among the obvious and more generic pros, there’s this one extra special benefit to being a happy, smiley, naive person. ditto that for being the youngest. why? because people tend to think you’re easy to bully if you’re young and happy and smiley. and oftentimes, by some strange twisted version of an inferiority complex, they also tend to assume that you’re kinda dumb. and that you’re easy to manipulate because you wont see it coming or are too nice to retaliate even if you did. so.. somewhere in between all the camwhoring, the fake smiles and all the false support, they let down their guard and they show you their true colors. all the while thinking you’re too dumb or too naive to see it. and that’s when you see who all the ugly people are. and that’s how you know who to avoid.

:)

first things first: i just heard that Bill Clinton is going to KL to speak. what!!! i have had a supercrush on Bill since forever, so i am understandably very upset that he chose to speak in my country JUST when i arrive at his.

secondly: there’s a rumor going around school that Blake Lively (Serena of Gossip Girl) is matriculating here at Columbia beginning next year. that is crazy, considering how the application deadline for the class of 2013 isnt even ovet yet, much less the decisions. but if the last few episodes of Gossip Girl are anything to go by, Serena van der Woodsen can charm her way into any Ivy even before she actually applies!

so i finally got around to sorting out my pics from halloween. there are so many of them!! here are some of my favorite pics, mostly because the costumes are (kinda) ambiguous, and i can as usual make the promise of a one buck prize to the first person who hits the right guess. guys, these one bucks really do exist, i swear. dont let cynicism rob you of your dollar!

1. a stranger on the train. this costume is actually pretty obvious when you see this dude in person, because he had all the gear with him… and wtf i guess it’s pretty obvious from the photo too since you can see the symbol on his clothes. bah.

2. this guy got his colors mixed up.. because he was more white than grey

3. aiya very easy if you all cannot guess this one i will smack you

4. this two come in a pair. i only recognized them because one of my friends dressed up as the guy in the left once. haha they were really happy that i knew their characters.. the girl on the right told me that everyone thought she was just a random tiger

5. this is nick the handsome <3 ahh his costume is amazing. if you can guess what he is i'll give you $1.50 !!!!

6. the ambiguous costume here is debbie’s, the girl in the middle. she says you have to stretch your imagination a little bit before you can get what she is. haha it’s so freaking out there. but here’s a hint anyway : those are pink hearts on her cheeks. not that her character has hearts on his/her cheeks… she just thought it was an appropriate symbol :P i cant stand it la she’s just too cute. and to add to her cuteness, she drew those hearts with pink highlighter HAHAHAHA. oh and sorry had to block out my front cos it was a bit indecent :P

7. okay, this one is a no-brainer. the hint is the badge she’s wearing; it says Mavericks. if you cant recognize her by face or by the Maverick term, then you probably wont know who she is! i thought i was going to see lots of people dressed up as her, but surprisingly i only saw three. i asked all three of them “are you dressed as _____?” but disappointingly not even one of them said “you betcha!”. geez. play the role, you guys!

8. HAHAHAHA I LOVE THIS COSTUME. it’s so awesome. the hint is me trying to eat him!

9. probably not guessable if you dont follow US politics. saw many variations of this character! all of them with the real name Joe!

10. BEST COSTUME EVER. if you can guess what they are, you are beyond godlike. the hint are the thingies that they have on their neck! cannot say what it is la, cos very obvious oredi like that

11. i was VERY impressed with this costume! i spotted him from my seat in the subway.. and all i saw of him at first were his metal claws.. and i thought ‘oh.. wolverine.. yawn’. but then he stepped into view!!! and i freaked out!!! and started pointing at him like a mad person. haha. he started posing for me! and i just had to take a picture. guess who!

i wish i had been more diligent that night with the picture-taking. there were definitely lots of very awesome costumes out there, many of which totally boggled the mind. like there was this guy who was walking around in a bright neon costume that actually glowed, complete with white glowing umbrella. to this day i still have no clue who he was dressed as.

and i cant wait to blog about my favorite costume of the night! it’s better than ANYTHING i have ever seen, and that includes a guy from my hall who went as a Metrocard (subway ticket – he made himself a sandwich board designed to look like the actual ticket) and a girl who went as a Facebook page :D haha stay tuned.

