i never thought i’d see the day fruits start blogging, but life’s full of little surprises like that. so sometime last week, i was shown two really cute blogs written by two rather unusual individuals - a Berry and a Lemon! hahaha yes the utter strangeness of it all. so i started leaving comments on their blogs with many stupid puns. like, berry good. when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. and, what do you give an injured lemon? then i facebooked Berry and wrote on his wall that i met a strawberry today, and i asked if they were related. his reply? “no su ann that is a straw man!” HAHAHA. BERRY GOOD!
so the boy Berry’s blog is here and the girl Lemon’s blog is here. they are both boyfriend and girlfriend - a new couple from the looks of it - and they write little stories from their relationship on their blogs. Berry, the guy, has a really quirky male sense of humor, as is obvious from his straw man retort haha. in one post he writes about why it’s good to be ‘purple and pantless’ :
* I stand out in any group photos, unless you shoot in black and white…
* I don’t need to take off any pants going to the toilet
* There’s no yellow snow moment
* I’m waterproof
* If I keep watering myself, I’ll never go bald
* No Monday blues
* Purple matches yellow, so I look sweet with my lemon pie
technically, berries aren’t waterproof because they have a partially permeable membrane (osmosis!), but he’s right about not having to take off any pants before using the loo. hahahaha i think i kinda just stared at that sentence in disbelief and then spent a few minutes giggling when I first read it.
Lemon, the girl, writes about very cute and girly things that I can so relate to. In this post, she writes about how she can never decide what to wear on dates, and either ends up being too overdressed or looking too plain. and she also says that guys aren’t really ‘quite there’ when they’re shopping with us, which is sooo true. all Martian does when he shops with me is play with his PSP :( i remember a time when he was very eager to come in with me into the dressing room and i’d have to kick him out, but now……. haih. very tak dilayan.
reading Berry’s and Lemon’s blogs reminded me a lot of how Martian and i blog about each other. earlier today, i went back to my archives and looked at all the posts Martian wrote when he was guest-blogging for me while i was away on a 10-day camp. it’s been almost two years since he wrote those posts, and reading them now, in 2008, evokes a lot of nostalgia in me. i remember the ‘us’ from two years back.. i remember how he called me while i was at camp to ask me how to put up photos on my blog (yes please excuse that horrendous picture of me in the ‘egg shaped muffin’ post… we’d just got off a long flight and i was so engrossed in my chocolate frappe at the airport that i didn’t care enough to delete all the bad-angle pictures from his camera).. but most of all, i remember how happy i was when i came back from camp and read those posts. now that i am reading them again, i feel like i’m extracting a whole different meaning from those posts. kinda like Antoine de Saint Exupery’s The Little Prince and how the meaning to that story always changes when we read it at different points of our lives :)
i guess most of you dont know that Martian used to keep a blog :) he started blogging a few months before we got together, and at the time i’d always read his posts with some kind of nonchalance. but when we got together, we fell in love so quickly that i got a bit scared. i didnt know too much about him, and he didnt know too much about me.. plus the distance made it a lot harder to integrate our lives.
so i started re-reading all his blogs, in a covert attempt to learn more about him. i remember reading the comments from his best friends - i wondered about these people, if i would ever meet them, or if Martian and i would get to a point in our relationship where we were friends with each others’ friends. I remember seeing an ex girlfriend’s name on his blog, and while at the time the only meaning i could pin it to was the story he told me about how he dated two girls with the same name before, i wondered about his exes and if he was best friends with them the way i am with my own ex boyfriends. and then there was a post where he blogged a brief but funny story about his friend A from Hong Kong. back in 2005, to me, A was just the star of a blog post and someone who i’d probably never meet.. but now i’ve met A so many times, and just from reading the story, i can instantly tell it’s him even though Martian changed his name.
then there are the pictures. true, not many in Martian’s blog, but there’s this one that i took of him in front of the concert poster in Bangkok. that shirt, those shoes, that pair of dark green khakis.. so meaningless to me back then. now, i know who gave him that shirt for christmas and i know where he bought those shoes and exactly when he likes to wear those khakis. around his neck - in the photo - is a concert pass and the voodoo doll i didnt want, which i would later come to be very familiar with as i walked to and fro the guestroom in his hong kong apartment. the voodoo doll hangs from the doorknob, together with the cirque du soleil and coldplay passes.
