… is what the temperature will be in two days’ time.

… is also my score for the weekend. though if i were my own judge it’d probably be -20000. i’ve been very, very bad. some things, like unfinished homework due tomorrow, can be easily fixed with some time and effort. and some other things, like tequila, can be expelled in the morning. some things, like disgusting calculus midterm scores, won’t go away but are ultimately irrelevant in the bigger scheme of things. but some other things however. just stick.

more Halloween pictures!:

#1 sizzling hot firefighter bananatan and i

#2 K who was a kinky schoolgirl. also one half of the blow-up dolls the next day

#3 i have no clue who this girl is… haha but she’s a funny drunk. she was dressed as a sailor that night too, and as i was walking past her she just threw her arms around me and said OMG IT’S YOUUUUU I LOVE YOUUU LET’S TAKE ANOTHER PICTURE COS WE’RE BOTH SAILORRRRS. haha we didnt take an earlier picture, but i obliged and took ‘another’ one with her anyway. only cos she’s cute. that’s the Pope behind her

#4 the sailor, the pirate, the firefighter and the flight attendant! all very smexy

#5 B, who kept getting his suspenders snapped. i think he was a construction worker…?

#6 look! mario, luigi, and even PRINCESS PEACH HAHAHA

#7 this is T, one of the Mile High Club attendants from this night. i think i saw her in like 4-5 different costumes at different parties during Halloween weekend, and even the weekend before Halloween! shit la i osowan multiple costumes now

#8 E, whom i think looks sooooo much like Claudia Schiffer. anyway.. you guys wont believe who she’s facebook friends with….

#9 azn love! E and Y, two of my floormates. they are super cute :D Y has stickers of Disney princesses on her door

#10 number of crossdressers spotted : 8. at least. but my favorite halloween cross-dresser will always be androo <3 pictures here-on are from the actual Halloween day, where a bunch of us went out to the parade!

#11 when i stepped out into the lobby, this guy in the mask just started running at me. hahaha it’s actually quite scary when you’re being faced head-on with such a mask. and the annoying thing about such masks is that the people wearing them NEVER want to take them off and reveal who they are. but this guy started talking and his thick Nigerian accent gave him away. haha. hello alexander. i see you.

#12 THIS was what i wanted my nuffnang wild live party costume to look like!!! but noooooo instead i went as a sissy ladybug :(

#13 batman and wife taking the subway!! Batpod’s in the shop eh

#14 a sloppy obama. i am unimpressed. number of Obamas spotted: 3

#15 BANANAS! though i’m not sure why they have moustaches?

#16 i was quite blown away by this costume. i really was! but then as we walked around the parade, lots of people were wearing the same wind-blown costume. so.. cheh. at least this guy could pose well.

#17 choi sun do!!

#18 hahahaha a hot dog eating a hot dog

#19 not exactly a halloween costume, but this dog was MASSIVE. it’s actually BIGGER than the girl it’s trying to pounce on O_O

#20 girl in the middle? totally hot. and i think the girl on the left has a prettier sailor costume than mine :( i totally saw the costume at Ricky’s (default NYC costume store) weeks before Halloween, but i figured because it’s available at Ricky’s lots of people were going to be wearing it. WRONG! this girl was the only one i saw with that costume. bah.

#21 hahaha batdog and cat face-off!

#22 little batman <3

#23 a homemade robot costume. so awesome!

#24 and a little mummy! i asked him, “hey little man, are you a mummy?” and he went, “nooooo im a monster!” and started scuffing his shoes on the ground. i think my heart kinda melted.

#25 number of jokers spotted : 58390854. but no Joker Nurses, and definitely none as cool as Jolene!

#26 french friesssss~

#27 GUYS THIS IS THE BEST HALLOWEEN COSTUME EVER. EVER. EVER. THIS IS A POPE!!!!

#28 WHO CAME WITH THE WHOLE FREAKIN’ CONFESSIONAL BOOTH!!!! hahahahahahahaha he even called himself Pope Fiction. see his real legs on the ground? he made that look like the legs of a nun who was lifting up the whole confessional booth. totally awesome!! he really was attracting so much attention. there was this crowd around him everywhere he went

#29 this is nicole kissing the pope hahaha

#30 nick and i groping the pope, though the photographer cut nick out. okay mom dad Martian if you’re reading this i didnt really grope him okay! that’s a fake pair of legs!

#31 the Beijing Olympics panda haha

#32 girl picture outside bananatan’s room!

