HAPPY 43RD BIRTHDAY, DEAR!

:D:D:D SINGAPORE NATIONAL DAY! ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Next year I'll try to be around to celebrate with you. :)

Ok obviously I'm not in love with some random piece of land. It's the friends, the places, the homey feel of the place, and the memories which make up the Singapore that I know. I was planning to rant, but I guess you all hear me talk about Sg enough, so I won't. =P On Sarah's blog there's this link to the national day page where they have all the songs written for Sg's birthday in past years. I was listening to some of my old faves, like "Home", "Where I Belong", "We Are Singapore"... omgosh, soo nice. I haven't been around the last 5 years, so I don't know the more recent ones. But other ppl in Sg apparently agree with me that the older ones just somehow felt more... special. Evoked more feeling, more nationalistic fervor... maybe's it's cuz we were all in primary school at that time, and so those songs are part of our dear memories, whereas now we're grown up and have our focus on other things. I dunno. But I really do miss those old ones. =)

...ok... guess it ended up as a rant after all.

So, apart from it being national day, and me missing Sg, today was pretty ordinary. In fact, Jana and I both were bored enough to start taking weird photos. First I was playing with the salamander, David Kim. (HAHA :D)

And Jana's little turtle.

(It's not slimy... just the flash made it look that way.)

Then this other little creature in pink came crawling up.

It climbed up the doorframe...

Then came down and started being psycho with a pair of snippers....

This creature has a very weird face... very elastic. Can be pulled into many shapes and sizes.

It likes hanging upside down from unlikely places, like armchairs,

And sleeps with it's limbs hanging off its perch.

It like high places (as seen in the doorframe shot just now), and swings down to land behind unsuspecting prey.

It may look small and cute and innocent,

but beware-

It has great leaping abilities...

and will POUNCE

GRAAH, GOTCHA!

...causing a disproportionately large amount of damage.

Hahaha. Had fun taking all those. We only sorta planned the pouncing sequence. The rest of it just came into my head as I was captioning.

I'm writing a song... sounds good so far, and I'm gonna make sure I finish it. I have a terrible tendency to leave songs half-done. Very sad. So ok, back to writing it now. ^^

I don't think all those fireworks are helping Beijing's air pollution problems...

Just watched the opening ceremony of the 080808 Olympics. VERY, VERY COOL. Well, some parts were a bit draggy, but I think on the whole it was really quite awesome. I was only planning to watch the first 20 mins or so but ended up watching the whole thing... dunno how long it was. 2, 3 hours +? The beginning dances and choreography and al of it was astounding. Mom and I were like, gawking at the tv. Then when they paraded all the countries' athletes, I was just waiting for Singapore to come out. Had no idea that that section of the ceremony would take so long...

I fell asleep twice during the thing... it got to a point where mom and I started (jokingly) saying things like:

"Do you think Sg even has anyone participating...?"
"Uh, well.. I think we usually just send in some ppl and hope lor..."
"Maybe our group is so small we missed it during one of the 30-second commercial breaks...."
"Or maybe they're hidden in between some bigger countries somewhere in there and they forgot to announce..."
"Oh, oh, I know. They're gonna keep Sg until the end, and then when the audience is falling asleep, Sg will come in with just ONE PERSON carrying the flag himself. Then everybody can laugh and wake up."

So... we were pleasantly surprised to see a fairly large group for Singapore enter. =)
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Rewind~

This morning I went to school early with mom again, to help with some classroom decorations (little kiddies must have pretty classrooms :D), and then go for my Student Council meeting at 2 pm. I slept on the beanbag again for a few hours, and again had various dreams, hehehe. Also, I got to yak and catch up with Ms Perla (mom's teacher aide) while we were both working. She's sooo much fun to talk to. A lot of the time we say things in indirect ways, things that can be interpreted in more than one way, testing our diplomacy skills. Haha =3. You know. Like, word play and stuff. "It's not what you said... it's what you didn't say that I heard loud and clear." That kind of thing. Very interesting. :P

Hm... the last day or so I feel like I can't control my temper and my words as well as I know I can. Today there were numerous occasions where I "lost my cool". =( Better start praying over this.

But today I got to see Patreeya, really for the last time, I think. We took some random pictures~ I'd put more of them here but I don't think she wants me to... Actually she didn't want me to put any up. :D

Going to Pat's house to pick something up

Stuck in the fishtank~

Yeah, Pat, I bet you could just step right over that, you tall person. XD

Kadilyn and Ms Jennifer Norton, we saw them on our way out

Random shot just before going into her apartment

Our SC meeting wasn't too eventful, just an overview of what the year will be like, and what we have to do at open house on Monday... but at least we all seem to be getting along well, which is very nice. ^^

Taxi-ed home with Jana, mom went for her dentist follow-up appointment. Practiced on drums, and played some of those nice songs on piano... Like "Memory" from CATS; "(Can't Help) Falling in Love"... the earliest time I can rmb hearing that song was in Lilo n' Stitch =P; Classical Gas, etc. Then mom came home, we had dinner, and then I watched the Olympics. So yup, back to the beginning of this post.

I miss youuu, my country. ...oh. Omgosh, it's past midnight. Happy birthday! :D Will write a proper rant about you "tomorrow".

Hehe. Today I had to get up early to follow mom to school... apparently some photographers were gonna be there to take pictures for the visa stuff, and in the end they weren't so I got dragged out of bed at 6 for nothing. (Same thing happened on Tues, actually. Had to dress nicely for photograph, then in the end mom had gotten the day wrong.) Then cuz I'd only gotten about 5 hours of sleep, I went and conked out in mom's classroom on the bean bag.

