%but_i_digress

Relink

2008-12-18T22:46:00.001+08:00

Relink me at iridesce.wordpress.com. A proper relink skin will be put up tomorrow. I have to sleep now.

sorry for not blogging

2008-12-10T20:36:00.003+08:00

I realise that I have not blogged in a long time. There are several reasons for this.

Firstly, I simply have nothing to blog about.

While school was still on, there was a multitude of events to blog about. In the beginning of the year, there was the novelty of the ascension to the highest academic level in the school. Closer to the June holidays, there was the sinking feeling that the PSLE was drawing closer and closer. August was the final month before the prelims, and as we faced the fact that our evasion of the reality of the PSLE was over, we could blog about that. And of course, throughout the year, there were events happening in class every day that we could blog about.

I think the two-month computer hiatus during the prelim and PSLE period ruined my blogging momentum. But at least I could still blog about my nervousness about my PSLE results and uncertainty about my future, and when my PSLE results came in, I could blog about them too.

But there is no anxiety about my PSLE results, since they came in three weeks ago.

There is no depression about them either, since I'm satisfied with them.

There is no uncertainty about my secondary school posting, because I've already been accepted into RGS via DSA.

There are no major events taking place in my holiday life. This doesn't mean I'm bored; it just means that there's nothing blogworthy taking place.

I could post endlessly about my thoughts about entering a new chapter in my life, my anticipation and apprehension of the transition etc., but that would be boring and repetitive, and it would only give me one post before my blog started to degenerate into a collection of near-identical ramblings.

I could blog daily about my routine activities, but I don't want to do that, because I would get too bored to finish typing it.

I could rant about my computer problems (my keyboard is less laggy but still acts up occasionally; my cursor is epileptic; there's an annoying debugging dialog box that paralyses my Firefox window and pops up relentlessly), but nobody would want to read it.

I'm lucky that nobody tags me with quizzes to do, because to be honest, I'd much rather post actual content in sentences and paragraphs, no matter how little of that I have, than answer questions about my birth month and my shirt colour or list the songs on my iPod (I haven't got one, anyway). No offence to people who do take quizzes. It's just my personal preference.

There simply is nothing blogworthy going on now. Even my LEAD blog, the third ever to be created, the first to be active, and one of the original then-P5 GEP Founding Blogs of the LEAD blogosphere, is dying. I haven't seen the top or even the bottom of the Most Active Blogs list since I got off my hiatus.

So, here I am, blogging about how I have nothing to blog about.

The irony.

first post in 10 days

2008-11-30T18:29:00.006+08:00

Sorry for not blogging.

Yesterday, my entire nuclear family went to the MindChamps workshop. I had no idea what it was about at first, but it sounded interesting.

We went out in the morning to eat breakfast, since there was not enough food left in the house. I ate three slices of toast, dipped in Milo.

After breakfast, we went back home to change into "going-out clothes", as we term them. We didn't have time to eat much of a lunch, but at precisely 1 o'clock, when the workshop was supposed to start, we were still in Mos Burger, ordering butterfly prawns and a drink to take to the workshop with us. I wasn't even hungry, but the workshop lasted for three and a half hours, so it was wise to provide ourselves with sustenance prior to the workshop.

When we located the East Wing of the building in which the workshop was located, we entered the place and found that it was packed with parents and children ranging in age from kindergarten to junior college. (Not the parents, I mean.) In other words, despite having been about ten minutes late, we weren't really late at all, since the workshop hadn't even started yet. I kept trying to read my book, but I kept getting interrupted. A lady in a MindChamps shirt wrote my name on a sticker and pasted it on my shirt. After this, I went to read the testimonials on the wall. There was one that stated that its writer had gotten a PSLE score of 110, but had achieved four distinctions in his/her (I can't remember which) 'O' levels.

We also received questionnaires to fill out (self-evaluations for the students, parental evaluations of the children for the parents) with questions about topics such as interpersonal skills (I only gave myself a 13 out of 25 for this part) and relationship to learning. When it came to answering the question about preferring relaxation to learning on weekends and during holidays, I figured that learning about frontal lobes and IQ ranges from Wikipedia counted as learning, doesn't it?

After this, we submitted our questionnaires (I was dissatisfied with the handwriting I'd used to write my name on the front page, but there is only so much one can do when one has to lean forward to write on a nearby cushion). We then went to a nearby room, called Einstein (all the rooms were named after one famous person or another).

I don't think the workshop got off to a very good start, as the beginning of the presentation was mostly about the history of MindChamps, the Champion Forum at the Olympics and the like. This did not clear up my doubts about what the workshop actually was about. Also, it wasn't very interesting, apart from the Olympics video. The quotes on the slides before the presentation were interesting, though.

There were also constant mispronunciations ("chiurens" was probably the worst, followed by "cha" instead of "child" and the ubiquitous "tiution"), but I tried my best to ignore those.

After this, we had a list of 30 words to memorise. It was supposed to illustrate the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the memory techniques to which we were accustomed. I managed to memorise about 15 with moderate confidence before we were told to stop.

The trainer needed three people, one from each category (secondary school, Primary 3 to 6 and adult). The first one got 7 right, the second (my sister) 10 and the third 16.

After this, those who were in secondary school or who would be the following year were told to go to a different room. Apparently, the technique we would be learning was called UFO, which stood for Using Familiar Objects. Ten vocabulary words had been written on the whiteboard. I wondered if we would be tested on them. I hoped not, since I didn't know about half of them, and even for those I knew I wasn't confident in my ability to define them.

Before we could do anything with the words, our trainer said that we only used 3% of our brains (I tried to suppress the small amount of neurological information that I had gleaned from various sources) and that we could unlock our subconscious, which took up 90% of our brain, through making learning fun or something like that. He demonstrated this by asking a boy to walk towards the whiteboard, and then asking him which foot he had started off on. I had a feeling that that was more a matter of cerebral hemispheric dominance than the subconscious, but I didn't say anything.

He then recited a rhyme which we had to repeat. The rhyme was

The Grand Old Duke of York,
he had ten thousand men.
He marched them up a hill,
and he marched them down again.
When they were up, they were up;
when they were down, they were down;
and when they were in between,
they were neither up nor down.

Then he asked us how many of us would be able to recall the entire rhyme. (I had actually already memorised it, but I didn't say anything.) Then he repeated the exercise, this time with actions.

After that, we were given a sheet of paper with the meanings of the vocabulary words printed on it. They were (not in order):

spindrift - spray blown across the sea
uxorious - very dependent upon one's wife
cheroot - cigar open at both ends
pyrexia - fever
shackled - chained
nebulous - difficult to see
antithesis - opposite; contrast of ideas
ileum - third and final portion of the small intestine

I can't remember the other two.

Anyway, the memory technique that we were taught was to use the syllables of the word to form a mental image with the meaning of the word embedded within. For example, because the first syllable of the word "nebulous" sounds like "nap", the mental image would be of a man taking a nap with one arm of his spectacles in his mouth, making it difficult for him to see when he woke up.

I had read about this technique before in books, so I recognised it and was slightly familiar with it although I had never used it before. When I tried to use it, though, I found that using visual imagery to learn new vocabulary words was counterintuitive based on my strengths and weaknesses. Basically, my brain had associated the words with their definitions and stored them in my vocabulary before my slower, weaker visual system had a chance to store the images. My visual system never had a chance of catching up. If my strengths (language) and weaknesses (visual imagery) had been reversed, this technique would have been helpful, though.

I tried to use the technique, but I could not, as even if I could have suppressed my language center from giving me the definition when I was asked for the meaning of one of the words, I would at least double the amount of time I took to retrieve the definition from my mind. I would have to summon up the mental image I had formed and extrapolate the definition from there, rather than just directly getting the definition I had internalised from the word itself. This would have increased the time I took to retrieve the definition in several ways. Firstly, it would have involved my weaker visual system. This would have slowed it down significantly on its own. Secondly, it would have added two extra steps, that of retrieving the mental image and extrapolating the definition from its contents. And thirdly, it would have bypassed the much quicker method of just getting the definition directly.

Also, the first mental image that jumps to mind upon hearing a word for me will forever be my synaesthetic colour and texture, not a picture of a man taking a nap or other visual mnemonic.

That's just for me, though. As I said earlier, had my strengths and weaknesses been reversed so that my strength lay in visual imagery and my weakness in languages, this technique would have been immensely helpful.

After this, we went back to the Einstein room, walking in right in the middle of a demonstration of the results of successful application of techniques taught by a graduate of the program. He had memorised a grid of numbers and was able to tell the audience of parents which digit was in each cell, so that if you called out "C4", he would instantly tell you what digit that cell contained. He could also recite whole rows and columns of numbers.

It was our turn to demonstrate the technique we had learnt next. Words would be called out by one of the trainers, and we would have to define them. We were divided into two teams according to gender, and the team that called out the definition first would gain a point. Somehow overcoming my stammer, I was the first to call out the definitions for the first few words. After I had earned my team a few points, the trainer asked me to keep the definitions in my head and not call them out for the subsequent words to give others a chance to answer. Our team did not fall out of the lead, though. After I had been told not to answer, the contest was still dominated by a few people. After these people had answered a few questions, they were told not to answer as well. I think we won in the end.

After our demonstration, the P3-to-P6 group and the youngest group recited two lists of 30 words from memory (one list each). I think their task was really more difficult than ours, but I don't know what technique they had been taught.

All in all, this had been a highly enjoyable experience, even if I hadn't actually gotten to use the techniques. Objectively, the technique would have been useful if my strengths and weaknesses had been reversed, and it is not the fault of the program that they were not. Also, I learned at least 5 new words.

PSLE results

2008-11-20T22:51:00.003+08:00

My description of the month between the HCL paper and the release of PSLE results in my previous post as "PSLE-free bliss" was not entirely accurate. That was what it was supposed to be, but although we didn't usually mention it, it wasn't possible for us to avoid thinking about the PSLE entirely.

The things I had been worried about were:

writing bad or average compositions, pulling my overall score for my languages down, when my languages were my two best subjects, only one or two marks apart
missing out pages in the Science paper and losing my A*
doing badly for Science MCQ like I usually do in mock papers
making stupid careless mistakes in Maths Section C questions

We didn't actually get to know exactly how much we had scored for each subject (an A* of 91 and an A* of 100 are quite different, as are a Distinction of 80 and a Distinction of 95), but from my grades, I don't think any of the above happened - or if the fourth item happened, it didn't happen too much.

I arrived in the hall about five minutes late, as the school carpark had been full, because of the impossibility of allowing 460 cars to park within the school compound. As a result, I walked in in the middle of the announcement of the top 10 students.

This only served to make me more nervous, as even members of the top 10 list were scoring below 280. That did not bode well for the rest of us. Visions of quickly glancing down at the paper on which my score was printed and seeing that the first digit was 1 filled my mind.

Since I had been late, I sat at the back of my class queue and started talking to 6Kers next to me.

Since all the members of the top 10 list had been from the GEP, there was an additional slide devoted to the top 10 mainstreamers as well. (I was glad that they did not use the annoying term "non-GEP".)

The principal announced that the highest scorer in our school (287) had also been the highest in the nation! Congratulations.

After the slide presentation, we went up to our classes to receive our results.

Before we actually received our results, our teachers wrote phone numbers on the whiteboard. Some belonged to youth hotlines and the like, while others were their phone numbers. I typed these into my handphone. I had to check repeatedly to ensure that I didn't type the wrong numbers or save a number under the wrong name, because I was so consumed with the suspense all this was building.

The teachers decided to give the top students in our class their results first, as they had to rush down to the General Office to be interviewed. This only served to further increase the suspense. The two top students in our class tied with 284.

At this point, my heart was pounding terribly fast. I think my sense of perspective for PSLE T-scores has been distorted by last year's 14-year record of 294. I thought of my prelim T-score of 240, which despite the valiant efforts of the A*s of my languages to pull it up nevertheless succumbed to the depressing effect of my Maths. What if the same thing happened again?

Fortunately, I was index no. 2 and would not have to wait for too long.

The paper with our results printed on them had been put into a transparent file pocket protector (is that what it's called?), along with our graduating-class-of-2008 PowerPoint presentations on a CD, our S1 Option Form and assorted mementos from our P6 year. This meant that we could not simply glance down at our sheets of paper to see how we'd done. I had imagined the sheets of paper to look more like the A5 sheets on which our prelim scores had been printed, with shades of grey and the scores and T-scores for each subject.

Not wanting to prolong my suffering, I pulled the white A4 sheet of paper out of the folder and looked at the bottom.

There were three figures there:

Student's Aggregate: 275
Highest: 287
Lowest: 87

I think I noticed the difference of precisely 200 between the highest and lowest scores first.

Only after I had registered that none of my fears (the score starting with the digit 1 etc) had come true did I look at my grades for the different subjects.

I was relieved to note that I had scored four A*s and one distinction (for HCL).

To be honest, I had been more relieved about Science than about Maths, because while in a Maths mock paper my level of confidence regarding the difficulty of the paper tended to reflect my actual score, there was no real correlation in Science papers, since I almost never experienced extremes of difficulty with Science papers, yet my MCQ section kept pulling my score down and causing me to score in the 70s. Also, I had found the Science paper more difficult than the Maths one. I had also been incredibly worried about missing out Science questions.

My Maths, though, has definitely improved drastically from my horrendous prelim score.

Our ordeal of waiting is over.

Tomorrow

2008-11-19T20:07:00.005+08:00

Two months ago, it hadn't sunken in for many of us that the biggest exam we'd ever taken was just around the corner. Examination nervousness doesn't usually set in longer than a week before the exam, not for me at least. Two months ago, we were worrying about our prelims.

Our prelims were the biggest event within a timeframe not too long for us to comprehend. When we received our results, we had to remind ourselves that our prelim results would not necessarily reflect our PSLE results. Some of us were disappointed at not being in the top 60 of the cohort, some of us were satisfied with being in the top 60 of the cohort, while others saw being in the top 13.0435% of the cohort when they were in the top 1% of the cohort unsatisfactory and unhelpful in illustrating anything about their performance. In other words, they felt that it showed nothing that they were in the top 60 when they were supposed to be in the top 4.6. (This is based on an approximate figure of 460 students in the cohort, based on 40 x 9 mainstream students and 25 x 4 GEP students.)

One month ago, our PSLE had just finished. We had spent the last few weeks in a frenzy of preparation for the biggest exam we'd ever taken. We had cheered deafeningly after our HCL paper. The room had resonated with our cries of joy that our ordeal was over.

For the next month, we tried to cast all thoughts of the PSLE out of our minds as we enjoyed the blissful month of PSLE-free life, free of preparation for the PSLE, pressure related to the PSLE or worry about the PSLE. We tried our best not to think of the ordeal we had just endured. That is why we hated it when people tried to give us schoolwork or asked us how the PSLE had been when that was the last thing we wanted to think about. We didn't want to remember the PSLE. We wanted to enjoy the month of bliss we had before the PSLE came crashing back into our lives again.

And tomorrow, that's exactly what it will do.

After a month of evading reality, it is time for us to face the dreaded acronym again.

Before today, we didn't even want to hazard guesses at our PSLE T-score, the dreaded three-digit number, as we wanted to forget about the PSLE, to wipe it from our memories and keep it safely locked away in a padlocked locker for as long as we could before the time came to face it again.

After tomorrow, we won't need to hazard guesses.

We will know the three-digit number that will change our lives.

From the day we were P1, we were bombarded with examination papers in the PSLE format and maybe even assessment books set in the PSLE format. We never realised how deeply ingrained the PSLE is in our culture. We probably didn't even recognise the features of the PSLE format. (P1 counting-from-1-to-10 questions don't make for a very recognisable format of any kind.) But the PSLE was just a distant speck on the horizon, if we even knew what it was.

The first day of 2006 was the first day we were Upper Primary students. The PSLE was two years away, but it seemed like two centuries. Many of us were too busy with trying to deal with each day's workload to worry about specks on the horizon two whole years away. We were 10, fresh into double digits. Two years later, we would be a year away from 13.

2007 was the busiest year, excluding this year. The three SS portfolios were a given, but projects (ECCM, IDP etc) fell from the skies at a prodigious rate, burying us under a mountainous heap of work. We were not new to the school (most P4 GEP), nor were we about to graduate (P6). We were too bogged down with everyday work to notice how we were inching closer and closer to the PSLE.

In 2008, we had to adjust to being the eldest in the school. We also had to adjust to the fact that the PSLE was no longer a distant speck on the horizon or an empty word like it had been six years ago. In our twelfth year of life, the PSLE had suddenly switched from being something we could afford to dismiss to being something we had no choice but to face. From the first day of P6, we were reminded that we only had nine months before the PSLE. But nine months is long when you've only lived for twelve years. With a sixteenth of our lives ahead of us to prepare for the PSLE, we continued to slack.

Three months after the first day, we reached the first milestone in our P6 year, the March holidays - the first holiday in 2008. It told us that three months, a whole third of the nine months we'd been given at the beginning of the year, had passed with little or no preparation done. But did we register that? No. We continued blissfully walking down the path of time, unaware of what lay ahead.

Six months after the first day, we reached the halfway point of our P6 year, the June holidays. Two-thirds of our preparation time had passed. But for most of us, it had not yet sunken in that the biggest exam of our lives would be in three months. Three months sounds long, but it is just 90 days, 2160 hours or 129600 minutes. Nobody, though, bothered to measure our remaining time in minutes, or we would have realised that the amount of time we had left to prepare for the biggest exam we'd ever taken could be measured in units consisting of half the time it took to brush our teeth and still only amount to a six-digit number. We didn't realise that six months had passed without noticing, neither did we realise the implications that that had for the duration of three months. We stepped up PSLE preparation, but not by a lot.

It was one month before the PSLE that we really started mugging. We had gotten back our prelim results, and we had three responses to them. We were shocked, satisfied or oblivious. My results were highly one-sided, with A*s for both languages but horrendous Maths results and average Science results (admittedly, I only scored 5.5 marks lower than the highest scorer did, but that's only because the highest score was 89).

This was my wake-up call.

For the next month, I worked harder than I had ever worked in my entire life.

