when i returned from Honduras earlier this year, i had a conversation with someone about the discomfort that dogged me almost every day i was there. there we were, a bunch of bright eyed and bushy tailed kids from an ivy league institution, descending upon the slums of Tegucigalpa and the sloping sides of Joyas, like crows so eager to help. we were but ten inexperienced children with some time during the school holidays, many swollen ideas of public health and what could be done to improve the conditions of these people, and our two hands. school taught us to think about these things- things beyond ourselves into which we could apply our strength and intellect, and do something good for people who didn’t have the resources or opportunities that we had access to. before the trip, we raised money for our own airfare and solicited medical donations from friends, families and doctors, which we would then bring to Honduras and delegate. when we got there, we were to assist in building sustainable structures such as latrines, septic tanks, ceilings, floors and stoves that would, we were told, change the lives of the villagers in Joyas, one family at a time. every morning we would gather and have a reflective talk about the magnitude of our presence and role in this project. i think we were all proud of ourselves and how we were doing this crazy wonderful thing called service work; that we could actually see the results of our toil, one layer of brick and mortar at a time. we took many photos, kissed the cheeks of the families we worked with, shared half of our PB&J sandwiches with the kids and even the stray dogs that would lick our toes hungrily as we ate our lunches amidst the labour.

it was strange, but the whole time i felt quite angry at myself for having gone on the trip and allowed myself the unconscious prescription to an ego balm. what were we really doing there, if it took us three days to build one latrine, when one young strapping Joyas local would take only ten hours to perfectly complete the structure? why were we bringing bags full of Tylenol when the health afflictions of the villagers ran far deeper than headaches and stomach pains? why were we even building these monstrosities if some locals thought them useless, and would take them apart after we’d left, to sell the building materials in the market for some petty cash? it’s easy to feel helpless and deflated when you realize these things. we may as well have put the money that we spent on airfare into capital towards a small construction business run by the Joyas locals, or other such microfinance initiatives. to think that we were so proud at having dipped our hands in cement, when the locals were really just letting us have a taste of what volunteer work feels like. they were, at the very least, kind enough to give us warm smiles and watch patiently as we took way too long to saw planks in halves and mix cement the wrong way.

perhaps it is cynical of me to approach volunteer work from this angle, but i wished that in Honduras we could have done something real with our intentions and energy. it would be nice to know that time and resources were being optimized, instead of being expended unnecessarily and at a sub-optimal rate, just to… what exactly? i’m still not sure where the benefit lies– be it on our part, or that of the villagers, or that of the organization we traveled with. sure, we take away valuable life lessons about the importance of teamwork, service work and what it means to play a small role towards sustainable development, small steps big change etc, but what about the people we were told we were there to help? they get this brand new cement floor, latrine, ceiling or stove. that’s really nice but apparently they could have built it faster and better themselves. why did we fly all the way there to do it? it also seems that they may just dismantle everything to sell the scrap metal. further, latrines just weren’t their way of life, and there’s really not much point putting a small band aid over a large wound if other public health problems (such as the lack of clean drinkable water) weren’t first addressed. correct me if i’m wrong but the most valuable benefit seemed to have been taken home with us instead of being left there with them. how did volunteer work come to have so little real impact, and become almost self-serving?

for some time i struggled to understand our place and purpose there. during some nightly conversations with the team, i would carelessly and insensitively rain on everyone’s parade by expressing my slight dissatisfaction surrounding the aforementioned conundrums. who were we really there to help? how much exactly were we helping in terms of what we thought we were there to do? could we think of ways to be more useful? could we push the envelope a little further? can we address some of these questions before we clap on our proud arsenal of shovels and saws?

there are many ways to answer these questions that would make sense of why we went and what we did. some popular ones: (1) it doesn’t matter that we essentially went there to play in sand, as long as we show people that our intentions are good and that we care and are willing to take steps to help; (2) we take away the important lesson of understanding how small our roles were in Honduras, and it will push us to think about bigger things that we can do to truly make big and helpful changes; (3) our mere presence entails expenditure on airfare, accommodation, food, and building supplies that will directly stimulate the local economy; (4) we can bring back to New York the eyewitness account of an impoverished community, and spread awareness of problems beyond our borders; (5) some effort is better than none at all… and so on and so forth. while these responses are highly relevant ones, a quick glance and some thought will quickly reveal the problems with each, and how ultimately they just do not answer the question of why we went there to do what we did without actually doing what we thought we were doing. yes, residual effects are important, but so is the main task at hand, which was to directly improve the state of public health in the villages of Honduras.

