Simply Felicious

Listening to: Walking After You - Foo Fighters

Man! It is so damn great to be back.
Currently I am You Tubing to my heart’s content.
So far I have eaten

• tosai
• wantan mee
• mee curry
• chicken peratal
• prawn sambal (with REAL chilli)
• chicken rice
• char siew rice
• fish curry

And that’s just the first three days. And I do not regret a single meal.
The weather is making me break out. So I just slap on some deodorant and continue on my way.
The Covenant is ok ok only la. Nice bods, okay plot.
I hope Damien Leith wins Australian Idol.
I miss my friends in Aussie but it’s great to meet up (and jam with) my old ones
I don’t even know what uni means anymore
Hurry up and finish your exams Mel…dah tak sabar edy!

Going to eat lunch. =D
Kisses…

Listening to: The Scissor Sisters - Don’t Feel Like Dancing

It’s almost noon and I’m leaving for home tomorrow and I haven’t even started packing! Finally dragged myself out of bed and decided to Take Charge and Get On Wit It and damn-bloody-well PACK and… I’m blogging.

Nice.

Caught myself wondering why the Scissor SISTERS sound like men!

Here’s what a healthy curiosity and Wikipedia got me:

"Scissor Sisters are an American band who formed in 2001, whose style draws from disco, glam-rock/pop and the gay-club scene of NYC. The group was named after a sex position between two women (tribadism) and their initial full name was ‘Dead Lesbian and the Fibrillating Scissor Sisters’."

There are four guys and a girl all dressed not unlike the dudes from YMCA. Ohkay, that explains way more than I needed to know.

Which brings me to (well, not really) how the hell did I accumulate so much shit in my room? I have stuff EVERYWHERE and trying to defrost my fridge is like a North Pole expedition - I had a glacier in my freezer. I washed my bathroom yesterday - the most of exercise I’ve done in a month since the exams started - and woke up with what felt like a boulder lodged in every crevice of my muscles.

Oh well…at least all that’s left to do is pack (faints) and vacuum.

My friends took me out for dinner the other night to celebrate my birthday. They gave me the most gorgeous clutch. Seems to be a favourite gift from most people…I highly encourage it, bags are practically my life.

Also got the latest Stephen King from Aruna and a chain with a key from Dorothy. I almost cried at dinner, I never got a chance to celebrate my birthday with them because I’m always home for my birthdays and so the surprise was beautiful. These girls practically buffered me through the worst year I’ve had in terms of assignments and the workload and ahem one scare in particular (note: Kiki)…so I know next year’s gonna be Shit but if I have them, I think it’s gonna be okay. Nothing like a great support network when you feel like you’re about to fall through the cracks. *death trap hug*

The exams were horrendous but…over. And now, I’m less than a day away from getting on the plane and going home. This is the moment I wait for the minute I get off the plane in Australia. Granted, I have the time of my life here but home is home. And I am blessed enough to be able to enjoy the best of both worlds.

So I’m gonna miss my girls and my hostel mates (TinKel in particular *bear hug*) but they’ll hold down the fort for me while I’m gone.

Here’s to Charades galore, the Christmas of a lifetime and the greatest time of the year. I can’t wait to see my family again, my sayang, my friends…I have to admit there is a touch of … something - I can’t put my finger on it. Nervousness, I suppose, of going home and losing my independence and becoming my parent’s daughter again (and I don’t mean in the biological sense). But I suppose therein lies my greatest blessing - that I may go anywhere and become anything in the  world but I remain forever my parent’s daughter.

On that note, I suppose it’s time to go pack.

P.S. Who is the Blower’s Daughter that Damien Rice sings about? Go find out if you want to know…it’s beautiful and totally puts the song into perspective. Thanks to Benjamin Hammond..

AND GO WATCH THE PRESTIGE!

Till I write to you from Malaysia, I bid you adieu.