#33 and the most adorable duck i have ever seen :)

despite the imminent dawn of 4 more midterms and the tragically slow elevator in my residence hall, college is still all kinds of awesome. i’m going into my third month here, and i’m still as thrilled by the novelty of the university and the city – and i suppose the new life in general – as i was when i first arrived. i remember thinking as i got out of the car on that crisp August day, that i would never be able to familiarize myself with the maze-like neighborhood that encompassed the campus. but now, two full months later, i feel local already. i know all the nearby restaurant names by heart. i’ve learned the price difference in stationery between the three different bookstores in the vicinity. i’m also a regular recipient of routine emotional abuse from the cashiers at Morton Williams. now those girls have some ‘tude. but i forgive them, because they are the last barrier between me and a nice hot plastic plate of microwaveable tikka masala.

you guys, you all have to come study here. or at least, come visit. i dont quite know how to convey my excitement of just being here, and how much i think so many of you would love it here at Columbia or in New York. for instance, we discussed memes in Frontiers of Science class today, and i couldnt help but think of Waffle who wrote us an angsty email once because we kept referring to online personality quizzes as ‘memes’ when it really meant something scientific. i see cute white guys and i wish Skyler were here to feast her eyes. and yesterday, i bought some Keebler peanut butter cookies because KY says they’re really good. and i know Wai Min would love latin dance classes every Tuesday night as much as i do.

i’ve found some kind of comfort here that i cannot explain. yet, it is a fast-paced kind of comfort, because there’s always something to do or something new to explore. all the museums, art galleries, neighborhoods, dog parks, bookstores, shopping avenues, chinatown, avant garde boutiques… how does one not feel overwhelmed by the sheer expanse of this place? how does one know where to go first? i suddenly feel like 4 years here isn’t enough. i fear that New York will evolve before i get to experience it fully. and that it will keep evolving, and i will never be able to ever say, i know New York.

in a more micro sense, i love my room. i love the people at college – my floormates, my classmates, the people from Model UN, ballroom classes, the DDR club (oh yes), italian cinema nights and the random ones who strike up a conversation while waiting in line for bubble tea. they are all so smart and knowledgeable that it’s thrillingly challenging, yet fun. and i love my bottom drawer where i stash all my food. i love the fact that if i need anything, i can just walk down to the 24-hour supermarket across the street. and i love the cheesesteak at JJ’s…

in many ways, i feel like someone who’s been reborn, learning to speak, walk and talk all over again. i’m delighting in all the new discoveries – the apprehension in the pit of my stomach as i load my clothes in the dryer, room raiding drunkenly at 4 in the morning, learning how to play ping pong and getting hit in the nose by the ball, crowding in front of the television to laugh at Sarah Palin, salty microwaveable popcorn on Gossip Girl Mondays. then there’s also the stress of assignments and classroom expectations; i wish someone had warned me there would be this much work in college. i have my burn-out moments, but i think i’ve come to relish the stress of working hard. it feels so good to see a perfect score on my assignments even though i spent sleepless nights working on them. plus everyone here doesnt sleep at night, so there’s always company in the long horrid hours of churning out a 2000-word paper on the day it’s due.

it’s 7 in the morning as i write this; i’ve been up all night cramming for my Literature Humanities midterm tomorrow. i feel good about it, which is inane because i only started studying yesterday and have been Sparksnoting my way through the semester so far. which is why i have to go back to studying now :) but i leave you with an exclusive photograph of an original Martian masterpiece. this is the front of a card he left for me:

i love my boyfriend very much, but for the sake of modern art, i hope he never decides to take his artistry to professional levels :\

the corners of my mouth are still a little bit greasy from the half-slice of bak kwa, or yuk kon as my family prefers to call it, that i generously allowed myself to have, a few minutes ago. the wonderful sweet meat is from a little shop that i stumbled upon while walking along Allen Street in Chinatown today. this is the first time i’ve seen bak kwa being sold in NYC, and i was so glad and relieved to have found the shop. i couldnt wait to sit down and open the packet to have some bak kwa! and now that i have, i am experiencing that sticky and double-chinned but satisfied feeling that i always get when i eat bak kwa. this city always gently holds out to me little slivers of home when i least expect it.

i had some very fascinating conversations with several fellow freshmen the other day. it was during an event for international students, and while talking to this Swiss guy who seemed to know a fair bit about Malaysia, a Polish guy joined us and shared that he was vacationing in Penang during the 2004 tsunami. so we all started talking about Malaysia, much to my delight. the Swiss guy seemed to have the impression that KL is a very ugly city because he was told that we have many highways and that the city is very pedestrian-unfriendly. undeniable on both counts, but i assured him that there are very, very few cities in the world that are more beautiful than KL to me. the Polish guy then chimed in and said that he found it very amusing that Malaysian girls seemed to hate getting tanned, because when he was at the beach in Penang, he noticed that a lot of Malaysian girls darted quickly under trees or were constantly in long-sleeved shirts despite the heat. i couldnt help but laugh because i immediately thought of Tze Ching. and Darren.. although he isnt exactly a Malaysian girl.