i don’t regret the trip. it wasn’t the fairytale volunteer experience that i’d thought it would be, but it stretched my mind and my heart so far, even despite the realization that we hadn’t been all that effective as a brigade that championed public health. it forced me to reflect on every single volunteer work experience that i’d had, and to pick out all the plausible reasons why we did each one and why we were made to do it (big distinction). it was a clear lodestar towards what was important, and even further towards the understanding that ‘what is important’ isn’t something static.

ultimately, being in Honduras taught me that the best way to help people is to allow them the knowledge that our helping them helped us back more than we helped them, or just as much as. in that way, they have done us the big favour of gratuitously helping us even though we were originally there to help them. this, i think, empowers the Honduran a whole lot more than some latrine hastily constructed out of misaligned bricks. we may have done this one small thing of building one family a stove with a piping system, but they did us the bigger real deal of educating us. the crucial ingredient however is that they have to know they did us this favour, otherwise that potential is wasted. they have to know that they did so much more for us than we did for them in the short time we spent there. that despite being ‘impoverished’ and ‘uneducated’, they are equipped with the ability to teach and do many things better than these random americans who fell from the sky with secondhand clothes and free medicine. such knowledge, even if unfurling from a very small flicker of pride in showing the random malaysian volunteer how to mix cement the right way, can be so powerful if harnessed correctly. i only wish i knew how to convey this information to them at the time, but alas i think i was either too shy or too stupid to recognize what my real role in Honduras was.

there was a girl from the family we built a latrine for who patiently kept refreshing my memory of the spanish words she’d taught me earlier in the week. her husband showed us how to hammer a nail into a plank in 3 hits and smiled encouragingly when we kept breaking the nails. they shared their food with us. explained the religious script on their doors. the women of the sanitation committee first bore children at the age of 11 and then raised many more in the years to come. the young boys that moved like greased lightning on the football field could kick a ball harder and faster than any of us could. all so awesome in their own right– why are we the ones who get to say that we are ‘helping’? what exactly were we doing with our hands in Honduras that is worth more than what they know and can do? i still dont have the answers but for all the above gifts from Honduras and for the questions they inadvertently raised, i’m grateful that i had the opportunity to go, and that we did what we did.

we’re going to Panama this year, hopefully with a bigger and better brigade with clearer goals!

#1 putting the tin roof on an almost finished latrine

#2 laying the base for the latrine

#3 starting on a water storage tank

#4 an average Honduran water storage tank, where the locals store water for cooking, cleaning and bathing as there’s no proper pipe system in the mountain of Joyas. also a big contributor to mosquito breeding

#5 nino!

#6 the men of the house helping us with the cement, which they mixed 10x faster than we did!

#7 G working on smoothing out a cement floor. most of the homes in Joyas don’t have floors, which renders the family members (who often walk around barefoot) very susceptible to the fatal Chagas disease which is caused by parasites from the ground.

#8 stray chickens doing a run

#9 M and B making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for us and the kids of the house. isn’t this picture super adorable :)

#10 playing games with the rest of the Joyas kids, who really love games

#11 young man with perfectly sculpted double eyelids, proud to receive a Superman sticker

#12 evening soccer with the boys, who run and play like superstars

more photos soon!

my heart has been irreverently displaced by something very small. its tiny, pulsating force seemed so harmless in the beginning, but i can ascertain for now that my feelings have truly been hurt. isn’t it weird? i have no right to feel like this. i should be trying to finish all the work that i allowed to sit and curdle over the long thanksgiving weekend. but this is bringing back a lot of horrible sensations from 2003 that i can’t seem to fight away alone. i just want someone to make this better :(

pictures from boston, when joe and i went to visit dominic:

#1 dom’s very waspy suburban neighbourhood

#2 fall colors, all gone by now

#3 it has been my lifelong dream to climb onto a mailbox and take pictures

#4 but that picture didn’t come without a very ungraceful behind-the-scenes process

#5 success! after many, many tries where i trampled all over poor dom

#6 a slightly more graceful picture

#7 then joe decided to copy me. to add insult to injury, all he did was swing himself atop the mailbox T_____T

#8 mine now :)))))

#9 sunset spilling over the Charles River. i wish we’d had the time to walk along the river :( this photo was taken from inside a moving train

#10 dom took us to Quincy Market for dinner. it reminds me of some place in melbourne, just as bustling and with as many good smells

#11 joe and his lobster dinner. i dont think i’ve ever seen him so happy

#12 this picture happened because i squealed, “joe! let me take a picture of your mussels!!” -____-

#13 it’s a real place after all

#14 at the train station

#15 you know how sometimes you fall into these moments, and you feel like you must capture it in a photo… but as you are deliberating whether or not it would be polite to snap a picture, the people shift, and your moment is gone?

#16 for the first time i deliberated faster

#17 dinner with the very pretty xiao and her roommate ashley :)

#18 would you spend your dollar on mints or a tampon?

#19 our relative feet size

#20 i keenly apologize to all feminists in advance, but i was very drawn to the creative for this poster. at some point i announced, “she is all the marketing that harvard needs!”

#21 there is something about supermarkets that defeats their sterility

#22 i have never taken a newspaper from those stands. one day i must

#23 a house somewhere in the midst of the place where people go to get lost in boston

on the first night of the halloween weekend, my roommate Piglet (she picked this pseudonym on her own!!), one of our suitemates Monkey, and i all got into a big fight. i had honestly wanted to just stay in with some soup and catch up on Grey’s Anatomy and post-midterms sleep, but the big buttery blocks of tension in the air thwarted that plan. so i half-heartedly dressed up in my costume and met some friends at the same bar we were at for halloween last year, basically The Bar of our university. it’s where we all had our first freshman year party, used our fake I.D for the first time, had / will have our 21st birthday celebration, spend every Halloween … i guess one could say it’s an institution. just remember not to eat there during the day, when it sunlights as an Italian restaurant.

it was a good, long night filled with many laughs. i didnt drink as much as i did last year, but everything else was exactly the same, except we were all a year older. it felt just like yesterday that i was prancing around The Bar in my very short sailor costume and Martian was being quite grumpy about it. i remember seeing all the same faces a year ago, and what they were wearing at the time. it’s amusing to know that even after a year later, their drunken greetings dont change as they wrap their arms around me to say hi. they say all the same things, in the same fashion and lazy lull.

this time last year, it was colder, and i loved school so much more than i love it now. i was so bright-eyed and excited about the novelty and the abundance of everything. now everything has the sanitized bleakness of industrial-sized something. it’s been a long story, which perhaps warrants a whole new post of it’s own. dont worry, i’m happy — it’s just that i constantly struggle to reconcile two polar parts of myself that seem to grow apart in distance more and more each day. apparently, it happens to all of us.

as i was leaving The Bar, i dropped by a 24-hour pizza place to get some food for myself and Piglet. i knew she’d be hungry, and that she was ready to kiss and makeup after our big stupid fight, so i got us some soup and three slices of pizza that we could have while watching a korean drama (Autumn Tale, or Autumn in my Heart, to be exact). i was having some trouble balancing all that food in my hands as i was walking back to the suite, so i sat down. i chose to sit down on that stone bench in front of Furnald, right at that very moment, to arrange the paper plates of food, and on a whim, i chose to take a bite out of one particular slice of pizza — the ziti one, that was basically pasta-on-pizza.