I was glad that the PSLE was opening with my best subject. I was also glad that languages and sciences were being alternated. I was also glad for the weekend break before Science.

As time went by, I grew more nervous about my compositions. I was worried that I had not tied them up properly, or that my plot didn't make sense. I hoped that my main papers would pull my score up.

My performance in the Maths paper exceeded my expectations. I finished the paper on time with time to check, I didn't have any questions I was stuck on, and I didn't have any implausible answers with strange fractions.

I'm still nervous about the Science paper. From my experience, confidence in mock papers tends to translate to losing marks in the MCQ.

But that's not the point.

The point is that for a month, we've distanced ourselves from the PSLE. We returned to the state of oblivion that we inhabited three months ago. For the past month, the PSLE has been a distant speck, no longer on the horizon, but receding into the distance.

But tomorrow, we will be forced to confront that speck once more, as it zooms back into our field of vision, enabling us to see every dot of colour clearly.

Tomorrow, we will be jolted out of our oblivion.

Graduation (late post)

2008-11-15T15:13:00.004+08:00

I am sorry for this late post.

On 14 November 2008, we sang the school song for the last time.

We wore our school uniform for the second-to-last time. (The last time will be on the 20th, when we collect our PSLE results.)

We all gathered in the school hall for the last time.

---

I arrived a little early, before we had been organised into classes. I got people to sign my autograph book, a school exercise book with "Autograph Book" written in the Subject blank on the cover. Earlier, since the first three people to sign my autograph book had signed in the lines on the pages, I came up with the brilliant idea of creating a Table of Contents for each class, organised by index number. When I realised that that would use only four pages of the exercise book, and that I should get comments as well, I devoted the two pages after a Table of Contents to comments. Unfortunately, people usually just signed on the first page and didn't bother to read the carefully handwritten notice on top that said "Leave a comment on the next page!" or something similar.

After collecting a few 6K autographs, I wrote my profile in others' profile books. I can write in my normal handwriting with markers after all. I just have to write bigger.

When we walked into the hall, I forgot to walk in the rhythm of the music playing. I only realised this when we got closer to the hall and I heard the music louder.

When we sat down, people all around me were talking. I tried to shush them.

Before the speeches, we sang the school song for the last time (excluding people who are going to NYGH). Surprisingly, this time I could hit all the high notes without using second voice, and I didn't make mistakes in the lyrics either.

The guest of honour came next. He was a little late, although not a lot. The leadership positions of the guest of honour, as well as of every speaker for the day, were repeated in every single speech that followed. This made the openings rather boring.

I really hadn't realised that our principal had seen this batch from P1 to P6. This was mainly because I had only been here since P4. This speech, as well as a few others, was translated into Chinese after it had been said in English.

I was really only interested in the parent's speech and the P5 and P6 representatives' speeches, although it didn't really make sense to wish us good luck for our PSLE results when nothing we could do now would change them.

The last speech was really the best, but unfortunately, nobody was really paying attention because the limits of our collective attention span had been exceeded by the previous speeches, many of which repeated the same points over and over and were delivered in two languages. I had wanted to listen to the speeches, excluding the irrelevant stuff about the CDC, but people around me kept talking and giggling loudly. Hilarious.

After the speeches was the Prize Presentation. Since we are in 6J, our prize recipients were given their prizes near the end of each award. This part was slightly more boring than the multiple speeches above, as there was no actual content apart from lists of names most of which I didn't recognise, requiring constant clapping. My arms had started to ache around the Best in SS award.

The Prize Presentation seemed much longer than it must have been. Each award was long enough, what with NYPS having 13 classes in this level this year. Congratulations to all the people who won awards, anyway. I still wish that the Bilingual Award had been split into two for each language, especially since only one person could get the award otherwise.

After this, we watched our class slides. I had thought at first that they weren't using our slides after all, since the colour scheme and fonts for 6A and 6B seemed the same, but 6C's presentation was different and I realised that they were using our slides after all. I had not gotten the chance to add nice fonts into the slides, so all our fonts would be aesthetically unattractive. But the slides actually looked quite good, even without nice fonts.

This was followed by teachers singing a song (《再见，老师》 or something).

Then we sang the graduation song. I had only memorised the second verse on that day. Before that day, I had not even been aware of its existence. From what I had heard of this song (I had even read about it in the copy of 《遥遥手记》 I had bought from a bookshop, in which it stated that after singing the first few lines one's tears would start dropping), I had been expecting to be moved to tears, but nothing of the sort happened. I think people around me were giggling. What, may I ask, is so funny about the graduation song?! I recognise that I am one of the few who actually like the song, but that doesn't mean it's hilariously funny, nor does it mean that you should disrupt the final singing of this song for those who actually recognise the gravity of this occasion.

Those of us who hadn't yet gotten our GEP T-shirts got them that day. Mine seemed a little too large, which is a gross understatement - it reached halfway down my skirt.

And so concluded our last day as students of NYPS.

last day of primary school

2008-11-12T21:20:00.003+08:00

Tomorrow is our last day of primary school.

The day after tomorrow is the Graduation Ceremony.

In three days, we will officially be ex-pupils of NYPS.

We will no longer be primary school students. We won't be secondary school students either. (It'll still be 2008.) We'll exist in a limbo.

One chapter of our lives will be over.

Tomorrow is our last day as primary students.

I remember "stoning" in my bedroom when I was three, not doing anything, just staring into space. Apparently I did that pretty often. This was before we moved house, of course.

Nine years have passed since that day. We graduate in two days.

Tomorrow is our last day as primary students.

I remember looking up in the middle of a spelling test in kindergarten, informing the teacher that I had run out of space. "Move to the next line," she said. But I had run out of space in the middle of a word. "Oh, dear," was her reaction. Of course, I had heard of hyphenated line breaks, but I didn't think they would be appropriate in a spelling test for some reason.

Seven (I think) years have passed since that day. We graduate in two days.

Tomorrow is our last day as primary students.

I remember running through the rain as a P1 student with two P3s, finally arriving at the canteen and doing strange experiments (their Science homework, apparently) with glitter, tissue paper and water. I looked up to P3s then, because they were two years older than I was. Now they're three years younger than I am.

Six years have passed since that day. We graduate in two days.

Tomorrow is our last day as primary students.

I remember clutching my brown envelope in November as a P3 girl, not understanding what it meant. As classmates crowded around me asking if I had gotten in, I could only reply that I did not know. I should have realised that since all but one of the others had gotten sheets of paper instead of brown envelopes, I had probably gotten in, but I did not realise that.

Three years have passed since that day. We graduate in two days.

Tomorrow is our last day as primary students.

I remember sitting in the school bus on the last day of P3, not quite comprehending the fact that that would be the last time I would see the temporary campus of my old school (CHIJ [TP]), as it would be demolished for a new campus the following year, the year I would be P4 in NYPS, a student in the GEP. The P6s were waving goodbye to the school as the school bus drove out of the gate, but for me it had not quite sunk in that I would not return to this school the following year. For the P6s it was obvious. I was P3.

Three years have passed since that day. We graduate in two days.

Tomorrow is our last day as primary students.

Three years have passed since we stepped into our new school (for most of us, at least; a few of us have been here for six years) as GEPers. Now, after three years, it is time to push that part of our identity into the realm of fond reminiscences. (There is no secondary school GEP, not next year, at least.) IPers doesn't roll off the tongue, really.

I like the Chinese words for the three schools. Primary school is literally "small school", secondary school is "middle school" and university is "big school". (JC is "high middle school", which doesn't make as much sense, but never mind.) It really shows the transition in a way that the English terms don't. Sure, we have primary, secondary and tertiary education, but people tend to talk about universities and polytechnics instead of "tertiary education".

In two days, we will be out of "small school". The next stage of our lives will be in "middle one". (I should stop with the literal translations soon.) This year, we're in "small six", but next year, we'll be out of the "small" category and in "middle one". (End of literal translations.)

Just a month ago, we were frantically mugging our heads off and panicking about the biggest exam we'd ever taken. We couldn't imagine post-PSLE life. What would life be like without having to worry about the exam that has been present as a distant speck in the horizon since we entered ~~small~~ primary school?

What a difference one month can make.

After the PSLE, I could not immediately adjust to guilt-free slacking. There was absolutely no academic work whatsoever (excluding the Historian-Geologist Card), so there was nothing to do during free time except slack (I was not going to torture myself with post-PSLE assessment books!). But I had spent the past few months or so in an automatic no-slacking-allowed mode, so slacking still brought twinges of guilt.

We adjusted soon, though. I think I'm one of the very few who completed the Historian-Geologist Card (I only earned 6 points, though). And I'm up 45 minutes later than I was supposed to be tonight. (I wish I did not have to sleep early after the PSLE, though. Fact: For 80% of the days after PSLE, the weekdays at least, I slept before 11, usually before 10.30. Fact: There is no major national exam on the horizon threatening to engulf me with its presence. Fact: I will not be able to slack legitimately with this post-national-exam insanity for another six years. I know that it's good for me, but going through life doing only what's good for us is like parachuting with a safety net. The safety net would be very big and it would completely ruin the scenery for people trying to take photographs. Get the metaphor?)

Twelve years ago, I was two and a half months old. (I know this isn't relevant.)

Six years ago, I had just graduated from kindergarten.

Three years ago, I left my school for this one because of the brown envelope that changed my life.

Two days from now, I'll leave this one.

Notice the difference in units.

Camp

2008-11-12T20:01:00.003+08:00

When we went up to the hall, it was past 8 o'clock. The left side of the hall, adjacent to the corridor, was allocated to the boys, while the right side was allocated to the girls. Some boys set up a small tent that looked too small for any of them to have fit inside, but you never know.

We did not have any tents.

During the P6 Star Camp, while sleeping, I had somehow managed to turn myself around 180 degrees, so that my legs were where my head had used to be, next to other people's heads. I didn't realise it until I woke up and others asked why I was in the opposite direction to that in which I had originally been. The others had not forgotten about this strange incident, so I slept at the extreme right.

We had about an hour of free time, which we spent playing Uno Stacko and Uno. The others played Speed and Cheat as well, neither of which I knew how to play. I should have brought my Scrabble. We used part of this free time to shower.

We did not have group showers like we did during the P6 Star Camp. We trotted down stairs in slippers or barefooted to the Level 1 toilets near the library with bags of clothes, soap and shampoo. I had not realised that I had had a bag in my bag, so I walked down with armloads of the aforementioned items in my hands, taking care not to drop any of them.

Apparently, I took rather long to shower. This was because the wrong size (not actually the wrong size, but the ones I had worn in P4, tightened unnecessarily because I had pulled the strings too hard) of PE shorts had been packed into my bag, making putting them on or taking them off a struggle. Also, I was trying to stop water from getting into the Ziplock bags on the floor of the shower stall. I did not succeed in this respect. I also took a while trying to sling my PE shorts over the door, as the top of the door was too high for me.

After I came out, not having a comb, I used my fingers instead.

After showering, we half-ran back to the hall, where we resumed our games. I played Uno in my sleeping bag. Halfway through, though, I had to get out of my sleeping bag, because all of us had to do area-cleaning because somebody had gone to the vending machine downstairs, two flights of stairs down, in clear violation of rules that explicitly stated that because of the darkness, all of us could not venture beyond the hall and the toilets.

We slept at about 11, but few actually slept then. CJ7 and Wall-E were played. I had watched CJ7 before. Halfway through, we decided to brush our teeth.

I had brought a cup, a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste with words printed on it in a language I didn't understand. Other people, though, rinsed their mouths with cupped hands.

After that, we went back to the hall.

We played for a while more. I had started to feel sleepy, though (that was why I had decided to play Uno in my sleeping bag earlier, so that I could lie down in comfort), so before CJ7 had finished, I fell asleep. I had wanted to see Wall-E, so that was unfortunate.

I woke up the next morning at about 6 in the same position that I had gone to sleep in. I stayed in my sleeping bag for a while before reluctantly getting out to keep my sleeping bag. I had the usual difficulty with rolling my sleeping bag up so that it could fit into its bag.

I could not finish the mee siam I bought from the canteen, although it was deliciously spicy.

My grandmother came to pick me up from school at about eight. Once I got home, I unloaded all my dirty clothes and removed my Doraemon comic from the bag.

(Thanks to Fiona for letting me refer to her blog for details.)

BBQ Under the Stars + Camp

2008-11-10T19:51:00.003+08:00

This post is long overdue. Sorry.

During debate training, we had a debate on the motion "THBT McDonald's has done more harm than good". The previous debate was about McDonald's too. Anyway, we were on the opposition, and the proposition raised a point about the food having been tested on rats. When we pointed out the differences between rats and humans, the proposition countered that genetically, rats were 96.6% similar to humans. I was the opposition third speaker, as usual, and my index cards were covered with scribbles in illegible quasi-cursive I-have-to-make-up-my-speech-during-the-debate-in-20-minutes debate-handwriting.

When I went up to speak, I was introduced by the chairperson as "the girl who reads Wikipedia for fun" (this is true). But I did not realise exactly how much my speech proved that.

When it was time for me to address the rats/humans issue, instead of pointing out how different that 3.4% made us, and raising the example of other primates being 98% similar to us but a world apart, I mentioned the following in my speech:

primitive brain development
neurons
frontal lobes

I mentioned frontal lobes in a debate about McDonald's.

The funny thing is, I actually forgot what frontal lobes did while preparing for my speech, and because the proposition third speaker was speaking and I would be next, I was frantic. In my panic, I just said "decision-making", which I thought was correct. It turned out to be partly correct, because frontal lobes apparently deal with recognising consequences of actions and social response. I guess that plays a part in decision-making, doesn't it?

I must memorise the function of frontal lobes for use in future debates.

I also used the word "quintessential", except that I stumbled over it because of my stammer.

After the debate, we had the BBQ Under the Stars.

The BBQ was fun, with music booming from the speakers on the stage that ordinarily broadcast morning exercise music. The food was delicious, especially the chicken, as it was perfused with delicious spiciness without sacrificing its original taste. The drinks were tasty too, but they ran out quickly. That was a pity.

Most of us sat on the stage in the courtyard, chatting, drinking and eating. People kept dumping banana leaves from otah onto my plate, which caused me not to recognise it as my plate at first after a trip to get a drink, as I had not chosen to eat five otahs.

After eating, my friend and I took shots of the basketball court, courtyard and fellow schoolmates with her camera. The basketball court really looks beautiful empty under the night sky. Unfortunately, her memory stick was full after a few shots.

After that, we went up to the hall for the camp!

post-PSLE "liberated bliss" (note inverted commas)

2008-11-07T22:10:00.005+08:00

Much of this year has been spent in frenzied preparation for the examination that Wikipedia says is part of our culture. When we did slack, we couldn't help but feel tremendously guilty about it, knowing that this is a crucial year. We couldn't slack legitimately. We couldn't do anything non-academic without being reminded to "concentrate on our studies", and we were regaled with tales of the two-month liberated bliss following the dreaded Last Examination of our primary school days.

So we suffered through it. And now it's over. And certainly, we have post-exam activities and some time to legitimately slack without pangs of guilt. But for some reason, we have to complete at least three Social Studies tasks, at least one involving large quantities of effort, revisiting the P5 and P6 SS curriculum, forcing us to mentally travel back to the time before the prelims when the GEPers had an additional Social Studies prelim exam (this should not have been there in my opinion, since the purpose of the prelims is to gauge our standard and let us know where we stand to prepare us for the PSLE, and SS is not even tested in the PSLE), when we were frantically trying to memorise dates and concepts and types of industries - and even to last year, when dates abounded in our curriculum.

Intellectually, I can comprehend that all this post-PSLE schoolwork (the word makes me cringe) will smooth the transition to Sec 1 next year, et cetera. And the logical arguments of the people distributing pamphlets about Sec 1 preparation courses make sense. But the fact is that from the beginning of the year, our lives were saturated with the PSLE. I couldn't follow my mother into a taxi and tell the driver that I'm P6 when he asks without the ominous word, "PSLE", uttered as a single sentence, as if I didn't know. I grew to resent inquisitive people asking me how my exams were at every turn. (They still do that now. Can't you at least let me forget about the PSLE before 20 November?!) I developed a dislike of the word "work" and all its permutations ("schoolwork", "homework" etc.)

And throughout this entire PSLE-saturated year, we have been regaled with tales of how wonderful post-PSLE life is. Teachers promised to let us talk and joke all we wanted. Parents reminded us that this was the last lap, after which we could relax. And among ourselves, we imagined what life would be like without having to worry about anything remotely academic.

In hindsight, we should have picked up that something was wrong with our fantasies of post-PSLE life when on the last day of the PSLE, before our paper, while we were assembled in the hall, a teacher droning on about the Essential Nature of Following School Rules and Not Going to Shopping Malls After School After the PSLE helpfully clarified, "Exams over doesn't mean anything!" (I never said it was grammatical, did I?)

But we still rejoiced after the HCL paper. Our bubbles were burst further when teachers continued to monotonously reiterate the Importance of Following Various School Rules, bilingual, of course, during morning assembly every single day after the PSLE.

Fortunately, this stopped soon.

We tried our best to enjoy ourselves (unfortunately, though, I couldn't avoid people asking me about the PSLE at the swimming pool) during this period of time, but since few post-exam activities had started yet, it was boring. We basically slacked and slacked, to make up for all the times we hadn't been able to the entire year.

But of course, this would not last.

We have a Young Historian-Geologist Card to complete. (If my pointer jumps away from its proper location one more time, I will throttle my computer, not that I haven't done that already.) To pass, we have to complete at least 3 tasks and score 6 points. (The award system is the same as that used in the NAPFA test, another thing I don't want to remember.) At least one of these tasks is from the 3-star range and is difficult. For example, one of the tasks is writing an essay on the Maria Hertogh case and detailing how we, as the judge, would deal with the ramifications of our decision. I don't want to write an essay on a historical event after the PSLE. I don't want to do any schoolwork after the PSLE, horribly lazy as that sounds, because this is the only chance we'll have to slack legitimately for the next six years (assuming we're enrolling in the IP). I don't want to wait 6 years for my 'A'-levels before I can stay up later than 9.30 and go on the computer for hours on end without having nightmarish visions of going blank during papers.

