one more to go. It would probably be wise to commence low-level panicking for organic chemistry now, while there's still time to do something productive about it. I wasn't panicking for physics, right up till a few hours before the exam when it flared up all at once and nearly made me do something I would regret. Fortunately, it's not that easy to drop a course this late in the semester.

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Wednesday, December 13, 2006

2 more exams - Physics and Organic Chemistry - and one more term paper to go. With Immuno over and done with, life seems a tad brighter.

It's a good thing the weather's somewhat warmer this week, because stress and cold don't go well together.

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Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Do. Not. Panic.

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Monday, December 11, 2006

There was some ghastly screaming coming from one of my Korean suitemates just now. Judging from past experience, she was probably reacting to late-night merry-making from our friends downstairs, whose joie de vivre seems undiminished by finals week. Good for them, bad for us.

I think this sums up mein Leben zu dieser Zeit:


今は、もう遅くなって、勉強する気分になれないけど、今週は期末試験が四つもあるから、徹夜で勉強しなければならないね。

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Friday, December 08, 2006

Being incapable of blogging anything coherent or interesting, I give all you long-suffering people the joys of... thanksgiving turkey!

Mhmmm. The pleasures of protein, instead of this carbohydrate/ caffeine/ vitamin supplements diet.

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Thursday, December 07, 2006

I shall be cranky, and sulk, and brood darkly, and crack open a new bottle of caffeine, and go into library hermitage where late-night guitar playing cannot touch me... until this period of madness is over. Otherwise, I'll be priming myself for academic disaster.

I will get through this, though, because that's what I always do, and why should this time be any different?

[edit] After attending a mind-blowing problem session for organic chemistry and being forced to realise just how inadequate my level of effort has been the whole semester, I am now truly, truly scared. Multiply that by 4 other subjects, and I'm absolutely paralysed with full-blown panic.

Crapcrapcrap

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Wednesday, December 06, 2006

My laptop came back after 2 long weeks of repair, and naturally, I celebrated by wasting time online on frivolities like this one:




Er. I wouldn't take it too seriously. Pure misanthropy doesn't work for me, and I could probably use more cynicism, but all the same, it's not completely off the mark.

Hmm.

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Monday, December 04, 2006

First snow of the season arrived this morning, and I missed it by only an hour or so because I decided to grab a few hours of sleep after staying up till 6am. The disappointment of missing the first snowfall of the season! Argh.

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Brenda - resolutely dedicated to a life of tedious stability and relentless obsession,
stuck with a mental age that is increasingly failing to keep pace with physical age.
Addicted to methyxanthines, NSAIDs, monosodium glutamate, instant gratification and certain forms of mindless entertainment. Now with a newfound addiction to pretty sweaters, online movie rental and solitary urban hikes in foreign countries.

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