that was how he stopped to say hi. “this is a really funny sight, a yellow duck sitting on a bench eating pizza.” that smile. that stunning smile. “it looks good, by the way. where’d you get it?” and that’s how i offered him some pizza, and we started talking — about pizza, about restaurants near campus, about hong kong, about how singapore and malaysia split in 1963 and the different versions of that story (he knew the real version, which was impressive), about universities built on lakes, about the selfishness of people from our school (or at least just the undergraduate student body, which i am in, and which he is not in), about selling out (which he did, which i am on my way to, it seems), about politics, about religion, and life. before i knew it, we’d finished all the pizza and an hour had gone by. it was really cold that night, and i wasnt dressed in very much, but i wanted to keep talking. i jokingly said to him that men are so simple: you offer them some free food and they sit with you to talk about nothing at all (or plenty) for an hour. he laughed, but walked me back home.

pictures from halloween weekend!:

#1 i walked into The Bar and saw this guy, and i thought he was dressed as a member of the Ku Klux Klan (it was dark; i couldnt see the yellow of his outfit!!). i thought he was trying to be ironic, so i found it really funny and laughed. he didnt understand why, and finally he explained to me that he was really dressed as a Brown Mustard bottle. hmph. that’s just so in your face -_- the irony would’ve been funnier.

#2 yes, i was dressed as a duck! i thought i may as well, since everyone thinks i remind them of a duck (?!) and i love ducks anyway. this is me with julie.

#3 julian and david, who both dressed as CEOs, haha. they came in with a bevy of office ho’s too!

#5 stephanie and julie. so pretty <3

#6 these girls were next to our table, being completely rowdy. we started talking, and i complimented one of them and said she was really hot. she replied with, “well yes but no one’s been hitting on me tonight!”

#7 Posh Spice. i asked her if that was her little gucci dress, and she said – “huh?” clearly not a true Spice Girls fan…

#8 it’s ALI G!!!!

#9 and then people started wearing my hat. this is alex

#10 and bikram. yes, like the yoga

#11 A, who is so boobilicious <3 sorry, the more unique names are gonna be truncated as always... i'm being googled way more than usual lately by people from school, so i'm getting a little nervous. locked my twitter as well, but feel free to request permission. i add everyone.

#12 isnt she totally adorable

#13 us with BRUNO!!!

#14 with the pi delta psi guys + singaporean girls

#15 he was a condom -_- i didnt understand, even when he started charging at my groin headfirst. i thought he was a trash bag…

#16 and this is the bartender from The Bar!!! he came dressed as a barmaid :D :D

#17 and he posed for this picture so willingly. it was his idea, even. GLEE!

#18 A and i. she came as a flapper

#19 his name is actually Gabriel

#20 the mighty morphin’ power rangers!!! when the green ranger was still around. taken during the pi delta psi halloween party, which was so packed i got my foot stepped on twice and burned by a cigarette as many times.

the second night of halloween was spent at the above frat party, where i didnt take anymore pictures, because i was (miraculously — given the sardine can conditions) wrapped in conversation. the third night of the halloween weekend was spent in … Boston! pictures to come soon. for now, i have to study for my huge macroeconomics midterm that’s happening in exactly 24 hours :(

i’m back at school and on campus!

classes officially start tomorrow, i still have to get my schedule sorted out (please let me into that sociology class even though it’s full, pleeeease), i have yet to fully unpack and shop for necessities, or buy textbooks, AND it’s my roommate’s birthday today, so there’s going to be a party in our suite tonight. plus lunches and dinners with all the people i’ve missed, yay :) i was so caught up in the melancholy of leaving KL again (it was definitely harder the second time around) that i forgot to feel excited about going back to school.

i have a roommate this year, which is going to be interesting. i know it doesnt seem like it sometimes, but i’m so much of a private person, and have become more so over the past few years. for so many reasons, the one thing i felt i did right for my freshman year was getting a single room. its tougher for second year students to get a single room in the housing lottery, so this year i had to either- a) apply for a single and run the risk of failing to get one, and then randomly getting assigned to a roommate i didnt know, or b) pair up with someone i knew, and form a double room together.

my roommate’s really fun and cool, and she’s actually a LOT like me — the similarities are endless, but we have yet to find out about any startling differences; hopefully there will be none :P — so i had no qualms rooming with her. we agreed last year to room together for sophomore year, and randomly formed a group with three other senior guys to form a suite. so this year we get a fully-equipped kitchen, a bathroom and a living room! :D yay, no more fighting for the TV with 40 other people, or having to trundle down an entire corridor to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. and of course, time to whip out all the baking utensils :) SPACE CAKES!!!! PINKPAU’S FAMOUS CHOCOLATE BROWNIES!!!!