So what am I hearing about the card now?

"Do your project now and don't do anything else first, so that you can enjoy yourself after the project!"

Isn't this exactly what I heard BEFORE the PSLE? Why should I be deprived of enjoyment by projects and ridiculously early bedtimes? All of us have suffered through this PSLE-saturated year, cramming fact after fact into our brains in preparation for the dreaded Final Examination, in anticipation of the two months of bliss afterwards. Do you know what that means?! It means that I do NOT want to sleep at 9.30 on weekdays, or be constantly questioned on why I need to use the computer, or write essays about historical events!

And speaking of early bedtimes, I have been systematically sleeping at 9.30 or 10 nearly every single weekday since my PSLE was over. I slept later than that BEFORE the PSLE. Do I want to sleep this early? You think? Do I want to waste my precious post-PSLE time on eight hours of unconsciousness and vivid hallucinations before getting up at half-past 5 the next morning to prepare for another monotonous school day?!

But I went against my own wishes and slept early anyway.

It's 11.02 now. I had to argue for this late bedtime. Why, you ask? After all, tomorrow is Saturday, and the only other time I've slept late was on Wednesday when I had to pack for the camp. That's two days out of the month since our PSLE's been over. Yes, what a serious toll on my health that will take.

The PSLE is over and tomorrow is Saturday - two factors that add up to a perfect reason for a late bedtime. Yet what is the response I get?

Why do you need to go on the computer? Isn't your debate over?

You see the argument here? This is the same argument that was used legitimately before the PSLE. Then, I should only have gone on the computer when I needed to. Now, however, with no preparation for any exams whatsoever or any schoolwork other than the Historian-Geologist Card mentioned above, which is not even given by teachers in our school, the argument is still that I should only go on the computer when I NEED to! And as for sleeping late, let me borrow a line from my 4-min-55-sec 3rd-speaker speech in the exhibition debate yesterday:

Oh dear, we'd all better stop eating Chicken McNuggets, lest we succumb to meningitis!

This is absolutely ridiculous. This is the first time in ten months that I have been able to legitimately sleep late without worrying about academics! Why should I give it up so easily, especially when I don't even have to wake up early tomorrow? (Doraemon is at 9.30. I will definitely be awake at 9.30. I would be able to sleep at half-past 1 in the morning and wake up in time for Doraemon after 8 hours of sleep, so don't tag with that argument, please.)

What do you mean, I shouldn't lapse into my crazy routine again? If there's any time to sleep late, if there's any time to use the computer for hours on end, if there's any time to go crazy, it's NOW, before 2009 starts. I am not an idiot who will duplicate my post-PSLE routine in 2009 despite the workload of Sec 1. I do have a three-digit IQ, thank you.

It's 11.24 now. I'm going to make up for all the times I had to sleep at 9.30 even after the PSLE. Sorry, but sleeping before the hour is in two digits after the biggest examination we've ever taken is over once and for all is absolutely ludicrous. Don't rant at me about the importance of a good night's sleep for a healthy body. I won't wake up before I get 8 hours. If my body woke itself up before it had gotten 8 hours of sleep, then it would be impossible for me to ever get a sufficient amount of sleep, even if I slept before sunset. In that case, it wouldn't matter what time I slept, unless I was only getting 4 or 5 hours of sleep a day, which I am not doing by sleeping at 12 and waking up at 8 on a Saturday!

In fact, if I had slept at 10 tonight like I was supposed to, and woken up at 8 tomorrow morning like I usually do (I naturally wake up at around 7.00 to 8.30), I would have gotten 10 hours of sleep. Am I supposed to get 10 hours of sleep? The answer is obvious! Since I actually only need 8 hours, that would be 2 hours of valuable time wasted while I lay unconscious on my bed. Do I want to waste time lying unconscious on my bed when I could be doing other, much more interesting things?

If my body woke itself up after it had gotten 8 hours of sleep, it would have woken me up at 6 in the morning. Since there is nothing to watch that I am interested in at 6 in the morning (House is at 4), and I've finished all my books, I would resort to going on the computer, which is precisely the going-on-the-computer-first-thing-in-the-morning behaviour that is part of the crazy routine that I'm not supposed to lapse into!

Back to the topic of schoolwork. The reason that few of us are interested in completing the card is that we have spent this entire year in anticipation of the post-PSLE liberated bliss. We have dreamed of being free of academic work for the rest of our primary school days. This is why academic work given to us for the purpose of easing the transition to Sec 1 is not popular at all. It goes in direct contradiction of what we have been told of and have anticipated for all of this year.

Personally, I've been quite busy as well. I've had the inter-class debate to prepare for, the graduation PowerPoint slides to prepare, my sister's work to help her with and, like everybody else, post-exam activities. I'm also on the 2007 debate team and constantly have to prepare for exhibition debates and spars in short periods of time to train the P5s. Fortunately, I enjoy most of these activities, although they are annoyingly time-consuming. But after the PSLE, I cannot allow such activities to eat up my free time as well. So although I can intellectually comprehend that they are beneficial to us and so on, the fact is that this is the last chance we'll have in six years to slack legitimately without having to worry about academics, and we aren't too receptive to the idea of having schoolwork and early sleeping eat this last chance up.

to a neighbour

2008-11-07T19:56:00.003+08:00

When I'm on the computer with my mouth full of dinner, and you come over and ask if you can play the Uno Stacko I've borrowed from my friend, a nod means yes, in this part of the world at least.

When I've already nodded, you do not need to ask me again.

When I've nodded twice, you do NOT need to pull one side of the headphones I'm wearing off my right ear and yell loudly into my ear canal. I am not hard of hearing, thank you, but that doesn't mean I want you to make me hard of hearing by assaulting my eardrums with your shrill voice.

And after I've nodded vigorously in an attempt to get my fundamental non-verbal message across to you, you do not need to run out into our living room and loudly declare that I'm on the computer and - gasp! - listening to music. In case you didn't know, the people in this house, excluding you, of course, form what is generally known as a Family Unit, from which you can extrapolate that the other members of this unit are not unaware of my activities.

And rather than asking me how to play the game, you could try reading the instructions on the box, which are printed in BOTH English and Chinese and are hardly esoteric.

---

Surely you haven't led such a sheltered life that you have no idea what a nod means. Of course, I'm just moving my head in time to the music. Don't bother that I have fully functional arms and legs to use for this purpose; don't bother that surely it would be too much of a coincidence that I start making vigorous up-and-down motions with my head the moment you finish asking your question; don't bother that if I really had the habit of moving my head up and down to music as vigorously as I had been doing when you asked your question, I would have concussed myself a dozen times over. And I definitely can't talk to you with my mouth full. Do you talk with your mouth full? Personally, I was brought up not to expose the half-chewed contents of my mouth to the world while delivering a passionate speech about capital punishment.

This isn't the first time you've come to our house and behaved in such a grossly uncivilised manner. This isn't the first time you've ripped my headphones off my ears to yell into my ear canal. And of course, I can't confront you about it, partly because you run out of the computer room immediately after you've finished trying to rupture my right eardrum, but partly because I have to worry about how it would look if a P6 girl like me ran out of the computer room yelling at a nine-year-old for shouting into my ear.

This is ridiculous.

Inter-Class Games

2008-11-05T15:47:00.003+08:00

I arrived in school at half-past 6 as usual and proceeded to sleep on my school bag in the courtyard, having completely forgotten about the Inter-Class Games taking place that day, which required us to put our bags in class and move to the basketball court.

After being woken from my state of semi-asleep stupor by two friends who had arrived a few minutes later than I had, I went up to class and put my bag in class without even switching the light on, after which I went down to the basketball court.

But were there any P6s there?

No.

We walked around aimlessly for quite a while in the basketball court before remembering that it was about time for us to go to the Music Room for concert practice. After a while of that, though, people came to use the room we were in, so we moved to the next room. There were no drums there, so we used a chair instead.

After that, we went to sit in the courtyard, since there was no space in the basketball court.

The Inter-Class Games, or Mass Games as they were called (I misheard that as "Math Games" at first), for the P6 level consisted of hockey and Ultimate Frisbee. It would really have helped if we had actually been told how to play these games in the first place. I was playing the latter, and I had to establish the most basic facts about the game (who do you throw the Frisbee to? Where can't you throw it? etc.) two minutes before the game actually started. It had been assumed that we knew how to play these games, which was not true.

As it turned out, during the game, I actually managed to touch the Frisbee (!), but was admonished for making a "short pass" when I threw it to someone near me. I had no idea what a short pass was (don't tell me that it's a pass that is short, please). Relying on the aforementioned unhelpful definition, I threw the Frisbee to someone at least twice the distance away from me as the first person had been. The teacher's response? "No short passes! Last warning!"

May I ask you a question?

Had I ever heard of the term "short pass" before this game?

Was I aware of the parameters of the word "short", or even that short passes weren't allowed? Short of tossing the Frisbee as far as I could and risk it being intercepted or going out of the playing field, how would I manage to avoid short passes without a clear understanding of what a short pass actually was?

We lost that game, as well as the next game. But when we competed with 6M, there was a walkover! This was because part of 6M's team did not show up on the tracks next to the field on time.

We had won one out of three games. And that one wasn't even a proper win - we scored the point without even having to compete.

In the end, though, 6J tied with 6K and 6L with 12 points, while 6M won with 18 despite the walkover.

After that, we had to compete with the mainstream. It was already almost 10.20 by this time. Who, exactly, was the one who thought that we would have time for an additional competition?

Derogatory comments could be heard in the air. That's all I'll say about the GEP-mainstream issue in this post, because we should respect deceased horses and not abuse them, shouldn't we?

(Side note: My pointer is jumping to other places in the Blogger text box again. I'm definitely not playing TypeRacer today.)

I think we lost.

The Frisbee people were dismissed at 10.30 for recess, but apparently the scheduling for this hadn't been done very well, because the hockey people were dismissed at 10.45, which was also the time we had to be in the hall for a rehearsal of the graduation ceremony.

I looked at the board with information about the Inter-Class Games (what are Mass Games, exactly? That term does not describe these games as well as Inter-Class Games does), and it states that the games ended at 10.20, the start of our recess. Apparently they hadn't accounted for the inevitable running overtime. At least provide a safety interval, please.

At this point, I shall switch to typing this in Notepad because I am fed up with the migration of my cursor and pointer to undesirable places on my screen.

I learned something horrible at the Graduation Ceremony rehearsal.

Not only are the Best in Subject awards for English and Chinese not determined by prelim results, they don't even exist! They've been replaced by the Bilingual Award, which combines the two.

I had been hoping that I would be able to end this year on a more positive note by earning an award, so this was quite disappointing. My Chinese, though, fell 4 marks short of the highest score, and I shall end this sentence now because I'm trying to enjoy the time I have before I find out my results, thank you.

Well, that's it for this post. I'm clearing my backlog of un-blogged events.

Entrepreneurial Bazaar

2008-10-31T17:28:00.004+08:00

The first word of the title of this post really drags my typing speed down.

In the morning, I missed the school bus and got to school after the sun had risen.

I brought a chocolate cake prepared by my domestic helper for the bazaar. Because of my failure to remember the bazaar before 9 p.m. the night before, she had only had time to prepare one cake. Although I was berated for this, it turned out to be no great disadvantage, since only about half or two-thirds of the cake was actually sold.

After morning assembly, we put the stuff we had brought onto the tables on the 2nd floor, trying to arrange them so that they looked presentable.

Then we went up to class to deposit our bags there.

After we had done that, we went down to the 2nd floor again. The walking-advertisement sandwich board kept falling apart while being worn by Fiona. I went around with the mobile-store basket even when I was off duty, so I was on my feet for about three hours, with occasional breaks to sit down. Some of the time was spent buying stuff.

Anyway, the drinks sold pretty well, because everyone was being subjected to the sweltering heat and needed refreshments. It was around this time that I switched to Chinese:

在这炎热的天气里，买点饮料来喝，是对身体有益的哦！

Some people gave me looks of utter bewilderment, while others refused politely in Chinese. Some other people just switched to English and asked me how much one packet drink cost.

After a while, the basket I had been holding was empty.

I refilled it with more drinks and continued my Chinese sales pitch, occasionally translating it for the first group of pupils mentioned above (those who gave me looks of utter bewilderment). Soon, because of the abnormally hot weather, all the drinks had sold out. I refilled my basket with cookies and continued promoting our store everywhere.

This time, my sales pitch was:

买这些零食，不仅能让你大饱口福，还能支持慈善机构，这岂不是一举两得、一箭双雕、一石二鸟吗?

I know that the 一石二鸟 is slightly wrong.

This time, fewer people understood what I was saying, which meant more translation. I kept walking around, from the right to the left of the bazaar area, and I went into the courtyard as well. By this time, I had been on my feet for about two hours, and my legs were cursing me for it, but I continued walking around, stammering less and less with each repetition of the sales pitch (and each translation of it).

My basket never did empty again. I think people don't like to eat heaty food (chocolate-chip cookies and muffins and chocolate cake) in hot weather. I don't either.

From this bazaar, I bought a Doraemon comic book and a pair of Doraemon slippers. The latter only cost 50 cents! (6G was having a closing-soon everything-50-cents sale.)

I helped move a table upstairs. The moment we arrived upstairs, some people started playing games, until the teacher stormed upstairs to scold us for leaving tables at the lift landing.

I got up on my aching legs and ran down the stairs again. Then I carried a chair into the lift and took it up to the 6th floor. When I arrived there, I was asked to take down the posters from around the school, which I duly did, together with another friend who had stuck the posters up in the first place.

Then we got back to class. Finally, I could rest!

We (6J + 6K) raised $1319.50 from the bazaar, if my memory does not fail me. 6M raised $946. I had bought an ice lolly myself.

Snow City

2008-10-31T14:45:00.002+08:00

Before we went to Snow City, we had a break in the canteen. I sat at the (lousy, dead-key-in-nearly-every-octave) piano and played random songs coming to my head. Then my down jacket was removed from my bag and placed over my head just as I was beginning a new song, and since I can touch-type but not touch-play(-the-piano), I had to locate C by ear and play from there, locating the keys by their distance from C felt with my fingers (not "hands"; I lost my English prelim mark there!)

When we arrived at Snow City, the first thing we did was to make ice cream.

Here are the steps:

1) Pour Bulla thickened cream into a metal mug on an aluminum tray.
2) Add three, four or five spoonfuls of sugar. (Stir well.)
3) Add flavouring (we chose vanilla) and stir well.
4) Freeze the mixture with liquid nitrogen. We had fun blowing the gas around.

It was delicious.

However, there was a half-melted blob of chocolate ice cream on the floor, directly under where I was sitting. None of us had realised it, so by the time we noticed that our bags were stained with melted chocolate, it was too late. A frantic and ineffective cleanup with water and tissue paper ensued.

After eating the ice cream, we exited the ice-cream room (?) and put on our winter wear. I had been unable to find gloves, so my teacher lent me some.

Before we entered the Snow Chamber itself, we had to go into a 5 deg C airlock to enable us to get used to the cold. There was information on polar bears on the walls, as well as a large sculpture (?) of a polar bear.

After a while, we entered the Snow Chamber.

I could not find the LCD display of the temperature that I was sure had been there the last time I had been here (also the first time, about 3 years ago?). After a few minutes of snowball-throwing (more like pile-of-snow-throwing, actually), we walked towards the slide!

I don't get why the tyre-like thing we have to sit on is called a tube, since it's not tube-shaped at all but is shaped like a doughnut, but I'll call it a tube anyway. We grabbed tubes and went towards the slide.

On the pathway leading towards the slide, there was a downwards slope. The slope was so slippery that some people fell. I kept myself from falling by holding the tube with my left hand and grabbing the railing with my right, and since the railing had metal bars attaching it to the barrier at the side, my hand would be stopped from sliding forward at intervals, causing me to stop sliding forward as well.

Finally, we got to the slide! We were supposed to put the tube on the top of the slide and sit on it with our legs sticking out. Then we would be pushed, and we would start sliding down the 60-metre slide!

Our bodies would start shifting position on the slide, so that we would turn 90 degrees and our legs would be pointing to the left of where we had started, instead of straight ahead - so we would continue sliding down sideways!

We slid down the slide a few more times, regularly going out to thaw.

After going out to thaw and coming back in again, we saw a snowball fight starting before our eyes! We were pelted with snowballs (although not as many as other people) and I kept getting hit in the face. I'm glad I wear spectacles. Anyway, I gathered up huge mounds of snow in both hands and started hurling them at people who had attacked me. After that, we headed for the slide again!

Just as we were about to slide down, an employee suggested a different method! We would start off sideways, but then because of the aforementioned 90-degree turn we would end up sliding backwards, and my tube was dislocated, so I ended up skidding in the end. This caused snow to get into my clothes. But this was one of the most exhilarating slidings!

We went on the slide three times consecutively without going out to thaw. Just as we were about to go on the slide for the fourth time, the employee said that our time was up.

Reluctantly, we filed out of the Snow Chamber and back into the thawing-place, which was actually a gift shop. I took off my down jacket and returned the gloves to my teacher. As usual, my spectacles were completely fogged up, so I had to wipe them with my hands again.

I had wanted to buy stuff at the gift shop, but we had to go.

On the bus, our numb extremities gradually regained feeling and dexterity.

I had thoroughly enjoyed the trip. It was just a pity that it had only been for an hour.

The debate

2008-10-30T20:36:00.003+08:00

We (6J) won the debate!

I don't think we were as prepared for the finals as we had been for the preliminary rounds. (We didn't have any semi-finals; 6K and 6M had to battle it out for the 3rd placing, while 6J and 6L competed for the 1st.) Our substantives weren't as well-elaborated, and while we certainly had relevant MSN discussions, these usually degenerated into a vigorous argument over certain issues in the motion between two people, which produced no results.

Also, I had to be wary of making the same stylistic mistake that I always did: getting overexcited and being easily distracted by POIs. And apparently I did not always realise when I banged the table with my hands in my excitement. (But I would be in front, speaking into a microphone, so that wasn't an issue.)