another secret: i’d actually read about Martian on someone’s blog a long, long time before i actually met him in person. she’s a good friend of his and i stumbled across her blog sometime in 2001; she and Martian hung out pretty often and every now and then she would talk about him. he was the guy in her blog who wore the tshirt with a funny leaf on it, the guy who has a kitchen he never uses. it took me way too long to actually put two and two together, but that is irrelevant.. the point here is: Martian used to be Leaf Tshirt Guy to me. on a blog. written by a girl i’ve never even met. and now, he’s my whole world. i know exactly which shelf of his wardrobe that leaf tshirt sits on. and i’ve met Stephanie.. she’s the coolest person ever. and i still read her blog :)
Martian has blogged about me a few times on his blog. funny stories are attached to all of these posts, but there is a particularly special one where he wrote about the first time he met me. in that post, he called me gorgeous and smart (hahahahaha i must hold on to this. with time, i find, he has stopped complimenting me) and talked about how if he died (in Hong Kong) the next day, i wouldnt know. weirdly enough, it’s actually true.. cos at that time, we barely spoke to each other. there is also another post where he described the journey from his house to mine, and in one part he says that he texts me that he’s arrived about 10 minutes before he actually reaches my place. cos i always take so long to get ready. 2 years later, he’s STILL doing that, but sometimes he texts me as early as 20 minutes before he actually gets there -_-
i miss Martian’s writing :( he doesnt even write me long emails anymore… T____T *twiddles thumbs* Martian if you are reading this, this is a HINT!!!
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:
there’s this pair of jeans that goes by the tagline – ‘live unbuttoned’. i stared at the tagline for the longest time the other day, and gave it some thought. what does it mean to live unbuttoned?
most of us, i think, in some way or another, live our lives – be it just a small part of ourselves or in entirety – in a buttoned, stifling, closed-up state. some of us choose not to let themselves love easily for fear of getting hurt; some others have this one love of their life whom they long to touch and be close to, but have to hold themselves back because that person is not and will never be theirs. and then there are those of us who are stuck in a lifetime of forever portraying themselves as someone they are not, having to keep up appearances to meet expectations, wondering if this endless cycle of doing what they hate is ever going to end.
as for me, i have always been the type to love cautiously. the moment i start loving someone, there’s always this panicky voice at the back of my head that tells me i shouldn’t put myself so far out there. and so i quickly withdraw myself, and only love as much as i am loved. the problem with this is that if the other person is just like me, then our relationship is doomed, because neither one is ever going to love the other person unconditionally. it becomes this stunted love that won’t grow.
i’ve never actually been left by any of my boyfriends. i’ve been hurt by them, yes, but never have i been fallen out of love with, dumped for someone better, or simply left to be alone. in this aspect, i am spoiled, but i am not ignorant of the fact that it could one day happen to me. and so in a warped attempt to protect myself, i always scare myself with the idea that i’m going to be hurt; that the people i care most about can and will eventually turn around and break my heart into pieces, and then leave me to lick my wounds alone. i’ve become scared to love. i’m scared to be the one in the relationship who gives and gives and find out way too late that it’s all in vain.
and that’s why i love cautiously, because i don’t ever want to one day find myself in the situation where i love this one person with all my heart, but he leaves me, and i never saw it coming in the first place.
i would like to tell you that i am no longer like this today, but the sad truth is that i still am very much like that. i’m still this panicked girl who holds back from loving the other person more than he loves me. it’s selfish and it’s unfair, i know. especially since i have this great guy who loves me and forgives me no matter how many times i have hurt him in the past, and always opens his arms to me when i realize i’ve done something wrong. and even when i refuse to accept that i am wrong, he comes to get me anyway. he comes to save me from the bathtub, or comes to wrap his arms around me when i’m seething in self-righteousness in the other room.
i have this great guy, and yet i love him with buttons on. why am i still holding back? i think it’s about time that i love – and live – unbuttoned :) i can’t and won’t have him think that i love him less than he loves me, because the truth is i love him so much more than that. i love him so much it hurts. he has to know that. and i will prove it to him. i’ll prove to him that I’m in this for the long run, and that i’ll work just as hard at this as he is. i want him to know that he’s the one who made me love and live unbuttoned.
hi baby. are you reading this? you’re the one who made me live unbuttoned. i love you :)
The Great Columbia Clock is still ticking away. i have so little time left. when i am there, i am going to be so scared. scared because i don’t know what’s happening back home, scared that Martian will meet someone else he likes more and leave me. scared that i’ll be lonely. but then i’ll come back to this post, read it, remember how i felt at this point in time, and i’ll be better again.
the jeans that Martian and i are wearing in this post are the Levi’s® 501® :)
i figure that by now most of you guys have seen the Oreo posts floating around the blogosphere lately, so you must already know what this post of mine is for :)
Oreo is having a competition where they are inviting people all over the world to make a video that depicts an Oreo & Milk Moment. if you look up their Youtube channel, you will find some excellent submissions up already – some touching, some cheerful, some funny, but all really good videos.