yoon (roomie) and i havent fully unpacked, so no photos of the room or the suite just yet. more another time.

but for now, pictures of my last night in KL, cos that’s the only night i remembered to take pictures of –

met up with andrew, emily, joe and zhiwei at the Apartment, which is exactly where i spent my last night in KL last year before i left for college. in fact, my Last Day Circuit was exactly the same as it was last year — no sleep, pack a little bit, go to see grandma in the morning, meet Stewie, KY and the Nuffies (doesnt Stewie and the Nuffies sound like a really cool rock band name) for lunch, panic shopping, meet friends at the Apartment, banana leaf rice dinner, hokkien mee late at night, pack frantically in the wee hours of the morning, bak kut teh breakfast, pack pack pack, leave for airport, forgetting at least two things. this year i forgot my US mailbox key and my pencil case :( asian stationery > american stationery.

banana leaf rice with Arthur at Nirwana! my last dinner. boss tambah benda ‘ni (fried bittergourd), nandri nandriiii!

after dinner, we went to Bangsar Village II to get the car. while at the parking lot, we saw one of those buggies that they use to ferry people from the exits to the parking lots, UNATTENDED!!!!! so i really wanted to drive it!!! Arthur took pictures of me hijacking the buggy, haha –

i didnt know how to turn the buggy on, and Arthur was very worried that i would eventually figure it out, because i kept flooring the accelerator while trying to operate the buggy. apparently i’m not supposed to do that, and i’m supposed to step on it slowly, and “build it up into a crescendo, like sex”, IN ARTHUR’S WORDS.

but before i could figure out how to operate the buggy (they hide the switch under the seat, so smart), the parking lot attendant came back! oh no! :O

when i saw the attendant, i started laughing really hard. then he started laughing too, and instead of kicking me off the buggy, he taught me how to use it!! see, this is why i love Bangsar Village. their staff are always so kind and cool, and there’s none of this no photos policy rubbish. remember this? timtam and i ran around the Bangsar Village supermarket taking stupid photographs and posing with all the different products, and the staff just smiled at us as they walked past. when the manager came over to see what was going on, he even posed for a picture with me!

away i go!

i think i drove the buggy for, like, 20 centimeters before i dissolved into giggles once again and was rendered incapable of driving. so arthur hopped on and the attendant drove us —

whee! :D haha cheap entertainment. i highly recommend it.

i love you arthur! you’re my favorite person in the world :)

found two pictures of my second last night in KL, together with albert and nazrul, who are also two of my favorite people in the world –

that’s me and nazrul doing the bollywood thing with our scarves.

i miss everyone already!

i’m one exam away from being done with my finals!!!!!! so i’m taking a break from the books and the stale smog of the library to celebrate. 3 exams and 3 final papers down, just one more exam to go. and then i’ll be done — done with freshman year, done with feeling completely helpless, done with feeling like i want to yank all my hair out in fistfuls. after a year here, i can sincerely say that i underestimated how tough college would be. by MILES. i guess till today i can’t quite believe how little slacking one is allowed to do here. i’m really looking forward to going home over the summer and just staring at the ceiling every day to recover from the trauma of the past academic year. i know it sounds like i’m exaggerating but i’m really not.

i crawled out of my room after a particularly brutal final today to see that one of my floormates had already packed all of her stuff into storage bins. then i felt sad. i felt sad that i hadn’t spoken to her properly in such a long time, and that now i only have less than 3 days to do so because she moves out on thursday. i felt sad that i’d spent my whole freshman year worrying worrying and worrying about how i absolutely must get a 4.0, and feeling guilty each time i took a weekend off or spent the afternoon sleeping in. sigh. surely this must not be what college is about. i’m doing it all wrong, aren’t i? people always say that they wish they could re-do their freshman year. me too.

things i took for granted this year:

1. new york city
i spent so much time exploring the city in my first semester, and i loved doing that so much, but then this semester i just stopped doing it completely. i only went downtown whenever i needed to get something done or buy something important. i haven’t even been to chinatown since i came back to the city after winter break, and i love chinatown. i used to feel so thrilled walking down the aisles of the small asian marts, marveling at the fact that i could get marmite, milo, vitagen, 100 plus, xo sauce, sugus and double decker prawn crackers here. i especially liked walking past someone on the streets of chinatown and unexpectedly hearing the malaysian/singaporean accent. all this inquisitiveness, i left behind a long time ago. now i hesitate at the thought of going downtown.

greenwich, near NYU

a fabric store in chinatown. i love fabric stores. i could spend all day just poking around and choosing fabric that i will never buy

2. extra curriculars
i had a lot of fun my first semester when i was running around trying out as many clubs and societies as i could. then i realized how much i’d been slacking and dropped every single one of my ECA’s this semester so i could focus on my grades again. college-bound kids reading this, i dont expect you to be as stupid as me, but if ever tempted to be, please dont ever do what i did. i feel like my second semester here has been so miserable because i just didnt have the time to do the things i loved and missed doing. when i come back next year, i’m pursuing them all again. i dont care if that means i take less subjects; i simply have to do something i love or i will go crazy.

DDR club!!! i thought i was good until i joined this club…… some of this guys are inSANEly good.

3. my floormates
everyone who comes to visit my floor tells me that it’s oddly staid and quiet, and i dont actually disagree. for some reason (actually i know why but cannot say wtf) our floor isnt as integrated as the others. the other day when our RA gave us the year-end speech, some of my floormates remarked that we’ve never had so many people in our floor lounge since the first week of college, when we had that first introductory floor meeting. and it’s true… that night i saw some floormates that i hadn’t seen all semester. i regret not saying hi even then, and not having made the initiative to barge into the lives of the quieter people on the floor. like i said, i only have three days left, and after this we’re all going our separate ways and are bound to drift apart over the next three years in college. it’s a sad thought. i regret taking so lightly the (few) open doors on the floor… next year when i move into EC i know that there are going to be even less doors open. i’m going to miss so much just being able to pad barefoot down into my floormates’ rooms and just sit around being emo, or crying, or whining about stupid homework, or shoving smelly malaysian sambal in their faces, and talking about red furry handcuffs… :)

hahaha this picture cracks me up every time i look at it

this is S, who covered himself in whipped cream just for the heck of it. and then started rolling around the floor and hugging everyone. i have the most delicious pictures of him in his tightie whities all smothered in cream…

4. schoolwork
okay this is so weird but i wish i’d enjoyed my schoolwork a lot more. believe it or not, when i was all bright-eyed and loving all the things i was learning in my first semester, my grades took a huge hit because i was being so flighty. when i sat down and started getting serious about things, i really hated everything i had to do, but my grades got so much better. it’s ironic and it sucks. i’ve had the opportunity to read so many great books for my lit courses over the year, but because i was conscious of the fact that i had to study those books, i just couldnt enjoy the texts as much as i did when i read them for leisure. and italian… i loved the language and got so much satisfaction from the learning, but i was so shocked when i got an A-. it’s the same with econ, which i love, and am actually good at. sigh. i dont even know what to say. even if i get all A’s this semester, i’m not going to be the happiest clam — it’s been the driest and most wearisome process of learning, ever.

5. handsomenick, mandapandatan and jacqueline
nick and amanda are the two other malaysian undergrads here, and jacqueline is in the general studies school. we all actually barely see each other, and i keep reminding myself to call them out for dinner sometime, but it never happens because i’m a terrible person like that. i only met jacqueline when i first got here, and even though we took econ and did ballroom for a semester together, we STILL HAVENT GONE TO HAVE DINNER EVEN ONCE. JACQUELINE IF YOU ARE READING THIS IT IS TIME FOR US TO FINALLY HANG OUT. /agitated. haih. okay let me tell you something cute about mandapandatan — she likes to eat but every time she eats she’ll complain that she’s fat, which she’s not, and she’ll start eating carrot sticks. and one time she was complaining about how her grades were so bad la, this la that la, she’s going to get kicked out of her scholarship program la; then when someone asked her, “oh did you get a B or something?”, she shifted uncomfortably and said “no la… not that bad la..” WTF. and everyone should meet handsomenick and see how handsome he is. he looks like a skinny chinese version of Paris. as in Paris of Troy.

mandapandatan and her carrot sticks

6. the scholars program
i’m in it but i dont do anything about it. i dont even hang out with the other scholars or take up the internship opportunities that are offered. idiot idiot idiot idiot idiot.