One of the major clashes in the debate was regarding integrating foreign workers with residents (the motion was "THW house foreign workers near local residences"). I had elaborated quite a bit on this rebuttal during our preparations, because GEP-mainstream integration is my former pet subject, and it doesn't take a lot of imagination to change "GEP" and "mainstream" to "foreign workers" and "residents" respectively.

6L's new third speaker was their former reserve, by the way, and their former third speaker was their new reserve.

During my speech, I had the vague feeling that I had overshot the time given, and not just by 20 seconds. The bell periodically rang 10 times, while the adjudicators alternately laughed and looked baffled. With a vague sense of urgency, I tried to get through all my rebuttals. By the time I had finished, my mouth was dry and I had to finish all my apple tea.

But I had never expected the chairperson to say the following:

"The speaker spoke for 5 minutes and 47 seconds."

I had overshot the time limit by nearly 2 minutes!

Immediately after he had said that, a chorus of "wahhh"s rose in the gallery. 5-minute speeches were not unknown in primary school debates, where speakers only have 4 minutes and a grace period of 20 seconds. But I had spoken for nearly 6 minutes! That, by the way, is the secondary school debate speech time limit, I think.

This debate had a 5-minute floor session immediately after the 2-minute team conference. One of our classmates said that 6L had neglected to address the issue of the housing of foreign domestic workers. Fortunately, they didn't mention that foreign domestic workers were usually housed in their employers' houses.

After the debate, there were quick comments.

One team had had substantially better content than the other.
One team had been more consistent in the way that they spoke than the other.

And the winner was...

6J!

Once the chairperson had announced this, cheers erupted in the gallery. The 6J debaters were screaming hysterically, as this meant that we had gotten 1st placing in the entire debate! I was relieved, as I had thought that my overly lengthy speech had doomed my team. (As it turned out, one of the adjudicators had given me a score of 93, the highest score that that adjudicator had given anyone in the entire debate.)

We had our photographs taken while receiving our trophies. The best speaker throughout the debate was the second speaker of 6L, as usual. And I have to go to bed now, so I'm signing off.

"Wa wan da dabate!"

To 6L

2008-10-28T22:19:00.004+08:00

Do you think I WANT to dwell on this issue? No, it is certain people who continually dispute the accusations of cheating, who open surveys about whether a post stating only facts is "outrageous", who flame me on my tagboard because I dare to tell the truth.

I had wanted to put an end to this issue, mostly because there is no point fighting over a debate in which the reply speaker has 3 minutes instead of 2 and in which teams are allowed to win after blatantly violating a debate rule right in front of the adjudicators. But you are not allowing me to end this. You are continuing to flame me on my tagboard, accusing me of "insulting your class" when your class was the one who violated a debate rule right in front of the entire audience and the adjudicators.

del: ariel just suddup and stop insulting my class

Then stop insulting my intelligence by thinking that I will just take your ridiculous allegations sitting down. I am not insulting your class. I have stated only facts, and have even clarified those facts in a follow-up post. I have done more to clarify this issue than I ever had to. In an actual debate, your class would have been disqualified on the spot for allowing your reserve to go over while an adjudicator was in the washroom. I didn't make that up. That is the unadulterated truth, and if you choose to debate undebatable facts, if what you are doing can even be considered debating, then I have nothing to say to you that would change your mind, because I use logic for my arguments, as opposed to nonsensical typos.

In a larger debate, an inter-school one perhaps, the reserve would not be allowed to go over to the speakers' table, not even if one of the speakers was crying and the reserve just wanted to pass him a tissue pack. First of all, there was no way for the adjudicators to be certain that that was all the reserve had been doing. That sentence scrawled in the palm of my left hand could just be song lyrics I want to remember. But that does not mean that I should leave it there during the PSLE.

I do not want to pursue this issue any further, because as I said earlier, there is no point arguing over a debate in which basic rules are twisted to the extent that the reply speaker has to speak for 3 minutes instead of 2 and a team whose reserve went over to its speakers' table during the debate can win the debate. But I will not take such ridiculous flaming sitting down.

Sunday

2008-10-28T19:09:00.003+08:00

I went to Fiona's house on Sunday. (Yes, I realise that today is Thursday. I had to prepare for the inter-class debate and do the graduation PowerPoint slides. Sigh.) Actually, we were supposed to start by going to the library to do the Entrepreneurial (hate this word for the way it drags down my typing speed) Bazaar (my left little finger is not used to having to hit a key twice in a row). But when we had planned the schedule the previous day, we had neglected the fact that the library (which I had last visited when I was 6, hence my non-remembrance of this fact) only opened at 11, and I went there at 9.

So we walked to her house. There was a mysterious red liquid (tomato ketchup?) all over the left side of the steps on the overhead bridge.

On the way back, she called her mother about (her) breakfast. This conversation contained the following quote:

"She wants to watch Doraemon."

That refers to me, of course.

It wasn't yet 9.30 when we arrived at her house. That meant that Doraemon wasn't on yet. Of course, the first thing I noticed was the 32-inch computer/TV in the living room. I wanted to see my blog on it.

Then we used her laptop to go to BlogSkins.com.

When 9.30 arrived, of course, Doraemon appeared on the screen, and I made an excited noise and quickly turned around to face the monitor.

Half an hour passed in this wonderful manner, half an hour filled with Doraemon.

Remind me to blog about my Doraemon merchandise.

Anyway, we went to the library at about 11. There, we finished two more posters, with different themes:
1) a raving food critic's review of our food, with our shop name, class and food items cleverly incorporated into the review
2) a movie poster

I also added plenty of Doraemons to the Word document outlining the themes of the different posters.

At 12, we ate at McDonald's. I could not finish all the food, originally ordered because I had thought that we would be sharing it as was stated, so I put the leftovers in a plastic bag and went to buy Doraemon stuff in nearby shops (namely correction tape and a phone chain).

I wanted to buy the large soft toys, but they were too expensive.

We went to NTUC after that to buy milkshake ingredients and materials. We reached her house at about 1.30 pm. The milkshake was very toey. I drank 2 cups.

We finished the posters at home, as well as redoing the movie poster, since the items-sold section was overcrowded with pictures, including one with a French-fries packet reading "I am not a plastic bag". We did this in an air-conditioned room which was too far from the adapter/modem for the laptop to have any Internet connection, so we played music from files already on the computer and added (me) and removed (her) Doraemons from the MS Word document.

Then we went out into the living room again, taking the laptop with us.

After my father called to say that he had arrived, there was a half-hour search for his car. I really must improve my sense of direction.

On 6L

2008-10-25T21:32:00.004+08:00

I did admit in my original post that it was a possibility that their reserve (not reply) had merely been comforting the tearful third speaker. The fact remains that the reserve was not supposed to go over. And while it was an assumption that they had been discussing the debate, it was still a violation of rules, if not cheating.

6L has clarified that they had not been discussing the debate. Their reserve had been comforting the tearful third speaker after his blunder, apparently. I accept that. So, if "cheating" is defined as using unfair or dishonest means to gain an advantage, then I suppose it was not cheating, although that definition is debatable. (Note that the term is used much more loosely in examination and competition settings.)

So even though cheating may not have taken place, if you use the strictest definition and not the one generally used in the real world, a violation of rules definitely took place. That's my baseline argument.

Let me respond individually to the issues raised on my tagboard:

Even though I am not in L, I still feel that I should stick up for them. After all, J HAS NO RIGHT TO GO AROUND CALLING L CHEATERS. AFTER ALL, YOU HAVE NO PROOF!!!

I thought I mentioned what they had done in my post. Whether 6L had been cheating or not surely depends on your definition of cheating. If you define it strictly as I did above, then yes, they had not been cheating. But they had definitely violated a rule. I do have proof for that.

And anyway, like u sed earlier, qingyun was probably justcomforting zhu. after all, she DID talk more to zhu than tp the reply speaker.

Yes. That is correct.

How would you like it if I just posted on MY blog: 6J is made up of a batch of cheaters, even though I have no solid proof to support this statement, since it's merely a hunch.?

A hunch? I explicitly said what they had done in my post. And I never said that 6L is made up of cheaters, unless you mean that I said that 6L's debate team contained 26 speakers, and every one of them had participated in the cheating.

Now the rest of the L debaters are trying to salvage their reputations. All because you posted on a popular blog that they have cheated. With, once again, i emphasize: NO PROOF WHATSOEVER.

My post contained ample proof of a rule violation, which under the sort of loose definition of the term commonly used in the world today ("You are not allowed to bring into the examination room...") would probably have been considered cheating, although if you insist on adhering to a strict definition, then it would not have been considered cheating. But there was ample proof of a rule violation, no matter for what reason, and however admirable that reason was.

reshuffling our lineup is NOT BY ANY MEANS CHEATING!!!!

Did I say that it was?!

look im sry if im er..defacing your blog or anything but you have to get this clear. how could you base your ENTIRE post on an ASSUMPTION that our reply spkr was discussing debate with us!?!?!?!

RESERVE, not reply. Also, even if your reserve had not been discussing the debate with you, her going over was still a rule violation, even if not cheating by the strictest definition of the term. Besides, I did mention the possibility that she was just comforting the crying third speaker.

---

I concede that 6L's reserve was comforting the crying third speaker, not discussing the debate. That is true. Whether 6L can therefore be accused of cheating depends on the difference between the terms "cheating" and "violation of rules", and by the strictest definition of "cheating", they were indeed not cheating, although whether they had violated a rule is beyond question.

The inter-class debate

2008-10-24T15:54:00.005+08:00

The inter-class debate has been progressing fine so far. Or rather, it had been, until yesterday after 6K and 6L's round. I will try to refrain from personal attacks in this post. (Which is going to be difficult.)

I had been looking forward to watching the debate, because the competition would be intense. While 6K's team was composed entirely of school debaters, 6L's team had one very, very good (as in perpetually-Best-Speaker) debater and, from what we'd seen in our round with them, a pretty good reply speaker as well. The motion, by the way, was "THBT English should be taught by native speakers".

6L was the proposition and 6K the opposition. Therefore, 6L's first speaker opened first.

6L's first speaker was pretty steady, although his main mistake was fumbling when offered a POI, pausing for 10 seconds and having to finish the rest of his speech at breakneck speed. 6L's second speaker was brilliant (the perpetual Best Speaker mentioned above).

6L's third speaker opened quite well, but after he received a POI from the third speaker of the opposition, everything started to unravel. The content of the POI had been about the word "papaya", which was from Malay, but which had been accepted into English dictionaries. The speaker responded by saying that he was unsure whether the word "papaya" was used in Great Britain, which was his definition of English ("a language from Great Britain"). You will notice that the third speakers were still wrangling over the definitions. Frankly, I think neither definition made sense. ("Native speakers" = "speakers of the language from the country in which it originated" vs. "speakers of the language in a country in which the language is not the main language spoken" - neither made sense, although the proposition's definition made slightly more sense.)

But the problem was that the proposition had not had a consistent definition of "native speakers" throughout the debate. Since they were the proposition, the onus was on them to have a clear definition of the motion. Instead, they had failed to hold their ground under the attack of the opposition's definitional challenge and had not established a clear definition. They would have won the definitions if they had had a clear definition, since the opposition's definition made no sense.

After his speech, one of the adjudicators went to the washroom.

The other adjudicator explicitly said that this was not the 2-minute conference and that the other adjudicator was just going to the washroom. But did 6L listen? No! Their reserve went over and started discussing the debate with them (either that or comforting the third speaker, who was distraught). I realise that 6L desperately needed a leg up after their third speaker's performance, which while probably had had a lot of effort put into it had unraveled their case, but that was no excuse for blatant cheating! 6L should have been disqualified once the adjudicators had noticed their behaviour, but were they?

No.

They won.

To be fair, their reply speaker did one of the best reply speeches I've ever seen (I don't even know how to do a proper reply speech convincingly and persuasively, frankly), which probably salvaged their case. But they cheated! Letting them win after they cheated with the awareness of the adjudicators (I told them) is like a marker saying, "I know this candidate copied all the answers from his genius seatmate, but who cares? I'll give him a 100 anyway." 6L's reserve went over to the debate table before the two-minute conference, which they were not supposed to do. That is the truth, plain and simple. In a real competition, this would have resulted in instant disqualification. Yet in 6L's case, it was no obstacle to their victory.

You can't say that they hadn't known that it wasn't the two-minute conference yet. Not only had the third opposition speaker not spoken yet, but the other adjudicator had explicitly told everybody not to discuss the debate! If even the speaking debaters are not supposed to discuss the debate, how can the reserve, isolated from the speakers for the entire debate with the exception of the two-minute conference, physically walk over to the proposition's table and start talking to them? Maybe the reserve was just comforting the third speaker, but although the spirit of that (not screaming furiously at the third speaker for destroying their case) is admirable, the fact remains that the reserve is not allowed to communicate with the team members in any way during the course of the debate!

By their overall performance over the course of the debate, 6L may or may not have won (the combined brilliance of their second and reply speakers more than compensated for the third speaker's mistakes, but they still didn't have a clear definition of the motion), but that is not the point. The point is that, because of their cheating and violation of debate rules, 6L should have been disqualified, not allowed to win! 6K should have won by default!

That night, we received the news that the 6L third speaker was dropping out of the debate, citing the extreme stress of being a rebuttal speaker. I, the opposition third (rebuttal!) speaker of a different debate, was baffled. Sure, mistakes are stressful, but you bounce back from them and try again, not quit while blaming the opposition third speaker (of your round, not me) for "humiliating" you by offering you a POI you couldn't answer. Nobody deliberately gives people POIs they know they can answer. The purpose of the POI is defeated, in that case.

6L is also reshuffling their lineup. All I can say is that they had better tell us who their new third speaker will be and what order their speakers are in this time. It's only fair. They know who all our speakers are. (We're against them next.)

I had actually been looking forward to watching this debate. But it turned out to be a fest of mistakes, fumbling and cheating. And 6L had had a pretty good chance of winning by honest means.

Mouse

2008-10-22T19:24:00.001+08:00

My keyboard has given up its mission of lagging until my average speed on TypeRacer sinks into double digits. Nope. Another member of its alliance has decided to mess with my average instead.

My pointer loves to jump out of the box while I'm typing.

Of course, I don't notice that this has happened; I type too fast for me to have time to react. I only realise it when I hit the spacebar and the page scrolls down. It takes time for me to scroll back up and click back inside the text box, time that could be better spent typing more words. Meanwhile, my opponents race ahead of me.

This causes my speed to sink into the 70s. I'm not kidding. I type about 120 wpm. This malfunction wastes 50 wpm of my score. I haven't typed 70 wpm since I was P4. Yet my pointer makes me seem like that's my average speed, particularly embarrassing since I hold High Scores titles.

Maybe it's mouse-related. My old mouse froze at times, but it didn't interfere with my typing. It just made it impossible to click things (touchpad use excluded) for a second or two. So I changed it. I had the same problem when I was using this mouse before as well.

Talk about frustration.

Reputation

2008-10-21T20:32:00.000+08:00

http://blogskins.com/forum/1/102546/

This is a copy of my post there.

What?! So whether functions like rating skins or including links in skins are available to you is determined not by anything you actually do, but by how good your skins are and how others see you. What if other people deliberately rate your skin down? You can remove 10 points from my reputation simply by rating me a 0.5 instead of a 5.

This seems ludicrous to me. How good my skins are (not very) has absolutely nothing to do with the integrity of my ratings. How many friends I have has nothing to do with any of the functions mentioned at all! Wait, did I just bold two words? I need 100 points to do that, don't I?

We already have a problem with insincere 5-star ratings given to ensure that the other party returns the favour. This lowers our SOTD standard and inflates blogskinners' egos unnecessarily, causing their skin quality to stagnate. Now that having a skin rated less than 5 stars affects one's ability to rate skins and use BBcode, HTML, links and images in posts and comments, won't the pressure be even higher to rate others' skins 5 stars, even when they don't deserve it? Before this system was introduced, people wanted 5-star ratings to boost their average rating and possibly win them a SOTD. Now they want 5-star ratings to add points to their reputation and allow them to carry out basic functions in this website!

Competition banners, links to valuable websites with information, even formatting text in forum posts and comments - all are rendered inaccessible to users others don't like, or even users keeping a low profile. What this system will cause is an epidemic of insincere 5-star ratings and declining SOTD quality. But even worse - it will eat away at the community spirit of this site. If there are different levels of users, and these levels are determined not by anything these users actually do but by others' perceptions of their skins and them - then this divisiveness and unnecessary demarcation of lines separating user and user will inexorably chip away at the spirit of friendly cooperation and goodwill that unites users of this website.

That is the result of such a system being implemented. It is elitist and discriminatory. Even expressing your opinion of a skin through concrete mathematical symbols - in other words, rating - requires that you have friends and/or 5-star ratings. Who cares? Is my opinion any less valid than that of the next user just because I have fewer friends and my skins are rated lower than him or her? Before this system was implemented, users could legitimately say that they did not want or need insincere 5-star ratings, as they are genuinely interested in improving. But now, even the most sincere of such users is forced to question their devotion to their principles, as the reward for betraying them is access to fundamental features that everyone should be able to access anyway.

The harm caused by this system definitely outweighs the benefits. It chips away at our community spirit, increases pressure to rate 5 stars even when undeserved, and denies access to features on the basis of figures utterly irrelevant to the features in question. What benefits, exactly, can outweigh that?

My keyboard

2008-10-20T23:03:00.002+08:00

I was on TypeRacer just now, trying to win. Which I did, most of the time. But my average speed there is only 114 wpm. I usually register about 120 wpm on typing tests. Why?

My keyboard has a mind of its own. It doesn't act up a lot when I'm typing The Irrational Nature of Managerial Decision-making (or something) on typingtest.com, but on TypeRacer, it once turned my "I would never actually" into "IDDVER". Yep, not only did it register only six of the 19 letters I typed, it also failed to register my hitting of the Caps Lock key. (I don't use Shift for capitals.)

It's not as if I type 200 wpm or something and my keyboard can't keep up. There are plenty of people who type faster than me, and they don't seem to have this problem.

