Wind In My Head: March 2005
Wind In My Head
Thursday, March 31, 2005
The Land of the Bizarre
So last night was a night of strange dreams.I dreamt I was in a mall. And for some strange reason, mb and his entire family were there*. To make it all the more bizarre, they were trying to learn how to rollerblade and kept falling down. It seemed like I was an onlooker in the dream and to take up bizarro level, there were also people dressed in giant breast costumes rollerblading around! Majorly weird. It was almost as if it was a breast cancer convention of sorts.
I was conscious enough in my dream to ask what in the world were these giant rubber breasts doing roller blading around, plus they kept crashing into one another, then creating a dominoes of breasts! So mb's family and the group of giant breasts were basically mirroring one another. I'm sure there's a Freudian explanation for it, but I'm not even goinig to go there.
Way weird. So, I fell asleep in quite a foul mood last night but woke up this morning feeling rather tickled by the dream. Talk about dream therapy.
*Yet another reason why this was weird, I have never met mb or any member of his family for that matter.
Ondine tossed this thought in at 08:56
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Colonization
Assess the impact of space exploration.Space exploration gives us information. We may be able to find other planets for us to move into if any attack like in Star Wars occurs. This is why we are looking to invade Saturn.
Right. I buy that.
Ondine tossed this thought in at 10:21
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Well, not exactly. But WMD- Women Make a D ifference. That was the run that YM and I did on Saturday to help raise awareness for those who have been trafficked into sex in the region. A good cause and a fun name for the run too- YaYa Sisterhood Run. Not the most original but we had fun. It was hilly and it was probably the only run that had to be done with a map in hand. A few times, we had to stop to find our bearings, but we still got lost and we still ran the wrong route.But anyway, it was a good day where I indulged in my childhood joy- fried fishballs on a stick. Plus ice cream bread! All after the run. Talk about putting in more calories than I lost. That's probably why my skirt's tighter and I've decided that in order to be more comfy while blogging this, changing to my workout clothes was the way to go. Pity it rained out and it was Easter weekend, otherwise we would have gotten a larger crowd.
Quite amazing that people would do anything in the name of charity. On a regular day, I wouldn't pay $3 for 4 fishballs on a stick. And on a regular day, celebrity men won't particularly enjoy being dunked in a tank of rain cold water. But we all did what we had to do and it was fun. In my brother's cliched words "it was all for a good cause". Even the bruised 2nd toe nail that I have. :)
For more colourful pictures, check this out. And if you'd like a pink t-shirt, let me know. :)- Shameless plug, but hey, it's all for a good cause.
Ondine tossed this thought in at 14:57
Monday, March 28, 2005
Running on the spot
I'm home at 3 in the afternoon because I have come to the conclusion that there was no way I could actually gather my thoughts and get any work done at school. Too many people running around, too many agendas. So, I carted everything back. I realised today that I no longer am comfortable with doing fly by the seat of my pants lessons. I could once upon a time without it weighing too much on my conscience. Now it does. Bugger the darn conscience.So I'm home, trying to do that.
I think this morning, at assembly, I've guaranteed myself the reputation of being a bitca * I couldn't help it. How stupid would one have to be to chat through the national anthem right beside a teacher, flicking one another's skirt because it was the funniest thing in the world? How even more stupid would it be to continue the conversation at a raised volume during the pledge right beside said teacher? And when I march over to tell them off, I realise that one of the girls has got foundation plastered on her face and it is SO the wrong shade, so I tell her off for that as well. I mean, what a faux pas! So wrong, so absolutely wrong.
Well, I'm now off to recover all the lost time from this morning. Before I go, shout to to YM, whose birthday is today and is lucky enough to share it with Julia Stiles!!
*Willow: That's what it was! I mean, why else would she be acting like
such a b-i-t-c-h?
Giles: Willow, I think we're all a little too old to be spelling things
out.
Xander: A bitca?
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 2 Episode 1 "When She Was Bad"
Ondine tossed this thought in at 15:13
Thursday, March 24, 2005
Evil Food on Maundy Thursday
We just came back from dinner at Hong Kong Cafe and had the most of desserts there. French toast. Sounds harmless until you actually see it. 2 thick slices of bread with peanut butter slathered in between, dipped in egg and deep fried to gold perfection. Served with a slab of butter quickly melting its way into the soft white bread on the inside. When you cut it open, peanut butter heated by the oil, oozes out. To top it off, you're served this with golden syrup, the sweeter cousin of maple syrup.
The thickness of this sinful delight.
Aerial view, with slab of butter melting in plain sight.
This puts Krispy Kreme with its 12 gms of fat and 200 calories per doughnut to shame. The French toast makes Krispy Kreme something Weightwatchers would recommend as a healthy snack.
A joy on its own, but there really isn't a means of comparison when it comes to sinfulness. The french toast is in its own level of covetousness, unparralled by any other.