Listening to: Quando Quando Quando - Michael Buble & Nelly Furtado

Some things are just too pretty that you have to stop whatever you’re doing and capture the moment. Normally pictures tell a thousand words. I don’t have a camera on me, so I’m doing the next best thing.

Adelaide experienced it’s first serious rain in many many weeks. Tonight there was some spectacular lightning bolts that snaked across the night sky and lit up the Australian sky with its tendrils. The jagged bolts were followed by some relatively unimpressive thunder but the anti-climax was surpassed by the awesome show the night sky put on for us tonight. The smell of rain is a very refreshing one - it smells of hope and renewal, all things being anew, if you need me to get technical. When it’s been raining all day and all night, like I’ve heard it’s been doing in Malaysia, it tends to get very tiresome very fast. But the farmers here need rain for their crops and the weather has been getting too dry too early in the season.

Tonight however, it was beautiful. Sombre and solemn yet magnificent in beauty and power. There is nothing understated about lightning and yet there is nothing quite so underestimated. You think you got problems and yet when you’re sitting in your room in the dark with Ben Harper on your speakers, watching the night sky light up, you feel miniscule in the grand scheme of things.

If it wasn’t so crazy I’d have gone out to dance in the rain. Thought I better not chance it - I still have exams on Tuesday. To which I have to get back to. Just needed to write this out and hopefully ‘capture’ it.

Damn I wish I had a camera on me now.

Currently Reading: Where Have All The Boys Gone? - Jenny Colgan

I’m meant to be studying but.. I am not =) End of story. I was thinking of compiling a soundtrack of my life. Songs to me are like scents, certain songs are indelibly printed in my mind’s eye because they’ve been linked to a memory I made while listening to those songs. Others were just the anthem of my life at one time or another. Some of the songs that have punctuated my life include

• Video - India.Arie: This was the anthem of my life in Form 5, I was into the whole I Am Woman, inner beauty independence phenomenon and believe me, no one rawks it quite like India.
• Always Be My Baby - Mariah Carey: Oh my gosh, Mariah (pre-boob job) was my first exposure to raw talent, listening to the queen of vocal gymnastics made me wanna be a singer and so my hair brush and I made a lifelong partnership and made our debut in front of every mirror in my house =) This song would soon be dedicated to me 6 years later on the radio by a boy I had not even known existed at the time
• Push - Matchbox 20: My first induction to real music, I was twelve-ish I think… the year I began broadening my horizon - soon followed was Shimmer (Fuel) and Third Eye Blind.
• Belaian Jiwa - Innuendo: We were 13 and performed an accapella version of this in church for a talent competition - I remember great afternoons of screaming laughter and night after night of relentless practice - we couldn’t have been that bad, we got third =) we got our first gig at a wedding the following weekend to which we all wore black and with only one mic we sort of…bombed..keke *Cheryl bares witness*
• I’ll Never Break Your Heart - BSB: omg we were freaks for these guys, every time we met all we would gush about were these dudes who never showed up in Malaysia ever again; everything we talked about was NickCarter this, AJ that… my dad used to call them The Blue-Arse Boys… like it was funny or something *seethes*
• Crazy Love - Aaron Neville : self-explanatory
• Foolish Games - Jewel: First time I ever cried while listening to a song
• Rock DJ - Robbie Williams: This was my song man, I can’t dance to save my life but you can’t say I don’t try
• Come Away With Me - Norah Jones: Always transports me to the time when I was seventeen and used to sit on the parquet floor of my room and talk to Barath on my mobile phone while it charged next to my radio
• Every Sarah McLachlan song ever released: I always crank up my Sarah when I’m feeling depressed or manic
• Paper Bag - Fiona Apple: My friend and I was going through a particularly rough ‘I Hate Men’ phase - this is a great song for the feminist soul (also listen to Ani DeFranco: Untouchable Face)
• Both Sides Now - Joni Mitchell : saddest song in the world
• Holly Jolly Christmas- Alan Jackson: reminds me of Christmas at home, with baked cookies and the tree and presents and friends and new clothes..
• Oughta Know - Alanis Morrisette : The first time my friends and I had ever heard a song that was censored because of the infamous ‘F’ word…we were what, nine?
• Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals - Live From Mars: one of the best live albums I’ve heard to date, I used to be addicted to Disc2, I would listen to Ben the minute I woke up till the second I went to bed. My friends were thinking of planning an intervention, that’s how bad it was =)
• Hell Freezes Over - Eagles : I listened to this album ad nauseam the first week I was in Australia…don’t ask me why, I was addicted to it.
• More Than Words - Extreme,(You Look) Wonderful Tonight - Eric Clapton and Here Without You - 3 Doors Down : me and the guys used to jam to these ones frequently.