I dislike having to drop out of TypeRacer races too. I understand that other people don't like it when one of their opponents' cars stops moving halfway and never finishes the race. But registering a score of 80 wpm because my keyboard is being slow is not what I want to do either. It pulls down my average speed and it does not reflect my actual speed. More than once I have seen my score fall into two digits because I'm frantically backspacing a run-together word created by my keyboard.

And this mostly happens in TypeRacer. In typing tests, it doesn't matter if I type slowly and have to restart. The only person typing is myself. But in a typing racing game, I'm sure you can see why my keyboard's antics are so frustrating.

And yes, my keyboard created "econnomels" too.

My sleep-wake cycle

2008-10-19T16:26:00.002+08:00

I start feeling sleepy at about midnight. Then I naturally wake up at half-past 7 the next morning. The earliest I wake up without other people waking me up and without the use of an alarm clock is half-past 6. The latest is half-past 8. Usually, it's about half-past 7. Obviously, my body does not want me to get 8 hours of sleep a day, because it wakes me up after I've gotten seven and a half, or even six and a half. (And I usually can't fall asleep before 11, unless I'm ill. Illness, though, does not take away my natural tendency to wake up early.)

It's 4.30 p.m. now. I've been up since half-past 7.

Of course, on school days I'm usually fully alert by half-past 6, because by then I've been up for an hour, even if the sun hasn't even risen yet.

Sore throat

2008-10-16T20:48:00.004+08:00

Fact: Next Wednesday is the inter-class debate.
Fact: I am 3rd speaker.
Fact: I have a horrible sore throat, not alleviated by Strepsils or water, which has already lowered my pitch range (I can no longer sing the last line of the Doraemon theme song), and which shows no signs of abating. Also, we are out of the blackcurrant-flavoured pain relief Strepsils that actually numb the throat and stop it from tormenting me constantly.

You see my problem?

Irrelevant fact: After 8 months, I have finally submitted a new blogskin! Please rate it at http://blogskins.com/info/218270! 5 stars are not required.

Debate discussion

2008-10-16T10:43:00.003+08:00

This is a scene from yesterday's discussion for the inter-class debate.

The girl next to me has turned around to discuss something with another teammate, so I sneakily move one hand onto her keyboard and type "Doraemon". Then I copy it onto the clipboard and hit Ctrl+V. I keep holding until there are 61 pages of Doraemon and she realises what I'm doing. Then she highlights all the Doraemons and deletes them. Foiled again! It's still on the clipboard, though, so all I have to do is hit Ctrl+V again. Indeed, later, point 3 on her document goes missing and we have to dig around in the Undo history for the point. This undoes all their backspacing, and the 61 pages of Doraemon reappear, as do scattered Doraemons in the text. In fact, even the version sent out to all the team members has one, hidden in a paragraph.

I think you can tell how the rest of our discussion went. I even have a saved MSN conversation called "doraemon debate discussion.rtf".

Movie

2008-10-15T19:54:00.004+08:00

Today, we watched The Spiderwick Chronicles. I had vaguely heard of it before (I have vaguely heard of most things that apparently everybody else knows about).

Before we went there, we had a short break in the canteen. I had already bought two packets of seaweed for the movie in the morning. During this break, I further bought:

1. One bottle of green tea
2. One bottle of winter melon tea
3. One small Doraemon fan (I know, I already have one, but it was a different one!)
4. One box of Doraemon folding paper (I don't even fold paper!)

Nos. 1 and 2 will prove to be my undoing later in this post. No. 4 turned out to be a trick, as only the first few sheets actually had Doraemon on them, to peek out through the hole in the box and give the impression that the rest of the utterly generic folding paper was the same. 60 cents wasted. Well, at least I have the box.

Side note: why does the phone keep ringing?!

Anyway, when we got there on the bus, we got off. (What else would we do? The side note above appears to have interrupted my flow.) I started fanning myself with No. 3 above (my larger Doraemon fan had been borrowed, as usual). We walked to the cinema.

I wanted to buy non-popcorn snacks, as they had Twisties.

We walked into the cinema to watch endless advertisements for:

1) HSM 3
2) Beverly Hills Chihuahua
3) Bolt
4) Quantum of Solace (007) (what does the title even mean?!)
4) JCDecaux
5) Carlsberg
6) T-Touch (watch)

This went on until it was our turn to go to the Popcorn Station to see how popcorn was made. Frankly, I wasn't really interested. I wanted to watch the movie!

Then we went to the projection room to learn about analogue and digital projectors. We got pamphlets about the cinema, which I wasn't really interested in. But at least I didn't throw mine on the floor like some people. (Whose identity I do not know, so this is not a personal attack, which means that if you flame me on my tagboard I will delight in this chance to prepare for the inter-class debate next week.)

Finally, we went back to the cinema. There were more ads! And nothing different - they were all from the list of 6 above. I started eating my seaweed.

After a while, we were given permission to go out and buy snacks. But I had not gotten my weekly allowance yet (yes, today is Wednesday), and I had overestimated the amount of money I had left from last week, especially after buying $1.20 worth of Doraemon stuff. (Our school bookshop is wonderful.) This resulted in an embarrassing scene at the counter when I frantically counted my money, found that I had only 60 cents and, my natural stammer exacerbated by the situation, said "不用了” (bu2 yong4 le0) repeatedly while trying to wave my non-money-counting hand in some way.

So I went back. As well as sharing other people's potato chips and popcorn, I dug into my packets of seaweed. The spiciness of the seaweed meant that I drank my two bottles of drinks particularly fast.

After some original, not-repeated-ad-nauseam ads (gasp!) the movie started.

Basically, it's about a family that moves into an old house (the word "house" is used a lot here!), which Jared does not like. This doesn't stop him from sitting on a dumbwaiter and reading a book that he has been explicitly told not to, though.

I won't tell you any more.

Anyway, approximately halfway through the movie, I had finished both bottles of drink and urgently needed the washroom.

But could I go?

No.

So I waited until the end of the movie.

After the movie, we went out of the cinema and into the main body of the mall. I was in agony by this time, and was waving my hands frantically when I saw that we were walking past a washroom without going into it!

But eventually, we got there.

We made a mad rush for the cubicles. Other people had drank a little more than a bottle on average. These people squeezed into cubicles as soon as they were vacated. Meanwhile, I who had drank two bottles was left to wait!

Eventually, I did get to use one, of course.

I have the feeling that our mad rush in the washroom completely disgraced our school, but if they scold us about it next Wednesday I shall flame them mercilessly.

I shall skip the bus ride again.

Once we had arrived back at school, we had a break. Our piano is really horrible. You can see that the strings that the hammers are supposed to hit have come out, or are slanting to one side, resulting in numerous dead keys. I'm not that annoyed by the silence of the C, D and E keys in the highest octave, because I don't even use the highest octave that often, but a dead middle G is just frustrating.

The debate discussion that follows deserves a post of its own!

Discovery Centre

2008-10-15T17:17:00.002+08:00

This visit didn't really start well. Yes, the 3D movie about a boy named Jonathan who has a dream involving high-rise buildings shooting up everywhere and who then opens a book under the guidance of the Spirit of Nature (?) and sees the world through animals' eyes and who realises the mistake of his dream by having to fly around in the city of his dreams was nice, but it made me dizzy and gave me a headache for the entire visit.

The Singapore X-Factor (or the other way around) exhibition wasn't really exciting at all. Lying down and viewing videos about Singapore was rather disappointing. So I wasn't very optimistic about the quality of this visit.

But the 4D movie proved me wrong. I had no idea what a 4D movie was. In this case, it was a movie about the Army with actual wind blowing around the room when the helicopters circled above, and actual water droplets falling onto us while a ship scene was playing. This was easily the highlight of the visit.

I don't remember what we did after that. The 4D movie was definitely the most memorable.

Excuse me if I don't sound very enthusiastic. My enthusiasm for blogging appears to have diminished.

And I find that I have nothing to post about

2008-10-13T14:31:00.005+08:00

When I agreed to post a flood of posts after the PSLE, I had never expected that I would have so little to post about.

I had expected that I would have plenty of things to flood this blog with. But surprisingly, I don't think it's even sunken in that the PSLE is over.

I leave you with this link:

http://www.time.com/time/asia/features/heroes/index.html - top row, fourth from left.

on the first day after PSLE

2008-10-10T15:04:00.010+08:00

Because the rant initially came to me in Chinese, I shall make this a bilingual post.

今天是会考过后的第一天，我原本以为会有什么活动可以参与。想不到我们在晨读时间过后，得马上走往礼堂看电影，那电影就是《豆豆假期》。想到一个多小时就这样耗费掉，我心中有千万种不甘愿，可是我又哪里可以拒绝呢？

我还以为看完了《豆豆假期》就可以上去课室了，想不到还得看《加菲猫》。我实在很不满，是不是一整天都得呆在礼堂里看滑稽的搞笑电影？另外一名老师说因为其他年级考试的关系，我们得呆在礼堂里，直到十点二十分休息时间为止。他还说我们考完了也没什么意义。我火冒三丈，我们辛苦一整年都是为了应付会考，现在好不容易考完了，还说没意义？！

《加菲猫》上映时，我一点也没看进去，我兴趣盎然地读我的华文书，可是太吵了，我很难专心。

电影还没播完就被老师暂停了，我还以为可以去食堂，可是老师还有“一些事”要和我们讲。她说要让我们提早十分钟去休息，可是所有的老师说完之后，只剩下一分钟了。

她要讲的事情是：

1）即使考完了，也不能带游戏卡来学校，电子游戏机也不能。（我们到底几时被允许过带着些东西来学校？再说，学校平时不让我们带着些东西来是为了让我们上课专心，不要打扰课堂上的老师与同学，现在哪有上课呢？）
2）休息时间过后，我们还得再上去礼堂！
老师尝试解释，这是因为其他的年级在考试，他们在我们会考期间已经很努力地安静了，现在轮到我们安静一下。可是难道除了白白浪费掉数小时的时间让我们看搞笑电影，就没有其他让我们安静的方法吗？其实，其他的年级在我们会考期间也发出一些噪音，那些噪音在我们的六楼上，还是“依稀可辨”的！难道他们看不出，我们虽然起初还兴趣盎然地看那些搞笑电影，可是就算是山珍海味，天天“风雨不改”地吃，还是会吃腻的！

接着，其他老师不厌其烦地重复关于扑克牌的“禁令”。难道我们耳聋，第一次没听进耳朵？！

休息时间，我吃了一顿黄梨饭，我们学校的黄梨饭实在很美味。接着，我买了哆啦A梦扇子，就跑上楼了。

上了楼后，老师告诉我们，休息时间有人“把不懂什么东西喷向风扇”，把风扇弄脏了。就因为这件一个人干的小事，三位老师分别对我们“滔滔不绝”地骂，尽管弄脏风扇的人只有一个而已，可是老师还是用取消我们的考后活动来“威胁”我们，还骂了超过五分钟，一位老师还对着我们厉声斥责！那个人的行为固然要不得，可是其他的人可是无辜的，为什么要让我们受罪呢？我知道你只是要给我们善意的提醒，可是需要如此反应过激吗？老师还因为我们有些人讲话，就“一竹竿打翻全船人”，说我们考完了就目中无人！我们只是不愿意接受这些跟我们无关的责骂而已！

看完了《加菲猫》就有另一部电影看，我看了一点。看完后，我们终于上了楼。好像有很多人喜欢看我的哆啦A梦扇子。老师还告诉我们，我们高才班有一场班级辩论会呢！

Today is the first day after the PSLE. I had expected activities of some sort that we could participate in. But no, immediately after morning assembly, we went up to the hall to watch "Mr. Bean's Holiday". I disliked the idea of having to waste more than an hour away, but there was no way for me to refuse.

I had thought that after the film, we could go up to class. But no, we had to watch Garfield. I was deeply unhappy. Would we have to spend the entire day in the hall watching comedies? A teacher said that because of the other levels' examinations, we would have to stay in the hall until 10.20. He also said, and I quote, "Exams over doesn't mean anything!" I was furious. We had worked hard for the entire year for this PSLE (I know that it is not the purpose, but you get what I mean). Now, our efforts have borne fruit, and it doesn't mean anything?!

I didn't watch Garfield at all. I read my Chinese books - or tried to, since the film was so noisy I couldn't concentrate.

After the film was half-finished, the teacher paused it. She had intended to let us go for recess ten minutes early, but after all the teachers had finished talking, we had only one minute of extra time left.

Here are the two things she wanted to talk about:

1) Although our PSLE was over, just as always, we were not allowed to bring game cards or electronic games to school. (When have we ever been allowed to? Also, the purpose of prohibiting these items in school is to prevent disruption of lessons and to allow full concentration, am I right? Since when do we have lessons after the PSLE?!)
2) After recess, we had to report to the hall again.
The teacher tried to explain that this was because other levels were having their exams and since they had tried so hard to keep quiet during our PSLE, it was our turn to be considerate now. I agree with that, but aren't there any ways to occupy us without wasting hours of our time with comedy movies? Besides, we could hear the noises made by the other levels during our PSLE even from the sixth floor! Can't they tell that although we may have been interested in the movies at first, even the tastiest food becomes bland and tasteless if we eat it for every meal?

The other teachers proceeded to repeat the point about game cards again. I doubt that we didn't hear it the first time.

During recess, I ate a delicious plate of pineapple rice (why didn't I learn about this tasty dish before I was a post-PSLE P6 student who's going to leave the school in November?!) and bought a Doraemon fan for $1 from the school bookshop. Then I ran up the stairs.

One person "sprayed something at the fan and made it dirty" during recess.

The entire P6 level got scolded for more than five minutes by three teachers.

We were threatened with suspension from post-exam activities (really, ruin the only post-PSLE crazy period we have in our entire lives because we won't keep quiet?!) if we didn't keep quiet during the next 4 days. One teacher even started shouting at us. I know that this was probably just intended as a gentle reminder to stop more people from committing similar offences, but is there a need to subject the entire P6 level to such an overreaction? One teacher accused us of being arrogant after our examinations because some of us were talking. Maybe, just maybe, we don't want to be subjected to scoldings that have nothing to do with us.

After we finished Garfield, we had to watch Army Daze for a while. I watched it with some interest, since recess had given me a breather from endless comedy movies.

Finally, we went up. A lot of people liked to look at my Doraemon fan. Anyway, we have a GEP inter-class debate!

Filling in the blanks

2008-10-09T17:49:00.002+08:00

I'll post my PSLE diary tomorrow or over the weekend.

Anyway, here's a summary of how my life has been over the three months or so of my hiatus.

I did plenty of mock papers. I didn't do all the mock papers that I got. I would have been overloaded otherwise. I also did some Maths assessment booklets.

I didn't start revising as early as I could have. This led to some rushing nearer to the actual papers. This is one thing I could have done better. Still, I am glad that I was not overwhelmed by the difficulty of the papers (I'm pretty confident about them, actually, and I still need a synonym for "confident").

I was a little worried about burning out prior to the papers, because my score on English mock papers was sliding. But I wasn't showing any other symptoms, apart from the normal the-first-national-exam-of-our-lives-that-will-decide-our-FATE-is-coming tension, and I didn't suffer a breakdown during the papers or anything, so I think I was fine.

I'm aiming for over 280. I think that my languages should pull me up enough for that, even if the other subjects pull me down, which they shouldn't by more than a few marks.

I still remember the nervous rush of the days before the papers - frantically flipping through files in an attempt to squash knowledge into my overtaxed brain. I still remember the mnemonic I came up with for 1st-, 2nd- and 3rd-class levers (life, elf, left). I remember my hand cramping horribly as I wrote long Chinese compositions, and wishing that I was really ambidextrous as opposed to the learned ability to write with both hands, which doesn't work for Chinese anyway. I remember not having to use the aforementioned mnemonic at all.

But most of all, I remember the hysterical screaming of joy after the HCL paper, our final paper. Four people, including me, screamed "WATCH HOUSE!", while the rest of the room just erupted in cheers and thumbs-ups. Primary school classmates have a special bond, because we have suffered together.

Overall

2008-10-09T12:37:00.002+08:00

I am definitely more confident about the PSLE than I was about the prelims. I overdosed on Glucolin (is that what the glucose energy drink that comes in tins is called?) and chicken essence during this period. I think the last time I drank Glucolin was when I was seven.

For English, my goal is to increase my prelim main paper score by 1. I want to increase my composition score to 36. While I'm not absolutely sure about beating my prelim score, I'm quite confident about my composition.

I had been incredibly nervous about Maths over the weekend before it, as I hadn't started revising as early as I could (I had been doing mock papers too). But once I got the paper, my nervousness melted away. After finishing Sections A and B, I was a bit worried about Section C, because in the prelim paper that had been my downfall. But Section C was fine! There were no questions that I got stuck on, and I solved the last question confidently. This definitely exceeded my expectations.

I have never finished a Chinese examination composition more than 5 minutes ahead of time. I nearly finished the entire booklet, though, and checked all but the last page, I think. I'm pretty confident about the main paper. (I need a synonym for 'confident'.)

Among the three or four people whom I polled, Science was widely considered to be the most difficult of all the papers. My revision for Science was rather rushed because 1) I spent a lot of time on Maths to the exclusion of my 2nd weakest subject and 2) I don't know. It wasn't too difficult, though. It was around our prelim standard.

I am glad I take Higher Chinese, because otherwise Science would have been the last paper, which wouldn't boost my morale at all. For the composition, I wrote a booklet and half a page. Again, I'm quite confident about the paper. I still need a synonym for 'confident'.

I will post more in-depth posts after I come back from the post-PSLE party at my ex-schoolmate's house (!).

PSLE is over!

2008-10-09T12:20:00.002+08:00

PSLE is finally over.

I will flood this blog.

Stay tuned.

Here's what I hope to post today, tomorrow and over the weekend:

1) Blow-by-blow account of all the papers
2) My entire PSLE diary, slightly cut to remove family arguments etc
3) Reflections

Well.

I still can't believe it's over.

hiatus

2008-07-22T18:47:00.001+08:00

I hereby announce an official hiatus from blogging until PSLE is over.