Ondine tossed this thought in at 23:14
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Fast Food
There's a Peranakan dish that separates the true blue Peranakans from the wannabes. It's called Buah Keluak. My mom only makes it on special occasions because the amount of work that goes into making it from scratch is too much to warrant making it more than once a year. My grandma and my aunt were equally reluctant to make the dish citing the tedium that came with bashing each shell in, digging out the contents of the nut(buah-loosely translated is fruit or nut in Malay). to toss with lemongrass, ginger, strange leaves, I think called limau perut (some lime based plant I'm assuming) and minced meat.When I was in Melbourne, my mom would pull a labour of love and cook up enough of the paste for me to bring over and freeze. I was then able to eat in when I felt homesick for some Peranakan food. Dan learnt how to eat it but isn't as fond of it. Like I said, it takes a true bred Peranakan to actually appreciate the dish. In the last years, I've depended on Chinese New Year to eat the stuff. Sometimes Christmas when we go over to B's, we get it too. B's grandma still makes it and I'm concerned about what might happen when she is no longer around and the recipe dies with her.
Anyway, Peranakan restaurants serve the stuff but it's always adulterated and at exorbitant costs. I found a cheaper alternative a few days back at the supermarket. It's about $4.95 for a box of pre cooked buah keluak with chicken pieces in yummy gravy. B's family and my mother would probably balk at it, I don't think it's totally authentic even if it had a teng-kak*
as a logo. The Jolly brand sort of gave that away.
But it was enough to satiate the desire for it that I didn't know I had until I saw it in the supermarket cold section. I'm pleased. A tasty dish that I didn't have to cook up with the added advantage of not having MSG (Monosodium Glutamate or A-ji-no-moto)in it. There are other local delights like beef rendang (beef curry)that I might try next.
I might also do the Coke-Pepsi taste test thing with my mom and see if she can actually tell the difference between true Buah Keluak and Jolly Buah Keluak. I could call it the Princess and the Pea taste test-only true Peranakans would be able to discern the difference. :)
*A tiffin carrier- containers, often metal, for food that can be stacked one a top another and held together and carried together by a frame and handle.
Addendum- Said supermarket. Bought from Cold Storage at Takashimaya and spotted also at Cold Storage Great World City. :) Go Forth and be Jolly.
Ondine tossed this thought in at 21:37
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Something Old in Something New
Sunday was spent under the blazing sun watching my kids at a relay championship. It is the same relay championship that I ran at when I was in school. Of course, we had supporters and we swept all the medals. Yup, we entered every darn race they could come up with- it is the only meet I know of where there is a 4 x 800m relay. How boring is that to watch?? Anyway, we were always entered for all the races then and we used to win all of them. On Sunday, my team was entered for ONE race because we ONLY had 4 runners in the whole school who could put one foot in front of another in rapid succession.They didn't do that badly, as in there were no major mishaps or cause for disqualification. But they didn't do that brilliantly either because well, what do you expect when out of a student of population of about 1600, we could only find 4 volunteers to run the easiest race in the book? There is a little bit of rivalry going on between the girls' and the guys' teams though. Possiblly because I coach the girls and the guys are coached by someone else who well, some would call eccentric and weird. I've known this guy way back from my own running days and his methods were weird then too. He insisted on, instead of carbo-loading* for the race, banana loading, in that you didn't eat anything but bananas before a race. I think once he relented, and gave us sugar cane! I see the merit in bananas, but a Nothing But Banana diet, to me now, is just a little bit over the top. So, the boys' team were eating enough bananas to feed a colony of stray monkeys and I didn't insist that the girls do the same. In fact, the girls asked if they could go out for lunch and ended up at Kentucky Fried Chicken. Inwardly, I cringed, because I knew how the oil would make me feel and I could only imagine what havoc it would wreak in the stomachs already filled with butterflies. But I figured, let it be. I shall not impose my neuroses on them. :)
And at the end of the day, the banana eating boys did worse than the fried chicken girls. I rest my case.
What was surreal for me though of the whole experience, was that the people at these meets don't change. The people who were around when I was racing, are still there, some coaching the same teams, some not, but all looking as sun-dried as they did more than a decade ago. I was recognised and well, slightly embarrassed by the same comments that relatives make at family functions about how you've grown and how they hadn't seen you since you were yea' tall. Also weirded out when my contacts were asked for so that I could be invited to the VETERAN'S Meet in the next few years! Veterans? Me? Crap, it is a sign of age. But I must admit I have the battle scars from my experiences on the track to warrant the name.
Ask me sometime and I'll tell you some stories from the front line.
*carbo loading- Before any sort of intense competition, atheletes are encouraged to create an additional store of glycogen which is needed for long drawn out muscle activity. They do this by actually increasing the amount of carbohydrate rich food they consume.