Oreo also engaged a handful of bloggers to write about this competition, and i was lucky enough to be one of those selected. you don’t have to persuade me very hard to write for a cookie like Oreo, which i already know like the back of my hand and love :)
below is the video i made for this competition:
i have had a lot of Oreo moments in my life. one of them was this time I went on a trip to Genting with some friends, and i was tasked with buying snacks, and all i bought was RM 30 worth of Oreos cos i had a craving :P everyone scolded me at first but we ended up finishing all the Oreos on the first night. then there was the time we made a cheesecake with an Oreo cookie base, and the time i spilled an Oreo McFlurry all over Azlan’s car. remember my dessert fast two years ago? i broke it with an Oreo McFlurry at the airport :) and then there are all the times i sneakily buy a small pack of Oreos while Martian isn’t looking, so that i can snack on them while he’s sleeping at night….
but i guess nothing tops the Oreo Moment i had when i made that video up there. it was a moment of realization that was very personal and very precious to me, so i hope you guys wont judge me too much as you watch the video. and thank you Oreo, for this new Oreo Moment, and for being such an awesome cookie :)
last month, i was approached for an advertorial by this brand that i really, really like and is one of the first places i turn to whenever i need to buy gifts for my friends and family.
when they emailed me to ask for my advertorial rate, i replied by giving them both my direct rate and also my agent rate which is priced higher. one would expect that the brand will choose to hire me direct instead of paying the agent fees, but oddly, they wrote me another email asking for my agent’s contact. i was very surprised and sincerely thought that they had misunderstood how the advertorial rate system works, but i later learned from a friend (who knows the brand representative who contacted me) that the reason they decided to pay a higher rate was because … including my agent in this deal was the right thing to do, and they didn’t want to cause any tension between my agent and i.
needless to say, i was completely shocked and couldn’t believe that such a nice client existed, even more so because these are representatives of a really big brand. later on, i went for a meeting with two of the brand reps Charlene and Jessica, where they showed me their products and told me some of their company background. i have never seen anyone more knowledgeable and sensitive to their product than them; they both seemed to have such funny or touching stories to tell about every item i pointed at.
but let me tell you what my favorite part of the meeting was. there was a point when Charlene was sharing with me some very touching stories about her customers, and halfway through one particularly moving story, she started tearing. i was very taken aback, but it was a very pleasantly surprising moment :) i realized then that this was the exact sort of sentiment that the brand represents - sharing, caring, warmth and coming back in contact with what makes us human: emotions.
and the brand? we all know it. it’s Hallmark :)
i spent the longest time thinking about how I could write this piece in order to do justice to the brand and the awesome clients (that’s the meeting I was talking about here), but I just couldn’t think of anything good enough. so i’m gonna stick to the most simple and straightforward way - take pictures of the stuff that Hallmark has, then show you folks :) hopefully this helps anyone out there who’s stuck in a bit of a gift-giving rut!
#1 this is Waimin and the cow piggy bank she picked up when i asked her what she would choose if she could have anything in the shop! i SO knew she was going to choose that. she’s a total cow freak, you see
#2 Jovann and the toy penguin he chose. the reason is because all of us call him Penguin. heehee don’t you think he looks like a penguin!!!
#3 and this is what Aira picked :P for her and her boyfriendddddd!
#4 super adorable zebra plushies! the largest costs RM 199.90 and the smallest is RM 29.90. i had an ex boyfriend (dowan to say which one!) who gave me the sheep version of these zebras – four of them from big to small! it was one of my favorite gifts :)
#5 one of the impossibly cute Me To You teddies that Hallmark stocks. the Me To You bear is honestly the cutest bear i have ever seen, and has been my favorite bear for a long time. i often buy small versions of it to give out as birthday gifts
#6 and these are the trademark Forever Friends teddies! i have this friend Annjoe who’s a super Forever Friends bear freak. on one of her birthdays, we all chipped in to buy her a REALLY BIG Forever Friends bear! then we went to her house one day and saw that she had damn a lot of really big Forever Friends bears anyway……..
#7 this COULD be the bear that we gave Annjoe, but I’m not sure. and the picture doesn’t even do justice to the size of the bear; in real life it is half or maybe even three quarters of my size!!!!!! y’know… I’ve always really wanted a bear that’s like half my size… cos very cute … *BIG HINT TO MARTIAN!!!!*
#8 this is a set of photo albums for a wedding. can someone please get married soon so i have an excuse to give this photo album set as a wedding gift :D
#9 a pregnancy journal! i flipped through it and all the pages have headers for different stages of pregnancy. it would be so cool to document a pregnancy like this for memory’s sake… but when i have a baby, i’d probably choose to start a pregnancy blog instead :P cos lazy to write with pen. hehe.