I had been planning to unload a flood of posts first, so that my blog would carry a complete story of my daily life until the hiatus, but I couldn't prepare ALL the posts in time - the range of topics I'd planned to cover was just too wide, spanning everything from the RI Inner Circle Plus Programme to buying a new brown G2 pen and left-handed writing, and I couldn't waste time preparing them when the prelims are just around the corner.

I might post them when I come back. By then they'll be two months old, but never mind.

I celebrate my blogging anniversary next month. If you look in my archives you'll notice that I've been using this blog since August 2007. Of course, I started actually blogging on LEAD in February 2007 and had a previous blog about Wikipedia at w1k143va.bs.com, which was filled with posts about Wikipedia, and marked the start of my inner-third-speaker-ish-ness. (Look at the last post.)

So, instead, I posted about Racial Harmony Day and the boring assembly. And now I'm on hiatus.

I wish I would be able to post something in my one-year blog anniversary month - but I can't. I'll have to prematurely celebrate it here.

This will be my last post until after PSLE.

Bye for now.

Thanks

2008-07-22T18:43:00.002+08:00

Before I go on hiatus I'd just like to thank the librarian of our school library (the one I posted about was just a parent volunteer), who read my rant about the parent volunteer on my LEAD blog and spoke to her about it. It's nice to know our feedback is still appreciated. :D

Racial Harmony Day + oral prelims

2008-07-22T18:38:00.003+08:00

6J was the only class yesterday to have EVERYBODY in ethnic costumes. The entire P6 level gathered in the hall for assembly, so we could survey our level's pitiful lack of enthusiasm for the only chance to wear something other than school uniform to school all year. Nearly everybody else was wearing the familiar school uniform, while mainstreamers next to us were jeering at how the GEPers next to them were all wearing ethnic costumes. I think that's a good thing.

The assembly opened with a captivating dance performance by another primary school (I didn't hear it very clearly). After that, everything went downhill.

Before the downhill sliding started, though, the teacher asked our class to stand up and said that we should get a gold star because we were the ONLY class with EVERYBODY in ethnic costumes. I think that apart from occasional smatterings of colour amidst the sea of white, 6J and 6K were the only classes to have any substantial proportion of students wearing ethnic costumes at all. Why are people so unenthusiastic?! Then she passed the microphone to the next teacher.

At this point it started going downhill.

The next talk was about the environment. Before I start on the negativity, let me say that it had the best template for a school PowerPoint presentation I've seen in a long time. Now, on with the post.

On the title slide, there was a large graphic that screamed "THE INVISIBLE ENEMY". I wondered what the invisible enemy was; there are a lot of invisible enemies.

The teacher said that her P4 prefects would be presenting, and because they were two years younger than us, they were very scared, so we must all support them! They took the microphone (only one of them, obviously) and started reading inaudibly from a crumpled piece of A4 paper. (They're called index cards. Use them.)

After about two slides of this, our interest level officially hit rock-bottom. I mean, it's hard to be interested in something you can't even hear. The teacher periodically took the microphone and told us to support them and be quieter, because they weren't as experienced in using the mike. I think it's more about volume than experience in controlling the tubelike device with a sphere at the end you hold in your hand. Anyway, she did this several times, conceding that they were soft but saying that we should support them and keep quiet anyway. I would have agreed with that had they actually bothered to speak up after that. They continued to mumble on inaudibly, while the hall's noise level continued to rise.

Finally, the teacher exploded and took the mike and started talking about how difficult and frightening it was to talk in front of a whole hall of people two years older than you. I must say I can't really sympathise with this, because I don't know what it feels like to be completely unable to talk (other than a stammering attack, of course, but even then I unlock myself with a small hand gesture - it works) in front of a panel of judges or even a full hall of IRS competitors and teachers - but you'd think they'd pick some more articulate P4 prefects, no? Then she restarted the presentation and did it herself. The P4 prefects, having failed to speak at a volume detectable by human ears, sat down impotently on the floor and watched the presentation.

The teacher asked us if we knew when Green Week had been. 14 to 18 July, mainstreamers shouted, which exactly coincided with the APEC conference period in which the entire GEP cohort of all three levels had been at home doing e-learning. You'd think they'd at least bother about us not being able to participate in this important event.

Then she asked how many of us had played the games offered in this week. Cue assorted grumblings from the GEP classes about the perfectly obvious fact that we hadn't even been here.

Now the presentation had started in true presentation style. I have no idea what that means, but... Anyway, the next slide went something like this:

"Do you know what the invisible enemy is? (Waits, expecting us to choose one out of the multitude of invisible enemies.) The invisible enemy is global warming. It is invisible because we can't see it. (The DEFINITION of 'invisible'!)"

And on the presentation dragged. The next slide was an explanation of global warming. Even ignoring the GEP, for whom global warming had been in the P5 syllabus, we had all sat through a similar presentation the year before. Why is there a need to explain the same things anew to us each year?

Unfortunately, we didn't pay attention. The teacher got angry again and started saying that if she gave us the quiz now, 90% of us wouldn't know what to do. I wondered how difficult the quiz really was. These things generally aren't rocket science, but I could have been wrong.

The next few slides covered how to slow global warming down. First were the 3Rs. The teacher mentioned a fourth R, Refuse, and tried to spell it out for us out loud lest we had misheard, but ended up spelling it as "refuce" instead.

Then were the slides about Things We Can Do. There were quite a few rather blatant mistakes (using plastic bags as trash is bad; using them as trash BAGS, on the other hand, is good), but overall the advice was sound (switch off the air-conditioners and use the fans instead, etc.). The fact that my fan is malfunctioning doesn't mean anything.

Then was the quiz. Here are the incredibly difficult questions.

1. What are the 3Rs?
2. What is the invisible enemy?
3. Name one way we can do [sic] at home to save the environment.
4. Name one way we can do [sic] in school to save the environment.

I think 90% of us would have been able to answer these questions.

Of course, when GEPers went up to answer, the mainstreamers next to us started jeering and commenting about how the teachers always chose GEPers - blatantly untrue because the first two to answer had been mainstreamers, and only four people answered because there were only four questions.

Thiss presentation wasn't the worst of it. After this was a lecture about mobile phone use.

The teacher, speaking in Chinese, opened her lecture by saying that she had found out that some of us did not know how to use mobile phones.

I wondered why this was important. There are manuals with the things; read them. Why is there a whole lecture about how to use your mobile phone?

Of course, she then continued to talk about how some of us don't know WHEN to use mobile phones.

I am at a loss to explain how 我发现有些人不懂得怎么用手机 could possibly mean "I have realised that some of you don't know WHEN to use mobile phones" rather than "how". This wasn't really the main point, though. Let me continue.

The mobile-phone behaviours she outlined after that were certainly unacceptable. Calling and SMSing in class, taking pictures of others during lessons. Classic examples of confiscation-worthy behaviours.

But after that, she said something else.

In my rough translation, "We do not think that you need to call your parents in between school and supplementary." This was followed by vague threats of confiscation and how calling at this time is not allowed, etc.

Note that she uses "supplementary" to refer to all staying-back activities (下午课), which isn't really a particularly egregious error because I can't think of a better term myself, but the point is, we do.

We have to call our parents to tell them that we're staying back, to tell them when to pick us up from school, to inform them of our whereabouts lest they get worried. Now, if we were going home on time at 1.30, her scenario in which we would be allowed to call our parents, why would we need to do that?

Even if we don't, what is wrong with calling them at this time? Mobile phones were designed for this very purpose! Letting our phones lie asleep in our uniform pockets isn't a very good purpose for which to bring our phones to school. There was a similar prohibition on recess calling, making going home on time the only scenario in which calling is allowed, which raises the question - "Would you rather inform your parents of your transport needs early, giving them time to arrange their schedules and tell us if they can't pick us up, or would you rather tell them last-minute and have them rush around in their offices to arrange a timeslot at which to pick you up?"

You could retort that you could also pay 10 cents for the canteen phone, or get a phone card, or run up to the General Office and borrow their phone. But why would you want to waste the time or money? When you have a perfectly functioning mobile phone in your pocket, what is the point of paying 10 cents for the canteen phone or $1.70 for a phone card, or running up to the General Office and wasting valuable time?

You could also retort that during recess and between school and supplementary, your phone might be stolen. My retort to that is the same retort that I've been using ever since this issue first came up. If you choose to bring your phone to school, it is your responsibility to take care of it. If you choose to flaunt it and it gets stolen, it's not the school's fault that you set yourself up for a classic Chinese composition scenario. If you choose to put it in your pocket and not Velcro it or zip it properly, it's not the school's fault that you don't have the fine motor skills needed to close a pocket. If you choose to leave it on the table while you're eating, a scene lifted right out of a mock oral picture, it's not the school's fault that you can't manoeuvre your hand to the table, lift your phone up and reposition it in your pocket.

Besides, what is the difference between the time after 1.30 if you're going home then and the time after 1.30 if you're NOT?!

The next new rule. If any of us photographs anybody in class, whether a friend, a classmate whether or not you consider him or her a friend, if any of us photographs a teacher, anybody, even if you photograph a light on the ceiling (don't blame me for the lengthiness of this part - I'm just translating!), our phones will be confiscated and we'll get a pink slip. It was explicitly stated that there would be no need to wait for three offences before a pink slip was given.

I can agree with the confiscation part. But a pink slip seems like overkill. Three offences before a pink slip has ALWAYS been the rule, a fundamental part of the discipline system, the one which was so firmly expounded upon after the Great False Accusation/Emotional Manipulation/"Cyberbullying" Blog Incident of 2007. Why should photographing somebody in class be more severe than, say, stealing or fighting? It's obviously severe enough to warrant changing the discipline system. The discipline system was applied so heavy-handedly in 2007 on a false accusation and some crocodile tears. Why should it be cast aside just to address this issue, especially an issue that can be dealt with by simple confiscation?

This new rule is illogical and heavy-handed.

I don't remember the next part of the lecture. I think there was more. Oh, I remember! It was about how we would be having our oral prelims that afternoon. "Take them seriously. Do not take them as a joke." You mean some people take their prelims as a joke, as opposed to as a reminder of how we are gradually inching closer to the dreaded PSLE? All I can say to those people is, good luck, idiots.

Of course, during this entire lecture, plenty of people were talking. This was mostly during the "friend-classmate-whether-friend-or-not-teacher-light-on-ceiling" list-of-things-not-to-photograph part, but the rest had been evenly distributed throughout the rest of the lecture. As a result of this, we were held back a whole 10 minutes.

Then 6J had to go be photographed in the courtyard, owing to our aforementioned abundance of colours, so we got an extra 10 minutes. The other classes, though, were not so lucky.

Prelims that afternoon went okay. First of all, I'd misunderstood the teacher during assembly and thought that we had to be in the hall at 1.55 instead of 1.50. Then the canteen clock was slow, compounding matters. By the time we got to the hall, everybody had left. Quickly, my friend and I ran up to our English exam room (clinic duty! sorry, digression), 4I, where we were told by the same teacher I mentioned as having misunderstood my general comment about being blocked during assembly as being directed specifically to her that we were latecomers and had better explain ourselves.

I started explaining about the canteen clock, but she had walked away.

Normally when you ask someone to explain themselves, you stick around to hear the explanation. (And no, I was NOT wearing a watch - I was in ethnic costume just like everyone else in 6J and had thought that a black digital watch, the only kind I had, would look incongruous together with the wonderful maroonish cheongsam courtesy of my mother that I was wearing. I had somehow forgotten about the prelims when I made that decision.)

I kept tripping over my own tongue, both for English and Chinese oral, and I could see that the teacher wasn't ticking all the highest-score boxes in her checklist. AHHH! But otherwise, my content was pretty good and I used lots of good vocabulary.

The wait for the Chinese oral lasted an eternity. We'd arrived in the room before all the boys had finished their oral, so I spent the time alternately rereading my oral file and reading Chinese books.

The prelims were pretty uneventful, though, although I don't think I did extremely well, although the vocabulary and content should compensate for my stuttering attacks. I don't stutter a lot nowadays - I get stuttering attacks, like when I can't say anything for a split second even though I know perfectly well what I want to say. I unlock myself with a small hand gesture when that happens.

End of yesterday.

Nanyang Sparks, my thought process

2008-07-14T23:31:00.002+08:00

And it's that time of year again - the time where we get to submit our suggestions to the school on a Nanyang Sparks form, except this year we don't handwrite it out (so I don't get to pretend to be left-handed) - we type it out. I didn't know what it was at first when I first got the email - the name isn't really self-explanatory. I do know that I'll need lots of forms, though.

I could suggest lots of things, from the most trivial to the most serious. I could suggest that they put a pocket on both sides of the skirt to make it ambidextrous, or I could suggest something more important like, say, the school-bag rule which I have ranted plentifully about or the students-must-not-set-foot-into-the-lift-or-die-a-horrible-painful-death rule (I know I'm exaggerating grossly). But which do I suggest?

Am I allowed to submit more than one form? I've been the sole contributor to the LEAD suggestion box from P4 to P6. Literally. No one else has ever posted anything there. (And the status has always been "Pending". I really wonder what the point of that box is.)

My P4 and P5 posts have faded into oblivion. So here are the three I submitted this year.

1. Morning Assembly Announcements
2. GEP Exam Announcement
3. Taking the Lifts

My personal favourite is no. 3. No. 2 only applies at certain times of year, and No. 1 (about not letting level-specific announcements such as "P3, keep quiet" be broadcast to the entire school over the PA system) is a tad too trivial.

---

Oh, dear! It just turned out that the email we got had been released prematurely. How anticlimactic. Never mind. (:

eye appointment

2008-07-13T15:33:00.001+08:00

I had my eye appointment at Gleneagles yesterday. We (my mother and I) were half an hour late, mostly because of my oversleeping in the morning. We went there in a taxi. When we arrived there, I alighted from the taxi and quickly negotiated my way into the hospital to make way for a lady in a wheelchair.

We got into the lift. It seemed to be stopping at every floor and thus took very long to get us to the 6th floor. When we got there, we rushed into the ophthalmology clinic. (Was it a clinic? I don't know. CLINIC DUTY!)

Apparently our being half an hour late had messed up our appointment schedules. I sat down on one of those cushioned benches they had directly in front of a TV. Had I really hoped that they would be showing House? No, they were pacifying the ones who really needed to be pacified, the fidgeting, wailing, annoying young children in the clinic who didn't want strangers dripping liquids into their eyes or making them read a series of small letters. They were showing endless Tom & Jerry cartoons. I sat down and started rereading the Oliver Sacks book I'd brought along. My mother went down to get food and drinks.

Meanwhile, the kindergartner/P1/short P2 next to me was fidgeting nonstop and kept touching me by accident. I was trying to concentrate on my book, A Leg to Stand On, and resented this intrusion. Then the older child/teenager next to me started touching me by accident too, so I adopted a very compact posture and focused on my book. This did not protect me from the noise of a wailing, screaming five-year-old (or so) who was apparently in excruciating pain from the eye drops.

The kindergartner started tapping the cushioned bench, sending vibrations rippling throughout the bench. I made various annoyed grunts and pointedly read my book.

My mother SMSed me to ask if I had been called into the room for my appointment yet, and if I wanted cake or a drink. I replied "Nope" to the first and "No thanks" to the second.

Meanwhile, the people to my left and right continued to annoy me in trivial ways. It's the trivial things that are the most annoying. Constant tapping on a table, snapping of fingers during a speech. Those are fatal.

My mother came back and suggested that I move to a different position, closer to the entrance, where annoying people to my left and right wouldn't annoy me any more. Actually, I said that last part. Out loud. I was annoyed by that time.

Not a minute before I sat down, some irritating toddler mistook the cushioned bench for a swimming pool and did a running dive right onto it. Apparently the fact that the floor was lower than the cushioned bench and was therefore probably not intended for use as a diving board didn't tip her off. I held my head in my hands and tried to suppress the rising cloud of irritation quickly threatening to obliterate any traces of a calm mental state. I had also almost finished rereading the Oliver Sacks book by this time.

My mother helpfully got me some old National Geographic issues to read. I perused them with great interest, but finished them quickly.

Soon, I was called in. The first test was the degree-testing put-your-chin-on-the-chin-rest-of-the-machine thing, where the machine would display a small MSN-display-picture-sized icon of a tree on a horizon, except this time it was replaced by a HOUSE. I somehow managed not to squeal in excitement. After this was the letter chart test. The last two letters of one of the lines was "HL"! I was ecstatic and wished that there had been a "GH".

I went back out and waited for another half an hour or so, perusing old National Geographic magazines.

Soon it was my turn to go into the ophthalmologist's room. We discussed whether or not to go back on atropine, that myopia-controlling eye drop that makes me wear sunglasses all the time, and my mother promised to get me a House cap as long as I would wear it! :D What better reason to wear a cap can there be?!

The ophthalmologist (I keep typoing this word) wondered why I was so obsessed with House. She said that if we wanted to confirm the results and use them to decide whether I was to go back on atropine, I should undergo some eye-drop refraction thing. This was the same thing that had been given to the wailing five-year-old in agony from eye drops earlier. I agreed instantly.

The eye drops were given thrice. They stung a little but no more than atropine, and I'd had that almost every day for six years of my life. The person-administering-the-eye-drops (I need a noun for this, not a hyphenated phrase) said that possible side effects included blurry vision and tiredness. I hoped both cleared up in time for House that night.

For the record, I obviously wasn't too tired to stay up till midnight, but the blurry vision forced me to constantly crane my head close to the computer screen and, when the time came, the TV screen showing House.

HOUSE!

keyboard retardation

2008-07-11T19:02:00.003+08:00

I was on TypeRacer just now, and I saw that the top score was 116 wpm. Since my personal record was 132 wpm, I immediately opened a new race, hoping to earn myself the top spot.

The first passage was rather long. I waited the obligatory traffic-light 10 seconds before starting to type. I had only made one typo, and my keyboard wasn't lagging. So far, so good.

Then my pointer jumped out of the text box.