the workload here has been so crazy. i wish someone had warned me how insane the pace here can get. i keep forgetting that i’m not back home anymore, where getting A’s was actually easy and all i needed to master was the art of mugging and regurgitating. le sigh.

i know i really have to step up my game if i want to do well here, but i just feel like there’s so much to see and do here besides freakin’ homework. yet at the same time, i feel so crappy when i see all my classmates handing in their assignments and essays and staying in to study when i’m just out there goofing off and taking random train rides to nowhere. people here.. are not human. they seem to get so much work done in such little amounts of time, and there’s loads of the typical thing where they go ‘oh i havent studied’ but they end up getting A plusses on all the tests and quizzes :( i mean.. really.. i thought i was spending a lot of time studying here, and for a while i was getting really angry at myself for wasting so much time doing homework when i could be out there exploring the city and going to museums and art galleries, but in comparison to some of my peers, i’m not doing nearly enough work. so many of them stay up till the wee hours of the morning studying, every day.

midterms week was especially sucky. i spent about two weeks barely sleeping and fueling myself with red bull, lots of energy drinks and as much coffee as i could get my hands on O_O i was just so tired and stressed out all the time, coupled with the fact that i couldnt really stay awake anymore because coffee was starting to lose its effect on me and red bull, while effectively lending me the energy that i needed, would give me those horrible hangovers in the morning. but i was so desperate to stay awake that i just kept chugging the stuff anyway.

but guess what :) over the weekend before my last midterm paper, i got something really cool in the mail :) i got..

Puppy was telling me how he drinks green tea to keep awake, and because i’m so used to drinking chamomile tea to go to sleep, i’d never really thought of tea as something that could be used to keep people awake, even though i knew at the back of my mind that tea contains caffeine. so i recently started buying mugs of english breakfast tea from the university cafes, and found that tea actually does work really well on me. while it doesnt give me that electric buzz that coffee does, it does keep me awake enough, but without dehydrating me or giving me headaches the way coffee does for me these days.

so it was really nice to get a box of tea sent to me all the way from Malaysia :) it’s a special kind of tea called Hirameki, which means to ‘get inspired’, and says the box: if you need to feel relaxed but alert, you can ‘get Hirameki’. that’s exactly what i need for midterms week – something that will keep me awake but wont cause me to be jittery. it seems the active ’special’ ingredient that defines Hirameki is this thing called ‘theanine’. i’ve never heard of theanine, so i looked it up online and found that it’s an amino acid commonly found in tea that reduces mental and physical stress (!), produces feelings of relaxation (!!), and improves cognition and mood when paired with caffeine (!!!). zomgs.

thank you to the secret ice cream-loving person who sent me this box of tea all the way from Malaysia! you really shouldnt have :) … haha but then i’m totally not complaining!! tea, like everything else, is so expensive here in NY. and now i have a 100 free teabags of stressless and awakening tea!!! take that, super-expensive Blue Java cafe with the mean cashiers. patronize you i shall no longer.

anyway, ya man, a 100 teabags. my brain wasnt working as i was opening the box, and because i expected to see something like only ten teabags in there, i kinda ripped the box open a bit too quickly.. and sent teabags flying all over my room. wtf.

i’m having my second calculus midterm in about 16 hours’ time. it’s going to be my first coffee-less exam. Lipton, if you help me through this exam, i will love you forever and ever. i will even play your online game for hours on end. just please! give me an A for calculus!!!

wish me luck guys :( i didnt do too well for my first calc midterm and i really need to compensate for that with tomorrow’s exam. aaaaaaaaaaaa >___<

P/S: lo and behold, the Hirameki Way of brewing tea:

when i step back to observe the aftermath, i always think it’s so strange how sometimes all it takes is one second. or one minute. for something big to sweep into our lives unexpectedly and change everything. it feels somewhat inconsistent to some major foundation of life. a woman spends 9 whole months bearing a child, not one minute. we spend days or weeks studying for our finals or putting together an important proposal, not mere seconds. we mourn for ages when someone we love dies. yet… sometimes all it takes is one moment for something incredibly beautiful, or incredibly disastrous, to happen. and we are taken completely by surprise. but i guess the unpredictability of each day is a major foundation of life too.