#10 gifts for babies and baby showers :) my favorite things in this shelf are those little toy snails! well actually they’re not toys - i am told that they are bezel boxes meant to store the baby’s first curl!
#11 i dedicate this shy Milo Dog to Tamtim because it is a milo dog and Tamtim knows how cool milo dogs are :D
#12 there! there! these are the aforementioned sheep that i got from aforementioned ex boyfriend! only mine didn’t have pink flowers in their wool and were on all fours instead of on their butts. haih mine are cuter anyway.
#13 an awesome family tree ornament that i wish i’d found out the price of! i’d buy this and fill it up with pictures of my family and give it to my aunt in Pennsylvania, so that she could have a piece of home with her :) my dad has a smaller version of this on his office desk with a photo of me in my Barbie doll phase… hahaha one day i must take a picture of it and show you guys.
#14 this is specially for all the people who emailed me asking about the scrapbook i made for Martian! Hallmark has a range of several scrapbooks that are made of excellent materials (the one in the photo has a linen/cotton cover) and have six different kinds of pages like single pocket or dual pocket for photos, blank scrapbook pages with protective sleeves or lined matte pages. they go for RM 130, which is a lot cheaper than the scrapbook i bought from Hong Kong. haih.
#15 and this is a REALLY BIG leather-cover scrapbook. Martian would love this i think, but it would take me a whole year to fill the entire book up, so i’m going to stick to the smaller ones, thank you :P this one goes for RM 234
#16 looking at this little ornament sends a little wave of calm through me. haha i don’t know why. at least it works. now i know what to buy for Stewie and my dad for Christmas. RM 32, this one.
#19 i really, really like this. this is an important message that i think a lot of us need to be reminded of sometimes… =)
#20 from the card section! i dedicate this card to all the people out there in the world who have alco-lovin’ friends!
#21 this would make a sweet and simple birthday gift :) even better if accompanied with a box of real cupcakes!
#22 absolutely hilarious thing, this one - it plays Darth Vader’s theme song when you press the button! :P Charlene said that a woman came into the shop and bought this for her office… so that when the evil boss comes down the corridor, they can all alert the office by pressing this button. hahaha damn funny
#23 And my dad’s birthday is coming up next month, so …
#24 … I’m getting him this card!!!! ^_____^
i spent some time browsing through the cards section of Hallmark, and honestly, I think that’s where the magic of the brand lies. we’ve all come to a stage where we’re too busy to give out birthday cards or cards for any event, choosing instead to send a quick text or email, and we’ve all forgotten how exciting it is to rip open an envelope to read a cute, warm or funny message in a card from someone we love :)
i am a huge fan of cards; i love receiving them, but i love giving them even more. even so, the only person i give cards to these days is Martian. i remember how i used to look forward to writing looooong ass messages in birthday cards to anyone at all, and how i always had a stack of blank cards that diminished very quickly because I so often gave out random cards to friends and family who looked like they needed a happy card that day… but nowadays i don’t even buy cards anymore. sigh. i didnt even realize that i’d fallen out of the habit of sending cards. i’ve also forgotten how good it feels to sign off on a very cheong hei but fuzzy-messaged card, or getting birthday cards in the mail from friends overseas because even that rarely happens anymore. JOHANNY if you are reading this, please send me a card soon!!! i’ve missed your cards :(
i’m really glad that Hallmark approached me for this advertorial, because without that meeting, i wouldn’t have realized just how far i’ve fallen out of touch with card-giving and just how fun it is finding THE perfect gift for my friends and family. so i’m very grateful to have been given this opportunity :) advertorial writing has never felt this good.
one last thing: the first 50 readers of this very cute blog called quaintly.net who go to the Hallmark outlet (in Gardens Mid Valley) and say the password – “The Original Very Cute Bear” will get a free Forever Friends Membership Card with a preloaded value of 30 points! you can use these 30 points to redeem whatever Forever Friends merchandise you want :) hehe I’m going to use mine to buy a bear to teman Egg McMuffin.
so I hope you guys enjoyed reading this advertorial and maybe even found a good gift to give a loved one through this post. i had a lot of fun writing it :)
Hallmark
Lot 225, Lower Ground
The Gardens, Mid Valley
Phone Num: 03-22848323
Pinkpau is Su Ann. 19, Malaysia. Hostile when hungry. Sometimes a shapeshifter, always an optimist with a penchant for pessimism and shoe-shopping. More?
Contact at : pinkpau[at]gmail[dot]com
Quaintly.net
The point of the pinkness of this site is to annoy the crap out of you. Really. What made you think I was a nice person? More?