Everything I typed from then on wasn't included in my score until I wasted time clicking back in the box. And by the time I did that, my speed had fallen to 89 wpm. It took even longer than it normally would because pressing space while out of the text box had brought the page down to its end.

Frustrated that my computer had sabotaged my high-score-setting efforts, I refreshed the page and started again.

The exact same thing happened, except that I didn't make a typo this time. In fact, it's happening now on Blogger, especially just before I press the backspace key. I'd innocently press backspace, trying to remove a typographical error, and then a dialog box would pop up asking me if I wanted to discard the unsaved changes in this post.

No, actually I wanted to keep typing. But my computer thought otherwise.

It's especially frustrating mid-word. I'd be happily typing away, in the middle of a correctly spelled word, then the pointer would jump out of the text box and the word fragment I'd be typing would be underlined with a red dotted line.

I know that "thoug" is not a word. That's because I hadn't finished typing yet!

I'm not even overloading my computer. I have exactly 5 tabs open in Firefox, and the only other applications open are Norton and MSN. Norton is only open because of the automatic daily computer scan. I only have 3 conversations running in MSN. All of these are inactive.

This is the same thing that happened when I was setting up this computer that caused my name to be mistyped as "Arie".

Now I have 9 tabs, but still not enough to overload the computer. It's still in single digits, for goodness' sake!

This is just stupid. I didn't click outside the box; how would I even have a hand on the mouse while I'm typing with both hands? And I didn't touch the touchpad either; the two sides of the keyboard (left hand and right hand, obviously) are too far from the buttons there for me to inadvertently press them, let alone every fifteen seconds.

I can solve Blogger gun-jumping by posting in Notepad, then copying and pasting the post into the box. In Notepad there's nowhere to jump to. But on a touch-typing racing game, in which every second counts, I'm sure you can see how frustrating this is.

blogskin II

2008-07-11T18:42:00.002+08:00

I want a new blogskin.

This is partly because I am generally incapable of sticking to one blogskin for longer than a week. It's also partly because I'm going to be on blogging hiatus soon, and I want a nice non-navi blogskin to last the hiatus.

Ordinarily I would choose something simple, like by lyricaltragedy. But lyricaltragedy left BlogSkins about two weeks ago thanks to a certain flamer, taking her accounts and skins with her. So I'm still searching.

Anyway, I stayed back in school today together with the rest of the 2007 NWSP (National Weather Study Project) team, because we have to present a shortened version of the presentation at the Science Centre. While we were doing a dry run, I kept bursting out in convulsive fits of hysterical laughter, doubling over and even falling to the ground while laughing uncontrollably, and generally being weird. Everything seemed funny, even the word "TANGRAM" on the tangram box inside the cabinets in the GEP resource room. This reminded me of when I found the level 2 sign funny after emerging from the GEPRR for IRS.

Insanity shall prevail.

I still need a blogskin. I like my current one, but I want a non-navigational one.

YKYOWH cont'd.

2008-07-08T21:13:00.002+08:00

You know you're obsessed with House when you are, as you are constantly reminded during morning assembly, "one of the best and smartest students in the school" (i.e. the entire P6 level, not the GEP - hold your horses, anonymous anti-GEP flamers!), and are therefore expected to set a good example for your juniors, by doing the morning exercise properly, not talking while teachers are talking, and not running around grabbing innocent people at random to jabber breathlessly to them about your absolute favourite medical drama. Guess which one of these expectations I don't live up to?

Blogskin

2008-07-08T20:47:00.000+08:00

I just changed my blogskin and it appears I used up all the space in the personal message box to the right of the post area with a message about House, and now cannot write something there about how I'm going to hiatus my blog soon, which was what I wanted to put there. Oh well. It was worth it.

scriptyscript

2008-07-07T12:08:00.000+08:00

I'm searching for old English conversation scripts on my computer. This is posing a problem because of my tendency to avoid self-explanatory file names like "English conversation scripts" in favour of "scriptyscript" or "Doc1" or "HOUSEHOUSEHOUSE!!!HOUSEHOUSE!". Also, I tend to leave documents with understandable file names empty and forget their existence, forcing me to create new ones.

More random ramblings

2008-07-06T17:10:00.002+08:00

I'm still in a random mood.

1) During Chinese tuition today in the oral picture there was a man with a cane. I immediately shouted out House's name in Chinese, which earned me an annoyed/amused look from the teacher, instead of the strange look I would ordinarily have gotten, which I suppose is a sign that my House obsession is no longer news to anybody around me. That's a good sign.
2) Also during Chinese tuition, when I was writing "oral pictures" in English all over the Chinese oral picture set, my seatmate whacked my left arm, which got me annoyed because I was writing with that for no better reason than that I'm right-handed (I told you this was random), and then I started screaming "HOUSE" in Chinese again.
3) I can now type comfortably when the air-conditioner is set at 24 degrees Celsius, instead of my earlier typing threshold of 25. School computer lab temperatures, however, continue to freeze my fingers.
4) I have an inexplicable liking for Chinese MSN display names and text display pictures. My liking for the latter is second to only my liking for House display pictures, which means that currently my display picture is a picture of House, whereas previously it was my Chinese display name typed into a 100x100 icon on GIMP.
5) I just realised that if you're going to set the air-conditioner at 25 degrees Celsius, you might as well not switch it on at all.
6) My MSN display name is currently:
我每次都发誓//不再相信你的谎言//因为我不想重蹈覆辙
The space between the xiang3 and the underlined text is supposed to be bigger but despite all the contrived HTML spaces in the world, I can't get Blogger to display this properly.
7) I realised that melancholic display names sound better in Chinese than they do in English.
8) I'm running out of things to post about. I need something coherent to blog about, instead of lists (like this one) of random items!

random rambling about computer-related stuff

2008-07-06T16:56:00.000+08:00

I just feel like posting something random today. Today's topic is computers.

Gone are the days when I could have 136 tabs in a single browser window (my personal record). Imagine if I had tried that on school computers, the ones with tab-less IE6, limited privileges that apparently don't even extend to safely removing your thumbdrive from the computer, incredibly slow Internet connections and laggy applications. 136 Internet Explorer windows! I wouldn't actually be able to get there, though, because 1) it would crash long before then and 2) I would already have gone insane from all the keyboard lagging.

Anyway, now I divide my surf-load into two windows. The first is for general surfing and music. The second is for the perpetual search for The Perfect Blogskin.

This has the advantage of allowing me to close most of the off-topic tabs at once when I want to focus, instead of closing everything except for my music with the Close Other Tabs function on the drop-down menu and then re-opening those that I actually want (e.g. TWoP House forums).

Oh, and I also compose LEAD posts in Notepad now. Because Internet Explorer (which I HAVE to use LEAD in despite my preference for Firefox because LEAD doesn't feel the need to keep pace with the browser wars and accommodate the sizeable minority that are the FF users) seems to have a virtual monopoly on keyboard lag (apart from MSN, of course, when I always think that my contacts are wondering why the typing notification is appearing for so long despite the fact that I'm not transcribing War and Peace in the text box and the fact that I type 120 wpm)...oh great, I lost track of where I was in that sentence. It's an inevitable consequence of rambling, endless, trying-to-get-around-one-sentence-word-limits sentences, I guess.

I've gotten Twitter and dislike its name because it sounds so much like Tritter.

Anyway.

My headphones started to malfunction around the time when school reopened. Their malfunction wasn't so much sudden mutism as warbling. The sound became distorted and lava-lamp-ish (I love synesthetic metaphors) and the vocals were all but hidden. So I unplugged the headphones and now cannot listen to music late at night.

The split-personality blogskinner I mentioned in my last post deleted her first two accounts.

The Search for the Perfect Blogskin continues!

blogskins

2008-07-04T20:29:00.001+08:00

I was going to post about a teacher, but there are more important things than that. (Posting about teachers, I mean.)

Look here, here and here. Notice something?

They all have the same names and the same blog URLs (after relinking). The first two are explicitly marked as the same person. The third tries to disguise it, not particularly well given that 1) her entire name is given, 2) her entire blog URL is given and 3) her entire real-life ADDRESS is given. Seriously. She could be one of those case-studies for boring presentations on cyber-safety or something.

But that's not my point.

Look at these skins.

The first is an average case. Using an alternate account to rate yourself 5 stars - hardly the work of a criminal mastermind. The lack of criminal-mastermind-ness (I really need a catchy word for this, given the absence of it so glaringly obvious throughout this incident) is even more obvious when you consider the fact that she used an account explicitly marked as hers to rate herself 5 stars.

But the second is really the height of deceit and dishonesty.

Forget ripping. Forget self-downloading and -faving. Self-rating, then defending yourself with a 3rd account? That's got to trump all the cases of BlogSkins dishonesty I've ever seen so far.

Of course, it's not particularly well-disguised, given the three personal particulars given out on her BlogSkins info page. But still. I wonder if after I flame her for defending herself when she self-rated, she'll create a 4th account to chime in and try to reproduce the sherry/random/suigeneris flame war on my cbox on the 25th of May, only with one actor who's constantly changing costumes off-stage.

From her blog profile, which is on a blog that consists mainly of all-uppercase ungrammatical incoherent posts, she is apparently a P5 girl in Singapore (who lives in Woodlands, in a certain block, on a certain level - she divulged it herself!), which is really stupid because I know I wasn't that retarded when I was, let's say, Primary...Three? Two? I don't know. I don't remember when my mental age exceeded eight. I don't keep track of these things, apart from a brief obsession in P4 when I calculated my new mental age every day on my scientific calculator (I know, I'm insane).

But I especially love this comment.

sweet lolli said:

(2 hours ago)

Nice and sweet.To sweet candiie,w1k143va and Silver-Bells,You are being very rude to tatplainlonelygirl.It is strange that she does that but at least she put in some effort.
you better reflect on your mistake.

For some reason, being told to reflect on my (nonexistent) mistake by a liar, self-rater and sockpuppeteer seems strangely hilarious.

I adore this...war. You really couldn't do much more to hand the moral victory over to me. But you could always try. Create a few more accounts and self-rate and flame a little bit more and you'll be on your path to I-Can't-Create-Proper-Skins-So-I-Just-Rate-Myself-with-Sockpuppet-Accounts-and-Cry-Hysterically-and-Defend-Myself-with-More-Sockpuppet-Accounts-if-Others-See-Through-It-hood. (I need a catchy word for that too.)

stomachache

2008-07-02T15:10:00.002+08:00

I got a horrible stomachache near the end of school. Assuming it was because I hadn't actually eaten during recess, I just hunched over and endured it.

It went on without abating throughout the school bus ride back home, and continued until I applied medicated oil and lay down on my bed for a few minutes. When I got home, I immediately rushed into the lift as fast as I could while hunched over and pressed 25.

Carrying my school bag, still hunched over, I pressed the doorbell urgently, praying that it wouldn't be one of those days where my sister and domestic helper had somehow managed to wait for me on the ground floor without me noticing.

It was.

I squatted down on the ground to give myself a moment's relief and dialled speed dial for my home number (labelled "House" just to get me high). An ear-piercing high-pitched tone told me that I had been correct. They were not in the house.

Sighing, still hunched over from excruciating pain, I stumbled into the lift and pressed 1.

They were not waiting outside like I'd expected. That left only one place (besides being out buying rice). The playground. I stumbled to the playground. On the way there, I heard some high-pitched cutesy wailing. Either it's a baby or it's my sister, I thought. It was. The latter, I mean.

I started yelling at both of them (my stomachache wasn't getting any better, plus I may have had a slight headache) that they really couldn't expect me to know where they were and they could at least have called out to me when I got off the school bus because I'm not psychic and can't tell where they choose to materialise! My sister retorted that she couldn't possibly know when I had a stomachache, which was completely besides the point.

Once upstairs, I immediately applied medicated oil and lay down on my bed for about five to ten minutes. My stomachache having abated somewhat, I went to shower.

In other news, today we had an English spelling test. I did it by synesthesia and got full marks. (:

short post

2008-07-01T21:29:00.000+08:00

I am annoyed with my computer. I had unplugged the power source temporarily, not planning to drain the entire battery, and after a while the entire thing suddenly flickered and died. I tried pressing the power button several times, but it didn't work. Then I plugged the source back in and turned it on, and it magically revived. It hadn't given me any warnings of the sort present on Windows XP whatsoever. It hadn't told me its battery was low. No, it just suddenly died, like a CIPA patient who can't tell you where it hurts. And the entire post I was drafting in Notepad was lost.

I'm eating my peach mints altogether too fast. I've burned through two packets in two days. I've got to ration them tomorrow.

bs news.

2008-06-30T20:43:00.005+08:00

So, are you happy now? I'm not even going to post all three 404 screens for all three accounts. False accusations, convoluted logic, nonsensical rubbish. An account created specially for this purpose. Defending yourself despite the complete futility of this position. And now?

I'm not going to say anymore.

Today in brief

2008-06-30T17:24:00.002+08:00

Well, I'm not really going to post a summary of today because today was too uneventful, apart from one part.

Do you REALLY think we have time to participate in a compulsory Recycle Bin Competition to waste recycled materials to make an item (a recycle box) that we ALREADY HAVE, in the crucial term of Term 3, every day inching closer to our prelims and PSLE? They tell us not to get distracted, they motivate us by telling us how unspeakably crucial Term 3 is...then they give us a compulsory, time-consuming task to do? Publicise recycling? We already have a recycling box in our class; how does making us make another one help in any way? Materials are recycled so that they can be used again, not so that they can be stuck on boxes and reduced to aesthetic decoration!

Well, as I said, uneventful day. I seem to be posting lots of short posts lately. If only we were still doing percussion in music.

living room zoo

2008-06-28T21:19:00.002+08:00

I am no longer being metaphorical when I say that my home is a zoo. Our living room table has three animal containers on it, a population of mealworms (my P3 sister's science project), a pupating caterpillar (caught downstairs) and a newly caught silverfish, taken from its home in our food cabinet.

I'm waiting for House to start showing at 10.

blogskin

2008-06-28T13:47:00.003+08:00

Every time I painstakingly change my blogskin and copy and paste everything from the outdated copy of "sidebar.txt" I have saved in my computer, then change all the outdated stuff and relink people I actually relinked the last time I changed my blogskin, then correct HTML errors from forgetting to include the http:// in front of people's links, then admire the aesthetic beauty of this blogskin (which I either found through user info pages of users I like or by trudging through months and years of SOTDs)...

I change it again three days later.

I MUST STOP DOING THIS!

But I cannot resist!

200th post!

2008-06-27T16:47:00.002+08:00

I have reached the double-century of blog post count. I have been blogging on this blog (which has survived two different relinks, all posts intact) since August 2007. Admittedly not as impressive as my slightly-dusty LEAD blog, which has archives from February 2007, and which was the third ever created on LEAD, but congratulate me anyway!

Now that that announcement's over, let me direct your attention to an announcement made during assembly this morning. This is quickly becoming a cliche, but never mind.

It is SIMPLY NOT TRUE that the entire P6 GEP failed to follow the teacher's instructions (putting our hands behind our backs and moving backwards slowly to compensate for the space eradicated by the school bag rule) correctly.

Some interpretations hold that the teacher meant the back of the P6 GEP. But really, she was talking in Chinese and what she said in Chinese doesn't mean that at all. "后面的6JKLM" (hou4 mian4 de0 6JKLM) refers to the 6JKLM at the back, not the back of 6JKLM. Admittedly the classes are arranged horizontally and not in terms of front and back, but it makes more sense to chalk that up to different visual perspective of angles than it does to twist the original grammar around.

But if those interpretations are correct, then it's just an issue of grammar, and construing misleading grammar as a blatant false accusation would be nitpicking even by my standards.

So, let me be fair here and say that although one of the interpretations doesn't make sense grammatically, the intention may have been either one. (:

I just typed 129 wpm on TypeRacer by the way.

Anyway, my keyboard is being stupid! The pointer keeps jumping to different places within the text box, and even out of the text box in TypeRacer >110 wpm cheating-verification tests!

I hope you enjoyed the flood of posts this week, because I'll be going on hiatus soon. It's purely coincidental that I decided to do this after I hit 200 posts...

And who is the -ANON- on my poll comments??!?!?!!?? NO INSULTING OF HOUSE ON MY BLOG!!!! LOL.

I love playing with my kneaded eraser. Picture the scene:

You pull it apart and watch the threads separate, recoiling, retracting into their chosen homes (I should say Houses), slowly pulling apart from each other and sagging without mutual support. Then you lay the eraser down on your table, and watch the sagging threads succumb to gravity and fall onto the table, disintegrating, dying, decaying. You touch them, and they are smooth, as smooth as clouds. Then you roll the whole thing up like a carpet. You squeeze the white mass together and compact it, and suddenly it has the consistency of Blu-Tack again.

Why am I waxing poetic about my eraser?

house obsession

2008-06-26T19:37:00.001+08:00

My right hand hurts from slamming it hard on the door when my sister wouldn't stop popping in and insulting House. And I think I have a bit of a sore throat too, from yelling louder than I ever thought I could.

Teardrop

2008-06-26T19:20:00.000+08:00

Nobody in my family seems to be able to recognise Teardrop by Massive Attack as the House theme song. After I've gotten high for the whole day by listening to the song over again, I squeal and invite them into the computer room to listen to the theme song of the most wonderful medical drama on earth, and they ask questions like, "How come it's got lyrics?" or "I don't think this is it, is it?" or "Where is the part?" This is what comes of insufficient House consumption.

aftermath, day 1

2008-06-26T15:40:00.002+08:00

I love the post title.

I was right - the ache in your left arm after the dreaded P6 Injection of Doom does get worse after you sleep. I woke up with my left arm throbbing and my right arm relatively painless by comparison.

I was wondering how morning exercise would play out. With a sizeable proportion of the P6 population unable to move their left arms without considerable pain, how would the 2008 exercise, 90% of which consists of arm movements, work?

Obviously, we weren't exempted. But what's worse, after the exercise we were given a mixed speech by a teacher who criticised our lacklustre performance yet applauded our effort.

I was confused.

At least our effort was acknowledged. But maybe criticising our lacklustre performance in an exercise that is 90% arm movements while our left arms are all throbbing insanely is a bit illogical?