7. college events
ann coulter came to our school last week and i didnt go because i procrastinated on getting tickets and then they were sold out :( same thing happens for lots of other speaker events… i keep thinking that i’ll have time to go get tickets but that’s never true. ahh college has been a time of many missed opportunities. so many things happen here that sometimes it gets a little overwhelming.

J dressed as a robot during one of those college event nights. hahaha, j j j j j j.

this is O Night at the library — where the school marching band barges into the library’s main reading room at the stroke of midnight on the night before the first finals, and starts playing loud music just to disturb people. they stand on tables and crack some jokes as well. hilarity. last night was Primal Scream night, where the students go outside and screammmmmmm away their exams frustrations on the Sunday of finals week. Primal Scream night is also Pillow Fight night.

8. the ninja poster in my floormate’s room
each time i see it, i laugh. i shoulda invaded his room a lot more just for the free laughs. and the free chocolate — he has this humongous stash of chocolate in his room cos his mom is afraid he’s going to starve. his stash is bigger than any girls’ stash. srsly.

9. things i get in the mail
earlier in the school year, i started a blog category to document all the cool and random stuff that people send me in the mail, but because i blog so rarely now, there’s this huge backlog of What I Got In The Mail that i never did blog about. i have a whole drawer full of cards from such wonderful people that i always meant to blog about but just didn’t; and worse, i have a whole stack of cards that i bought to send back out to these people but didn’t either. i’m sorry :( do you guys hate me :( please dont think i’m ungrateful… i really do appreciate the time you guys took to write me a card. it always cheers me up so when i get a postcard or a letter in the mail. okay i swear i’m going to sit down and send out all those cards when i finish my finals on thursday.

10. being in the northeast
since being here, i’ve only ever visited two other schools — penn and yale, and that’s not even to meet any of my friends. kehrol goes down to princeton like every other week or something, and i keep telling myself i’ll join her one of these weekends… but many weekends have passed and now summer is already here. wtf. why am i like this. why am i so lazy. OMG it’s just occurred to me that i’ve never even been to swarthmore to see andrew. good effin’ … and next year he’s not even going to be here anymore!!! okay now i’m panicking. i think next year i’m going to make it a point to spend some time at schools other than my own. sigh. will you guys welcome me with open arms =(

11. the singaporeans
there are so many of them here!!! i really enjoy talking to them, because all (well, most) of them still have their singaporean accent, and i can lah, mah, and whatlahyou with them unabashedly. it’s greeeeeat. they make me miss home a little less.

P, R and R. they are all super adorable :)

C and his lousily-made popiah. he’s a real cool guy — one of those who’s graduating after just 3 years (instead of 4). i’m really jealous because he got a job offer at HK and he’s going to live there for an indefinite period of time :( hong kong…..

12. campus
it seems to me that all i ever do is run through campus cos i’m late. i barely ever stop to soak in anything. see these pictures that i took? i hurriedly took them and then ran straight for class. this has to change. the few afternoons i spent out on the grass tanning and reading this spring were probably the only times i’d stopped to properly spend some time being one with my college.

13. my room
here is the picture that i promised 50000 centuries ago. i meant to go around my room taking pictures of things and blogging about the stories behind each thing… but … i just didnt. okay i’m beginning to see a running theme here. ANYWAY, this is my room. right now it smells like bananas and there are papers all over the floor from studying for my finals.

14. love

:)

P/S: can someone explain to me how i can maintain the picture quality (esp the saturation) when i export pictures out of iPhoto? everytime i export pictures they turn out so drab… yet i still need the picture size to be less than 50kb :|