:)

anyway. i wanna share with you guys something interesting that i read today. this is part of a short speech by the greek writer Aristophanes on the subject of love. prior to this passage, he is telling his audience this myth of how humans originally had two faces, four legs, four hands, two sets of sexual organs. there were also three types of humans – male, female and hermaphrodites (an individual possessing both male and female characteristics and sexual organs). one day, the humans attempted to overthrow the gods, and when the gods saw this, they decided to punish the humans by cutting them in half and then scattering these halves across the world, thus weakening them.

so each human now had one face, two legs, two hands and one set of sexual organs; in other words, they have the human form that we now know of. if they were previously male, then their own other half would be male, and likewise with the females. but if they were previously hermaphrodites, their other half would be of the opposite sex. whichever way, because their natural form had been cut in two, each human longed painfully for its own half.

and thus Aristophanes says:

“this then is the source of our desire to love each other. love is born into every human being, it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.

and so, when a person meets the half that is his very own, then something wonderful happens: the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don’t want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment.

these are the people who finish out their lives together and still cannot say what it is they want from one another. no one would think it is the intimacy of sex – that mere sex is the reason each lover takes so great and deep a joy in being with the other. it’s obvious that the soul of every lover longs for something else; his soul cannot say what it is, but like an oracle it has a sense of what it wants, and like an oracle it hides behind a riddle. suppose two lovers are lying together, and Hephaestus stands over them with his mending tools, asking, “What is it you human beings really want from each other?”

and suppose they’re perplexed, and he asks them again: “Is this your heart’s desire then – for the two of you to become parts of the same whole, as near as can be, and ever to separate, day or night? Because if that’s your desire, I’d like to weld you together and join you into something that is naturally whole, so that the two of you are made into one. Then the two of you would share one life, as long as you lived, because you would be one being, and by the same token, when you died, you would be one and not two in Hades, having died a single death. Look at your love, and see if this what you desire: wouldn’t this be all the good fortune you could want?”

surely you can see that no one who received such an offer would turn it down; no one would find anything else that he wanted. instead, everyone would think he’d found at least what he had always wanted: to come together and melt together with the one he loves, so that one person emerged from two. why should this be so? it’s because, as i said, we used to be complete wholes in our original nature, and now ‘Love’ is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to once again be complete.”

Extracted from The Speech of Aristophanes, in Plato’s Symposium.

this speech really resonated with me. for many reasons. it made me think about my own beliefs about ‘The One’, and how it is always so obvious to us when we find our true other halves; when there is affinity, there just is, and you just know. i’m a big believer of affinity, be it towards our partners, potential partners or friends. not all of us are lucky enough to find our The Ones though, or even someone remotely close.. but then there are some of us who do :) and i think when that happens, it is the epitome of harmony and happiness.

it also caused me to think about the question that Hephaestus (the god of craftsmanship) posed to the two humans lying together – what is it that humans really want from each other? it made me think about the reasons we fall in love, the reasons we want to stay in love, and the reasons that make us fight for our love so that we may never lose it. i came up with no answers. i guess we love because we love. i used to hate it when any of my boyfriends say that to me – “i love you because i just do”. i always thought it was such a cop-out answer, something you say when you dont really know why you love the other person. but now i see that there is little more you can add to that, that would add any real, significant, larger meaning to the fact that we love each other. i’ve been asking the wrong question all this time. what i meant to ask was, ‘what do you love about me?’ instead of, ‘why do you love me?’. so silly. i spent so much lost time feeling angry.

i did a lot of thinking today. am i happier? i dont know yet. maybe. we’ll see :)

here in my university, and i’m guessing in many places all over America and the world, the air is pure electricity. people here are pouring out into the streets and screaming in happiness. there is much celebration to be had :) Barack Hussein Obama is the 44th President of the United States of America. the final moments are here!

official tallies are out so far:
States for McCain
Kentucky (8 electoral votes)
Tennessee (11)
South Carolina (8)
Oklahoma (7)
Total: 34 electoral votes

States for Obama
Vermont (3 electoral votes)
Illinois (21)
Maine (4)
Massachusetts (12)
Connecticut (7)
New Jersey (15)
Delaware (3)
Maryland (10)
District of Columbia (3)
New Hampshire (4)
Pennsylvania (21)
Total : 102 electoral votes

okay lah i cannot keep up already. lazy to update. just go here for the updated results! Obama is leading so far!!