the novelty of people knowing about Malaysia’s petroleum industry and Anwar Ibrahim has worn off a little bit, but i got very excited when i spotted from across the room, a guy wearing a shirt with a Malaysian flag on his sleeve. he was in the middle of a very heated discussion, and i was fidgeting for about 5 minutes wondering if i should just interrupt and ask him why he was wearing that shirt.

i eventually did, and he told me he was in KL last year for a Model UN conference at ISKL. i got even more excited and squealed that i lived really near there. “oh my god, you live in Ampang?” he asked, equally excited, and i was extremely impressed that he pronounced it correctly (äm-päng, not ām-pāng). he went on to say that he thought the best thing about Malaysia was the mamak stalls, also pronounced with the correct ‘a’, and that he loved tosai with dahl. amazing. he knew and could remember so much about KL even though he was only there for 4 days and was at a conference most of the time. it kinda mitigated the slightly depressing conversation with Swiss Guy who heard KL is ugly and the one with Polish Guy who said his first observation of Malaysians was that they nonchalantly threw trash everywhere.

after all these weeks of talking mostly about politics when the topic of Malaysia comes up within my new friends, it felt strangely – but i guess not unexpectedly – good to talk about something trivial like mamak stalls. apparently the one that Model UN Guy went to all the time was in Taman Sri Ukay, because he lived there with his host family. to hear a foreigner say ‘Taman Sri Ukay’ in perfect intonation is an experience everyone should have. i felt proud, a glowing feeling that lasted a couple of hours, that Malaysia was so interesting to this one person that it could captivate his fancy this much.

spotted in an asian mart, next to some cans of 100 plus and milo

i also love hanging out with the singaporeans here because they ALL (except this guy called Chang) still have their accents and can switch back to it within a split second. lah leh mah meh wah sibeh ex. i loooove the fact that after a full day of straining to speak in an American accent and practicing Italian speech for my classes, i can meet up with the singaporeans and let my tongue loose (in a purely linguistic sense of the phrase), and we can compare notes on the little Americanisms that we’ve observed over the course of the day. like.. how everyone here holds doors open for the person behind them and how everyone in your vicinity says ‘bless you!’ when you sneeze.

but of course, there are no proxies that are better than the real thing. in my first week here, i was introduced to a whole bunch of Malaysians (of course, by means of Chen Chow, because EVERYBODY knows Chen Chow…) working here in NYC. i’m really glad to have met them because they are so much fun to hang out with, and they remind me a lot of my friends back home.

i met up with some of the Malaysians over a buka puasa ramadhan bazaar at the Malaysian UN Consulate sometime last week, and the array of food drove all of us crazy. it was so good to see onde-onde, satay, asam laksa, karipap, cucur udang, bubur durian, nasi dagang, nasi lemak, popiah and RAMLI BURGER all under one roof, cooked by the wives of malaysian ambassadors and delegates working here in NYC. it was also nice to speak malay again, ‘berapa kak?’, ‘pedas tak?’ ‘ni buat apa?’. even though i didnt know any of those ambassadors or their wives, it was so easy to strike up conversation in Malay and talk freely like friends. if there is any reason for our government to insist on children learning 11 years of Bahasa Malaysia, this is it. the ability to speak malay is an access to unity that i have sadly taken for granted all of my life.

us girls very excited to see sugar cane and lychee drinks at the bazaar

i was also really amused while listening to the young children talk. they all had flawless american accents when speaking amongst themselves, but they almost always reverted to colloquial malay when speaking to their parents. the kids were the ones manning the Ramli burger stall by the way, and i must say they make a very mean burger ayam special tambah sos cili!

Carol is staying over with me right now, because tomorrow we’re going with the singaporeans to Woodbury Commons for a full day of fabulous shopping. i’m really glad to have her here with me :) next week Suet is coming to stay and that will be much fun too. Carol will join us, and then we will have a night of Malaysian dinner and a lot of good ol’ gossiping and catching up.

i feel thankful for these little slivers of home (though sometimes they feel larger than life) that i am serendipitously finding in little nooks and crannies of New York, but sometimes bared out in the open for me to just reach out and grab at. whether in loud or subtle ways, my transition from home to away is eased by these things, and i find that every day that i spend here in this new city, i love it more and more.