Have I left anything out? Sorry for the boring entry, I just thought I needed to give these songs credit, they are literally a soundtrack of my life. Also sorta reminds me that my taste in music have broadened quite considerably

Just like jasmine can remind you of your gran’s perfume, songs can have that ability too.

Apparently.

Having a Mariah Marathon … from MusicBox to Emancipation of Mimi

Reminds me so much of the time when I was eleven and used to stand in front of the mirror with my hairbrush..actually, it may have also been yesterday hehe..

Had my first exam today — Immunology…whatever la; one down two to go.

I am so against the concept of exams, there is no way you can judge a student’s understanding of an entire year’s worth of work in a three hour paper. It is inhumane and .. arcane, I can’t seem to remember if there’s such a word but, no…arcane means obscure; archaic is the word I’m looking for. Where was I — yeah EXAMS are an extremely archaic concept — it should be shown to the door. 

The stress and pressure surrounding the entire idea of knowing a bulk of syllabus (syllabi?) and then being tested in vast proportions on the one meagre slide that you skipped because you didn’t think it was worth anyone’s time, is not only cruel, it’s barbaric. Not to mention that exam conditions can really screw a person up — I can almost bet you that students make the same amount of stupid mistakes and careless judgements in an exam as they would if they were drunk - something happens to you in an exam hall that you can’t explain!

You write things you normally wouldn’t, you leave out things you would normally stress to death, you start giving your own version of things (p.s. I rewrote my own History during SPM hehe). It’s like the second you enter an exam hall you enter an equivalent Twilight Zone area — everything seems strange, and it never bodes well if you start to think that about your exam paper as well. No, exam conditions are not a conducive environment for anything, much less a setting in which almost your entire GPA is riding on.

No - Do Away With Exams!!!

I am going to make this one of my personal causes — join it will you?

Make everything assignment based -

• students are given the opportunity to demonstrate what they understand at length and depth and present their best work.
• It minimises the possibilities of a student slacking of an entire year and then showing up to exams with a stupid photographic memory and doing better than the entire student body put together (grr)
• There is no stress when you’re in your own room - sure you slave in the meantime, but you get the end of the year off and so do lecturers/graders…everybody wins…
• …and gets to go for Christmas vacations earlier.

If you’re a brilliant student that’s shit at handling exam stress you can say goodbye to your grades - it’s unfair, inhumane, barbaric and…say it with me…archaic.

So until that day, I still have to remind myself that I still have Genetics on Wednesday and Biochem next Tuesday, can’t boycott those — my parents will beat me, they are less likely to understand my plight…good luck to everyone sitting for exams.

Here’s to :

1. Doing Away with Exams forever
2. Equal opportunities for every student to improve their GPA in non-exam conditions
3. Less chances of losing your hair faster
4. Lower suicide rates among students in coutries where exams are the Be All and End All of life itself
5. You effectively eliminate those annoying makciks whose only goal in life is finding out how many As you got in the last exam — MYOB!
6. Earlier Xmas holidays

Med students can have their regular exams :p can’t have our doctors walk into an operating theatre and refer to an anatomy book while the patient lies on the table…

Adieu.

p.s. Kel, since you almost killed me..this one’s for you…