Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Camel Brand Assorted Nuts
Just a few nuggets of thought that had chance to leave their footprints in the disheveled mess my mind has become, as I went about this day's activities.
Shrek 2 is fantastic, spectacular, great. I could exhaust the O.E.D. giving you adjectives and try to describe how good it was, but still not be able to tell you how good it
really was. So go and watch it. I wonder if I will watch it again, like Ivan. =) Great soundtrack too. I loved Holding Out For A Hero that the Fairy Godmother sang, even if she was a villain, so much so that I really felt like standing up in the cinema and dancing. Now that would be a sight to laugh heartily at. At the present moment, I am listening to that specific song, sung by Jennifer Saunders (which if you are not aware, voices Fairy Godmother). It is somewhat surprising to realise that Jennifer Saunders, of French and Saunders (the programme which hilariously spoofed Star Wars Ep One and Fellowship of the Ring, as well as other movies like Thelma and Louise) fame, can actually sing. But then again these British comedians can just about do anything, they are so damn brilliant.
Speaking of soundtracks, I discovered the reason why Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah sounded so familiar when I heard it on The O.C. Turns out I have heard it before on the Shrek soundtrack, which I do not actually possess, but have had chance to listen to it at a friend's house.
To scrimp and save on a few cents so I can accumulate a few more dollars on movies and stuff (which really does not quite make cents, but still), I have decided to maximise the ghastly horrendous abysmal scandalous amount of money I spend on public transport every time I go forth into the greater unknown, by only going out on the days I have to go to RJ and teach MQ. That way I minimise wastage. Which therefore explains why I went to watch Shrek 2 before MQ today.
I was so incredibly high after watching Shrek 2 that I could not for the life of me talk straight, nor make any sense of lipid metabolism, and so ended up rather off my rocker at MQ training. I think they are all used to it, anyway. My madness, I mean. L-- L-- is auditioning for Singapore Idol (sic) by the way, so we will all troop down to Suntec City and give him our support. And laugh madly while at it, no doubt.
Every MQ session it keeps hitting me in the cranium that I have no real idea whether what I am teaching will be useful to the students when they go for the quiz, because we trainers have no idea what kind of questions the question-setting committee is setting, while the question setters, save one, have really no idea what MQ is like, since all of them have not taken part in the quiz before, save one, as I said. Deaf leading the blind. All for the sake of hallowed equality. Tell me where the equality is when you send kids into a quiz where they are supposed to see the fun in Medicine, which I really saw back in my time, only to be bombarded with questions that are truly way beyond their depth. and maybe even beyond the depth of an average medical student? When the trainers have no concrete idea of what the questions are going to be like, and thus cannot conceivably try to reduce the already-gargantuan amount of information these students have to grapple with, on top of their A level syllabus. When people have the decency to say the kids should know everything since they have been exposed to the subjects for two years.
It is laughable that all I can do is complain, considering my position. It is what I chose, though, and for all my complaints I cannot say I would prefer to be a question setter, since all my joy comes from my juniors. I just cannot help but feel that I should do some more for them...
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How is it that discman earphones always get themselves into impossible tangles, that I have to spend minutes trying to separate the haphazard nest of coils before I can ever listen to my CDs, so much so that the idea of even using the discman in the first place raises chills in my heart at the thought of the hopeless bundle that will emerge from my bag? It must either be some secret conspiracy between the earphones (or perhaps more generally anything cord- or rope- or string-like) of the world that when tucked into dark pouches, away from the observing eyes of their owners, they will proceed to partake in some clandestine ecstatic coupling, twining in and out of themselves in sinuous shifts, a dance as convoluted as the twisted result. It definitely trains one's patience, though, trying to untangle everything.
Of course, one could try coiling the cords around the discman to prevent too much tangling, but the wires seem to also conspire to de-coil themselves and get into worse tangles than before. Besides, I think that coiling the wires kinks the delicate circuitry inside and damages the wires prematurely, so I do not practice it.
Personally, I do not like to use a discman overmuch, and thus my discman is still the model I bought in Sec One, which by today's standards is pretty obsolete, but still works, and that is really all that matters to me. What makes me feel queasy is the fact that the way the earphones send the sound straight and unadulterated into your auditory canals, such that my brain tends to intepret the source of the sound as being somewhere in the posterior part of my cranial cavity, which if I think about too long starts giving me a massive headache. I can almost feel the sound echoing about in my cranium, and tickling my temporals, which is a terribly strange sensation.
But that is the kind of aversion I have with technology. I think TWL put it rather aptly, if a bit crudely, when she describes people like us as "techno-dinos".
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Almost had a cardiac arrest when Shinsen Subs pulled off all the Sonchou FMA fansubs they were hosting without any reason, while no other site I visited seemed to have any updates for FMA. I thought Sonchou had announced they would stop fansubbing FMA. But thankfully, it turns out that it is just a break in release, and episode 33 will be released next week instead. I think I becoming too obsessed with FMA, so maybe I should lie back a little and watch other animes... It scares me, this addiction.
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I think many people know that I have some kind of compulsion to squeeze this particular person's cheeks (for ease of narration, let's call him X). Okay, now I really sound perverted. But X has such cuddle-able cheeks, if cheeks can really be cuddled. I now realise I cannot bring myself to squeeze. Anyways, I saw this person at the bus stop today with cheeks that looked very similar to X's, but by far not as cuddle-able, and I had to really resist this compulsion to squeal and cuddle his cheeks. Not looking at him helped quite a lot, but to resist looking was terribly difficult.
Ms C--: "Cheeky boy erh. Cheeky erh."
Another compulsion that I tend to need to suppress greatly is that I am obsessed about grammar, punctuation and spelling, and thus when I see something wrong I feel the need to point it out. Of course, I know my levels of knowledge about spelling and punctuation are really pretty low, but I have this inexplicable nagging in the back of my head when I see something that is incorrect. But of course I have to suppress it, since I hardly think leaving comments on people's blogs telling them of the various spelling and grammatical errors they made is going to endear you much. But I would appreciate if anyone tells me about errors they spot in my blog, Seriously. I am rather lazy to check for errors sometimes, especially since the entries are really long (see, I know it too!), so errors are unavoidable.
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At this point in time I must complain that almost all of the above were painstakingly re-typed from memory after the computer most tauntingly crashed in little steps. There were the first signs of crashing, which I believe was caused by my having too many programs running in the first place, after which I scrambled to save the document before all was lost. The computer allowed me to get as far as the Save window before it most irrevocably went kaput. How frustrating. It explains why I am still not asleep at this mad hour. You think I could go to bed, without finishing something I started?
Many many thanks to Ivan for helping me scan my pictures, after Hope did valiant battle with the scanner-problem Balrog and lost. I kind of screwed up some stuff though, for which I feel terribly sorry. I am such an idiot (yes yes that sounds familiar, but I mean it).
I need to do some editing to the pictures, after which I should be able to finally open the gallery. Please do not anticipate too much, for I fear you might be sorely disappointed, since there are not too much more than a handful of pictures. Probably a dozen or so.
Avaris / 5/26/2004 01:17:00 AM
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