Ondine tossed this thought in at 09:23
Saturday, March 19, 2005
Bleeding Red
I remember my honours supervisor threatening us once that when he was done with our thesis drafts, it would look like our pages were bleeding. On hearing that, we went out and got him an assortment of multi-coloured pens just so that our very fragile self-esteems wouldn't take too big a hit when he gave us our drafts back. As a result, we got vetted drafts that resembled a rainbow melted all over them.I've spent the entire day trying to catch up with my marking. Unlike YM, I haven't been able to find a good block of time to just sit and mark with impunity. I've had to snatch time and it's been worrying because I need to get all this done by Tuesday and on top of that, I have an exam paper and a quiz to set by Monday. It had nothing to do with time management this week. On no one day did I laze around, do nothing and enjoy my holiday. We've been packed to the brim and the days have passed too quickly with much done about nothing.
So, I've scrawled, I've exclaimed, I've underlined to show my growing impatience and annoyance and the scripts are looing increasingly bled upon. I should perhaps be kinder and mark with purple, but I like my purple pen too much to squander the ink on gormless students' scripts that know much about nothing.
We gave up free tickets to see Coach Carter this afternoon, and the opening of Terz's show this afternoon so that I could get 2 hours of marking while Dan slaved over a lasagne. We're off to an anniversary dinner tonight and I'm thinking it would be quite rude if I actually brought along my marking so that leaves tomorrow. And tomorrow, there's tuition, and then there's the watching of my track girls attempt some sort of coordinated effort to keep the hands on the baton round the 400m track without hitting one another's knuckles with the metal pipe, dropping it, getting disqualified or running into someone else's lane. All of which might happen along with them forgetting to bring racing shoes, tops, bras(!), socks, safety pins...Ahh... the list can go on. Sufficed to say, I've got to be there to watch them cross the finish line, hopefully in a respectable enough time so that I don't have to make like an ostrich and bury my head into the very hard and parched ground that is the Gombak Stadium where ever that might be.
Ondine tossed this thought in at 15:55
Friday, March 18, 2005
Too Fast Too Furious
The week's almost over and I have done nothing!I haven't finished my marking. I haven't gone shopping. I haven't gone to tea with anyone.
I have on the other hand, gotten a strange set of tan lines from standing under the blazing morning sun training the track girls. I have acquired a strange headache behind my left eye that came to me at the strangest of moments and went from zero to mindblowing pain in 10 seconds.
So, I have to cram all I need to do into today, with the blinding headache along for the ride. Dan and I have a lunch date. I want to find some time to actually do some shopping and somewhere in there, I have to mark and fix my phone that has lost all ability to detect a SIM card. I think it didn't like have to sit in the blazing sun too much. But neither did I and I'm not throwing a hissy fit at myself. I'm hoping that the threat of actually sending it in would make it behave itself. But then again, I'm giving it too much credit.
Where has all the time gone! Bugger bugger bugger.
Ondine tossed this thought in at 10:33
Friday, March 11, 2005
Patch Adams
I have a locked jaw from having my mouth opened this morning for an hour. That was how long the dentist took to patch the chip. It was what I'd imagine plastic surgery to be although I'm sure I'm as far from the truth as I could be. There was the initial patching, then the false hope that it was all done, only to realise it my patched tooth now looked taller than my non-patched tooth beside it. So it had to be filed down. And the filing made all my hair stand because it felt like a construction site in my mouth. Then, there was the looking into a tooth-shaped mirror to check on the height of the tooth, only to now realise it was uneven. One side had more tooth than the other, so back down onto the chair I went while it was evened out. Up and down, back and forth, open and close, bite and say Ah! the whole hour long.It's done now. It still feels uncomfortable, but it's patched and I'm so sleepy from the whole experience and the rushing back to school. I'm due in class any minute and I have 100 survey forms to sieve...
And so the bell tolls.
Later.
Ondine tossed this thought in at 11:53
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Bite Me
I bit into a plum this morning and a little bit of my lower front too came off. Darn. I feel so insecure now, like the rest of my tooth is going to crumble away and biting into a chicken wing feels like such a hazardous mission. The earliest I can get this done is Friday morning. So, till then I'm going to be very careful about what I sink my teeth into.Two more days of school before the holidays although it's not going to be much of one. I'm inundated by marking, term reports, exam setting type rubbish. Gone are my grand plans to actually get out of the country during the week's break. Well, it's that plus a big phone bill that came for me yesterday. So big that M1 is offering me $100 worth of free mobile phone IDD cards. Yurp. Me and my phone habits propped up M1's profit margins for the month of February.
Not typing straight now. Took a nap and in dire need of going back to sleep but have got tuition in a while.
-Gurgle-
Ondine tossed this thought in at 18:42
Monday, March 07, 2005
The Road Less Travelled
Countries that I've Visited
I SO need to travel more.