Slept from arnd 7.30 to 11, which is the regular time I wake up during the hols. :P Every so often I'd wake up and change to sleep on my other side so I wouldn't end up with a cramp or crick or smth. And every time I slept, I dreamt. Kinda cool, cuz usually it takes awhile for the body to descend into the dreaming phase of sleep. So in those 3+ hours, I had about 5 or 6 different dreams. One of them was about being in Sg with my friends... at one point I could feel myself starting to wake up and I was like "nononononono stay asleep, keep dreaming, plssssss....." and managed to do it. =D

Gosh. Haven't been this attached to Singapore since I first moved away. I think everything I do here now has some thought of Sg behind it. Well, open house is on Monday and school starts on Wed... I'll see if things revert or not... I doubt it. Like when I first returned from the June trip, I thought that once I started seeing my friends and teachers from here, the Sg life would once again feel distant. But au contraire, everything I've done and everyone I've seen till now has reminded me more of Sg.

Ok enough of that. So today, after I'd rendered myself VERY useful by sleeping in the classroom for 3 hours (mom actually wanted me to help her decorate the place ^^''''), we went for lunch at KFC. Mom went back to school to work some more, and Jana and I cabbed home. We played chess, and it lasted an hour and a half or thereabouts. This set we've got now has colored glass pieces... quite nice to look at. We've been playing a lot of boardgames lately. Chess, mastermind, othello, Sorry [<-- rmb this one, Sarah and Rach?] , chinese checkers... She's pretty good at these thinking, strategy games. =) Good job, Jana.

The wonders of Facebook:
I got in contact with two guys (twins) who were my classmates.... back in nursery. Tung Ling Kindergarten. I mean like, wow, after nearly 13 years. :D Leyon, the guy I bit on the cheek cuz he took my seat while I'd gone to ask the teacher something... hahah. He still rmbs it too. Oh funny memories~ ^^ Sooooo cool sia.

I've been playing a lot of the old songs lately... nice melodies, poetic words...
Not like some of the trash lyrics or today that are screamed into mics with the music blasting away and half sounding like static....
Yeah. =)

Okay, tmr gonna have to get up early again. To follow mom to school... and have a student council meeting, da dee da. Part of me's like, omgosh, lemme sleep in the rest of my holidays. But at the same time, it's good for me to start getting back into my school-day sleeping routine. 'Nite! ^^

Last night I slept real late, and had to wake up early this morning so even though it's like only 9 pm now, I'm srsly falling asleep and cnt type properly..

Yesterday I didn't do much, but one thing that was really nice was a word of encouragement my dad passed to me from one of my teachers (last year's bball coach). Won't say what it is, in case it ends up sounding like I'm bragging, but yeah, it was very uplifting. =)

Today the waking up early was to accompany mom to school to continue helping her with her classroom. It's nearly ready, I think.



I was sorting through a big box of things the kids use for play and dressup, and found some old stuff: the pouch was mine from way back when, the mat was Jana's, and the phone (with the broken antenna) looked so much like the phone we had when we lived in Mandarin Gardens... and I'd also broken the antenna. This pic's just for sentimentality's sake. =P


Patreeya was babysitting and happened to bring the kid, Win (5 years old), to the elementary building where we were, so he ended up playing with Jana in mom's kid-paradise classroom, while Pat and I chatted away. From the back, Win looks a lot like Aunty Yee Peng's Caleb... haha.



For lunch, Pat, Win, and I went to Central. Brought him to play some games at the arcade... and some of THOSE reminded me of my earlier childhood too. Then we went into Toys 'R Us and played with the legos... yeah, more memories. What a day. :)

We came back at 3, and at 3.45 mom and dad went off to the airport to catch their flight to Sg, cuz they need to sign some papers there. Dad's also staying a bit longer to see some friends, but mom's just signing the stuff, then coming back tmr night. It's funny how she's sooo concerned about leaving Jana and I home for just one day. Giving me the bank card in case anything happens on their flight... giving me instructions and cautions over and over again as if she was going away for a month... etc etc etc. sigh. XD

I've been browsing quizzes again. Today I was on blogthings.com. Check it out for fun, if you don't have much else better to do. =) And it'll be added to the links list in case next time you wanna find the site again.


Go to the quizzes on the sides there, or in the middle. And if you click refresh, those lists give you different quizzes. Most of the (many) ones that I took today had pretty accurate results. :) Of course, when you do a quiz, don't just take the results as you get them... think for yourself how true they are.

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Just a thought:
In the dance movie "How She Move", there's a line-

"... how just one moment affects a million after it."

Which led me to also think, "...how one moment has been affected by a million before it."
Think about it. =)
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Be still my heart.
It gets tougher, these ups and downs of teenage emotions...
Trying to find words to express thoughts that are as amorphous as the wind,
Too wide, extravagant, and overflowing to be contained by language
One moment soaring, your spirit in the sky
And then
Shutting your eyes tight
Trying to forget yourself in the darkness behind closed eyelids
One moment to another
From the heights, to the depths
From the joys, to the sickening pits of fear
Insecurities...
Ramblings that tell you you're not good enough
Tears that threaten, but never spill
A volatile thing, the heart.
Reaching out, hoping...
Wishing you could stay on the highs
Wishing the lows wouldn't be as extreme and jagged as they are...
Wishing that if, there was no other way
You could just
Leave it to float away on the breeze
Let it go, forget about it
Let it go, forget about him.