Ondine tossed this thought in at 20:08
Sunday, March 06, 2005
Hangover
Unfortunately, it was not from being inebriated. But from being at my nephew's birthday party at the park. 20 screaming 5 -7 year old kids totally high on sugar and food with trans fat running around the park and one 3 year old who was feeling so left out, totally unused to not being the centre of attraction screaming her lungs out and turning on the water works at a whimper's notice is enough to exhaust any grown person. Me included.So today, we had grand plans to mark at Brewerkz after church that was after tuition. We made it two thirds into the plan before we gave in to the tremendous exhaustion coupled with the Sunday afternoon laziness. We need to try to get to church more often. Putting aside the guilt that has long been imbued in my by my mother, we need to beat coincidence. Our attendance at church seems to have somehow or other caught on with the roster of pastors at church. So, everytime we manage to get to church, it is always the same pastor. And that would be fine if he wasn't so hell, fire and brimstone. But he is and after 3 or 4 times, I'm beginning to think it isn't a coincidence anymore. And today, it was a double whammy. Usually, we try to make a beeline for the sanctuary where a more staid, sombre service is in session, but today, they were having Holy Communion there so that would mean that it would take as long as the furious message that we were bound to receive. So we stayed and just held our breath and crossed our fingers. Wish us luck next week.
Well, I'm off now. I don't need to wake up at 6 tomorrow because I'm on course. I can actually wake up an hour later, have breakfast, read the paper and get dressed when the sun is up and leave for work like every other normal non-teacher human being. After that, I'm making a beeline to see if I can buy funky spotted shoes like YM's. :)
Ondine tossed this thought in at 22:58
Thursday, March 03, 2005
Mummy Knows Best
Warning: Rant ahead.Why is it somehow mothers seem to forget to be people and friends after they become mothers?
I know, I'm not a mother so I won't understand until I learn the secret handshake of motherhood. But seriously, some of these things are just common sense for the decent human being and when you call yourself a friend.
In what world is it okay to actually tell someone they're down to help out with time and date stipulated without any sort of prior warning or heads up? I mean, do mothers think that all the worlds are suspended around their universe and axis? What if we have other things lined up? Is it because they think that non-mother type people can't be as busy as them and be struggling to keep their head above water? Or do they just assume their children are so important that everyone will come running at the drop of a hat?
It's annoying. It's frustrating. It makes one feel that my life is worth less in the eyes of the revered mummies of the world because I don't have one of them kids. So, by extension, everything I do is inconsequential. And it makes me want to fight for my life and what it means. I like my life. I like being busy and stressed for myself, because when I get through it, there is a sense of euphoria. I may dislike my job at times but I love the feeling it gives me, that I'm doing something and that something is important. And I hate people who think that what I do is not important or less important than their jobs or their children. I don't compare my job to anyone else's. I know bringing up kids is tough. All I have to do is look at how exhausted my mom is with Bruce and Beth to know that and I respect that. I don't tell her she's less tired than I am because I face classes of 25 kids every day for 8 hours. So why do the mummies of the world think less of what we do?
I understand that when one becomes a parent, the focus of their life changes and the kids take priority. Before I got married, a pastor and some married friends told us that while kids were important, they couldn't be made to feel that they were more important than either parent to one another. That the kids should never dominate the marriage. And I thought that was excellent advice. Too often, women become mummies and forget that they were people, wives and friends before that. And I feel sad to know that for some of those that I considered friends that I could confide in, their world has become so blindered that they don't see that their friends are still friends and need to be treated as such, with consideration and kindness. Not with an air of importance and taking us non-mummy friends for granted, in every way possible.
Humph. That really sucks.
Big time.
I should start looking into creating bumper stickers "Kick me if I become a Mummy and forget to be a person"
Ondine tossed this thought in at 09:20
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
The War of the Roses
We are in the midst of essay marking. So I cannot resist.You can mark them down for not being creative...
The war of the Roses was fought for decades in England as the people could not decide whether the national flower should be red or white. After such a long period of war, with so many lives being lost, the national flower was finally set as rose with no particular indication of the colour. This went all the way back to ground zero.
...Yes, that's why we got the English Rose
Creative use of grammar. At least this kid has some idea of grammar rules. Theoretically speaking anyway...
This essay is entitled Ways of Using the Word Enterprise
Enterprising is defined as starting a business and many have neglected the fact that enterprise is also about passion and interest.People enterprise as they are keen to provide services. Although we cannot deny the fact that enterprising is one of the easiest methods to become rich, enterprising would not be successful if there is no interest. The interest they have in enterprising have made them survive failures during the process of enterprising. Sim Wong Hoo is an example of an enterprisier who faced many setbacks and finally succeeded because of his passion to enterprise. He was declared bankrupt twice but this did not stop him from enterprising.
Ondine tossed this thought in at 11:22