How can a P6 teacher not know about the P6 injections?!

"You know yourself that you can do better." Well, I also know why we're not doing better. Could it have something to do with the health checkup that took place in your own school, and the injections that came as part and parcel of the aforementioned checkup?

It's possible.

For some reason my ankle was acting up again too.

Oh, and today we did the School Experience Survey - mainstreamers came in halfway and said out loud, "Those are GEP, right?" "Yes, I can tell."

I made up my mind to flame them.

But the topic of the GEP is a bit old on my blog, so never mind.

On the school bus on the way back home, the usual Bus Noise Club meetings were in session. The members of this exclusive club consist of two P5s, a P3, a P4 and a P1. The sessions mainly consist of stupid games, a screaming competition and everyone trying to kill each other. Their meetings are in front, and I always sit in front because all the seats are taken up (I don't even sit in a seat, I sit next to the fire extinguisher near the bus driver's seat), so it was even worse. Soon, however, the bus driver yelled loudly at everyone to shut up.

Instant effect.

The noise came back in slight trickles after that, though, but it wasn't as bad as it had been.

And nobody fell on either one of my arms.

ECSTATIC

2008-06-25T20:25:00.002+08:00

I averaged all my P4-6 results and I'm exempted from RGS General Ability Test!

Got to finish my portfolio now.

I can't believe that, despite my distraction in P5 and general underperformance on GEP exams, my total percentage has always stayed afloat above 80%.

I've never seen anything but maroon-brown (80s) and purple (90s) numbers in my Percentage section, though, so I should have known. :D

the dreaded p6 injections of doom (si3 wang2 zhi1 zhen1)

2008-06-25T15:34:00.003+08:00

For all the hyped-up, overdramatised stories circulated throughout the school about the P6 injections, they weren't that bad, really.

But first, the checkup.

The nurse stopped by our door while we were filling up our Chinese notes for 5.1. We noticed her immediately. She didn't need to say anything for us to get the message; the classroom erupted in a volcanic amount of noise and I started shouting "THE MOMENT OF DOOM IS HERE!" We all went down noisily to the library; our journey was punctuated by repeated "Shhh"s from the monitors and Senior Monitors in front.

First was height and weight, which had me ranting about how I should have been 0.877 cm taller so I could hit the 150 ceiling (sort of how I keep falling below the 120 wpm ceiling for no reason). Then I went to the second station, which was the eye check. Without my glasses I couldn't see any letters at all, not even the largest one (and synesthesia wouldn't help me because if I don't know what the letters are I obviously don't know their colour). With my glasses my vision was suddenly perfect. I would have recited the third-last row if the nurse had let me.

Next was the embarrassing part.

The doctor's examination.

It wasn't THAT bad, just a colour-blindness test (side note: why is my keyboard acting up today? It's micro-lagging and the pointer keeps jumping out of the text box where I'm typing!), a personal question about a certain developmental milestone, the embarrassing part (though it only lasted 1 second or so) and then the forward-bending scoliosis test.

Now we had no more stations to separate us from the dreaded injections of doom (死亡之针 or si3 wang2 zhi1 zhen1). Our doom was imminent! Actually, Index No. 1's (whose name I will not reveal, just like I never reveal anybody's name on here) and mine, because the rest were suffering from health-checkup lag.

First we had to check our details with either of two nurses. My detail-check was over quickly, but Index No. 1 was with a nurse who apparently typed really slowly and was flipping through papers and checking stuff and the like, so I went first.

I went second, in accordance with my index number. There was brief contention by the nurses over whether I should take the jabs because I had taken a Hepatitis A and B jab the Saturday before (reported speech!) but in the end the green light was given to go ahead.

I looked away, closing my eyes and trying to imagine that the nurse was House (this plan did not go too well). The nurse wiped a disinfectant (was that what it was? I only know the yellow iodine stuff in lumbar punctures is a disinfectant but I do not know about the far more common procedure of injections) on the injection site. It felt cooling and refreshing. At this point I tried to imagine that the nurse was House, a plan I broadcasted to everyone around me.

While I was nervous and tense, feeling very unsettled, the nurse (whom I could not imagine was House) put the needle in. The P6s in my old school called the injections "injections of fire"; this is the one that comes close. Admittedly papercuts also feel like fire, and the first injection hurt really badly (like a papercut exposed to wind) during its duration, but after the injection it stopped hurting really quickly and only started coming through occasionally in short, shallow bursts of pain when I was on the school bus. This was exacerbated by some stupid P4 GEPer being ordered to stop standing in the bus doorway, stumbling back to his seat and falling on me. But anyway, back to the injection.

Holding a piece of cotton wool to my injection site (the pain of which was fading away), I went to sit down in the queue for the second injection. In this queue was also a crowd of 6K boys who'd just had their first injection. (I think.)

Now for the second injection. The same process repeated, albeit with a different nurse. The second injection, however, hardly hurt at all. It was a bit like being scratched hard with a wooden block; you feel uncomfortable but not actually in pain.

By this point I had obviously discarded the cotton wool used to cover the site of the first injection and gotten another piece of cotton wool to cover the site of the second injection.

Soon after the injection, though, my left arm (second injection) started to ache and there has been no respite from this throughout the day.

So basically, the right arm hurts more during the actual injection itself but less afterwards, while the reverse is true for the left.

Hope this has debunked any of the same overdramatised stories I heard before this year.

second day of school

2008-06-24T15:16:00.008+08:00

I must come up with more creative post titles. I'll try not to title tomorrow's post (if any) "Third Day of School".

Today was the first day of the new school bag rule. I have to admit, it didn't mess up seating, and morning exercise worked too as it didn't have too many foot movements. The stairs, however, despite being mysteriously empty of P1s were more congested than ever. Practically, though, it still achieved nothing with respect to its actual professed aim.

Today exactly half the class also re-ran 1.6. I don't know if I improved or not because I don't know my first timing.

The teacher (again with the "the teacher" titles!) also started rapping my hand repeatedly to tell me how I can't draw on my own hand, using my own other hand and my own pen.

I smiled politely (the closest I can come to that, anyway) and pulled my hand away several times.

Anyway, we also reelected our class committee (I think this is what it's called). The coincidence of the identities of the two monitors led the teacher to doubt the integrity of the election, and to reelect with the same results. It also led to a talk on creating pairings for fellow students in school.

My head exploded. I realise that this is the same thing I said yesterday about the school bag rule, but two occurrences does not a cliche make.

It was mentioned that it was unlikely that primary school limerence will progress any further, because nobody will expect to see the two people together 20 years down the road.

A valid point, but I doubt that anyone except those having them thinks that primary school crushes will last forever.

The next point was that you might affect the person in question.

It's accepted that teasing stops and bullying starts when the victim says "Stop". Meaning that if the person is being affected, he or she should say "stop" so you will stop! Of course, if it goes beyond there, then there's a real problem, which is what needs to be addressed.

As to how it will "distract" you from your work, unless you spend hours every day formulating ingenious new ways to tease people and creating new pairings, the time you spend teasing people (before morning assembly, recess, after school) won't distract you any more than having a life will.

If you are totally preoccupied with the social landscape of your class to the exclusion of your work then you are completely obsessed and need help.

It's unlikely that real people in real life will descend to this degree of obsession.

As to parents calling the school to ask what kind of things they are teaching - then the parents are unreasonable. How do you go to a coed school and not be prepared for some similar subplots, especially (why do I keep typoing this word?) in the Upper Primary years? That's like going to the ocean and not being prepared to see fish. Unless the parents themselves went to single-sex schools they should understand that such happenings do take place in mixed schools (and even then they should at least have an inkling).

The speech ended with a resounding "put a full stop!" I mentally noted that not everybody is sensitive enough to get upset and distracted over normal happenings in a mixed school, and therefore putting a full stop to such normal happenings is unnecessary unless there is evidence that it is really distracting people from their work.

Oh well. Our seating arrangement changed today too. I was left partner-less and assigned to another partner-less person.

Uneventful day overall.

new rule about school bags

2008-06-23T18:54:00.002+08:00

I have no idea how I forgot to post about this in my First Day of School post.

The teacher (notice how I call all teachers "the teacher" here?) announced during assembly that instead of going up to put our bags in class, we should bring them to the courtyard instead. This is so that we will have more time for silent reading.

My head exploded.

First of all, not all of us come at 7 am and therefore could theoretically read during the time we go up to put our bags in class. How do you expect me to read at 6.30?! It's too dark to read then even if I wanted to, which I don't. And I'm not the only one. Many students come by school buses that like it or not come ridiculously early. Any time before 7 is too dark to read, according to the school's own guidelines. And students who come after 7.10 aren't supposed to put their bags upstairs anyway. So this new rule actually only benefits students who arrive in the narrow window of between 7 and 7.10. What about those who arrive before 7? Are you going to deny us the benefits of this practice for the theoretical possibility that we could somehow read at half past 6?

Second of all, I don't look forward to the congestion on the stairs from tomorrow onwards. P6s already compete for staircase space in the morning with all five other levels, all of which carry their bags up when they go up together. You want to add our bags into the equation? Do you really want bag-carrying P6s fighting for space with bag-carrying, stampeding P1s in the morning? How does this actually benefit us?

How long does it take to put your bag upstairs anyway? Worst-case scenario, your class is on the 6th floor, so you take 2 minutes to go up. Depositing your bag in the classroom (assuming the door is already unlocked, which it is from 6.40 onwards), 1 minute. Coming down, gravity's on your side so that's 1 minute. You took a grand total of 4 minutes to deposit your bag in your classroom. Is this really significant?

Let's say you're an average reader and read 200 wpm. Slow, but never mind. In these 4 minutes, you could have read 800 words. You could have read one of my English compositions! Wow! What a great achievement!

Most people's classes aren't on the 6th floor anyway - just 6I and the P6 GEP.

Wait, I just thought of something else. What about those who arrive early and eat breakfast in the canteen? (People who arrive at 7 generally don't have time to do this, if I'm not mistaken.) Instead of leaving their bags in the classroom, they either leave them in the courtyard, open to theft, or lug them everywhere. And all this so you can read less than 1000 words more in the morning.

Everybody has about the same time allotted for reading, subtracting for the time before 7 when it's too dark to read. 7 to 7.20 - if you're the really slow average reader I mentioned above, you'd read 4000 words in this time. Would an extra 800 words here really make a difference?

Of course if you're a quick reader (let's say 1000 wpm like me), the equation is a little different, but the fact remains that it's not worth creating so much inconvenience so you can read several hundred more words in the morning.

fed up

2008-06-23T16:10:00.002+08:00

I'm searching for new blog URLs now. All of the good ones seem to be taken by people with Blogger preset templates who haven't posted since I was in kindergarten.

first day of school

2008-06-23T15:16:00.002+08:00

Upon returning to school after nearly a month of absence, we noticed changes aplenty. For one thing, the lower halves of the walls of our classroom have been painted blue. Not baby blue, not something remotely calming, but bright prefect-sash blue. Why?! Now the whole classroom looks like it's underwater. The overly bright blue is jarring and reminiscent of the school painting the hilltop building bright green, red and blue - completely incongruous with the brick red of the actual building itself. Maybe the P1s like it, though. I don't know.

Also, cracks in the clock tower were noticed during school maintenance, so now there's a huge safety net outside the Meeting Point to ensure nobody gets concussed by falling bricks. We've all been told not to walk too close to the safety net, in case it breaks I suppose. This makes it difficult to get to the bus but I'm not complaining. The basketball court has also been repainted.

Assembly was a screening of a video put together by our English teacher. It contained pictures of this year's batch of P6s from 2003 to 2008. At the end were our class photos. Other classes clapped and cheered when theirs came on the screen, but 6J seemed particularly unenthusiastic. The teacher mentioned that most of this year's batch had come from the old campus - sadly I was sitting at the back so I couldn't really see what the old campus had looked like.

Lessons were mainly collection of homework (some of which I had done but not brought, for whatever stupid reason, such as not printing it and printing it but leaving it in the printer), doing PSLE booklets and being introduced to our two new teachers! Our Art lessons will be in Chinese in the new term and our art teacher let us talk among ourselves at first but then started playing a game that is really much easier to explain in Chinese. It's some kind of word-chain thing. You carry on the next phrase with the last character of the previous phrase.

Our SS teacher will not be here for 3 weeks and as such we have a new teacher temporarily. We did free assessment worksheets about Southeast Asia.

I hadn't even noticed that school had ended when we were dismissed.

for one more day

2008-06-22T15:49:00.003+08:00

I haven't posted meaningfully in a long time. Sorry.

Today is Sunday, the 22nd of June. It is the last day of the June holidays. I'd better sleep early today.

One consolation for the fact that school is going to reopen tomorrow is that House season 4 repeats on Saturdays too, so I don't have to forgo it entirely - just endure withdrawal for a few days longer (not as easy as it sounds).

The prospect of going back to school after a month of school-free-ness (nearly a month, anyway) seems almost surreal. It's not as if it's particularly foreign, the routine (almost missing the school bus, arriving at school before 6.30, waiting at the doors of 6J for the classroom doors to be unlocked, entering and going down before 7.10 etc), but after a month of not going through the routine the routine is no longer the routine. I know that sentence was awkward.

I enjoyed myself yesterday watching House 4-o3 ("97 Seconds") repeat on AXN. I'd already watched it on Monday because I can never miss an episode, but I can't miss repeats of episodes either!

I actually got 8 hours of sleep last night. Admittedly I slept at 1 and woke up at 9, but still.

I'm changing my blogskin, and along with it I'm cleaning up my profile - removing unnecessary things like how fast I type (honestly, how does that help you put my posts in context, apart from the ones about my keyboard lagging?) and possibly adding some new material as well. My tagboard is in need of a good flame war. Not a really time-consuming one like the random/sherry/suigeneris one on 25 May, which went on for more than an hour straight even if it did make my blog visitors spike, but a small one. Just a small one.

I'm planning on changing the chemical composition of my blog. Of course when there are issues worth posting 1000-word rants about, I will post 1000-word rants about them. But I won't have any filler posts, and I'll try to avoid one-paragraph soundbites. And I won't rant about the same issue for months on end (read my November/December 2007 and January 2008 posts for context on this one).

And I will post less often.

Ah well, time to go fiddle with HTML in a separate Blogger tab. Strange how I can't stick to any one blogskin.

reviving my dead blog

2008-06-20T08:18:00.003+08:00

"So, while you guys were worrying about me, half this kid's brain died."

Anyway, I haven't posted in 6 days - so here's a general update.

I managed to get 126 wpm on TypeRacer. Of course this meant another verification test to make sure I didn't just copy and paste everything but as a result I won't have to take another in a long time. (:
The BlogSkins arena stalled yesterday because of the absence of many proposition members. The opposition threw flames into emptiness within our MSN convo.
I need a new blogskin.
I need a new URL.
I need more House pictures!

Anyway, I'm a bit short of intellectual tirade material at the moment. Sorry.

typeracer

2008-06-14T21:05:00.002+08:00

I'm on play.typeracer.com. It is addictive. I cannot believe my average typing speed is below 120 wpm. And my keyboard is lagging. Not as badly as it did during portfolio days, but badly enough to pull my speed to BELOW 100 WPM. Can you believe it?!

HOUSE

2008-06-07T18:47:00.002+08:00

My heart is definitely beating to that rhythm right now. I just watched 4 Season 2 House episodes in a row.

today's non-essay post

2008-06-07T00:23:00.004+08:00

My ankle was acting up again today so I walked with my characteristic mirror-image-of-House limp. I'm stressing on my personal statement. Handwritten and under 500 words - a lethal combination for me, whose reflections can run to nearly 4000 words (3884 to be exact) and whose handwriting sacrifices legibility for scrawly "elegance".

And yes, I have plenty of incidents to write about in which I had to "uphold a value or principle I held dear". Problem is, I don't think altercations with teachers would go over too well in a DSA personal portfolio, since I'm trying to promote myself, not ruin my reputation. And I don't want to broadcast my lack of social skills either.

Out of the list of facial expressions on Wikipedia, I can only reliably identify the basic three: anger, happiness and sadness. Fear and surprise, maybe, and possibly even concentration. But contempt is beyond me. And it would really be helpful to me to know what an offended person looks like, so I don't keep getting into trouble for things I didn't do.

Yes, yes, observation. I need to be more observant. Obviously I'm really lousy at that, because in nearly 12 years of observation I still have no idea what an offended facial expression looks like. Now, given that I watch House that's got to be quite an achievement.

Anyway, I'M STUCK ON MY PERSONAL STATEMENT. It has to be handwritten, as I mentioned earlier, so I just put an aesthetically pleasing piece of WordArt saying "Personal Statement" in a cursive font with interweaved lines and fill on the top of what is essentially a document of foolscap (composed entirely of underscores, underlined to ensure firmness). I printed one copy at first, wrote something wrong and discarded it (I can't possibly correction-tape off my entire first paragraph). Ditto for second copy. Now I'm on my third copy, and so as to avoid constantly sneaking back into my parents' room where the printer is to collect new copies of the personal statement template, I'm brainstorming first, in a Word document.

Yes, I've made my DSA portfolio cover page look really nice with interweaved-line-and-fill WordArt (a sample of which I've attached, BTW). But what good is "DSA PERSONAL PORTFOLIO" rendered in blogskin-worthy artistic text if I can't come up with my personal statement? I thought pontificating on upholding values I hold dear was one of my STRONG POINTS. Now it's nearly 1am and I'm still stuck at a blank page and a nearly-blank MS Word document.

I do wish people would realise that tapping me to get my attention is incredibly annoying. So is grabbing my headphones when you're talking to me! I can click one "Pause" button by myself, thank you!

In other news, the flamers are back! I don't know whether I should be flattered that brainless retards actually exist whose raison d'etre is none other than to occasionally post synchronised crap on my cbox. Working out an entire synchronisation routine just to hit keys on my blog must be really difficult.

The first time you flamed me maybe you had some actual points to make, although they were lost in the sea of incoherent rubbish and feeble attempts at sarcasm. But one month on, you really are flaming me for no reason. Your cause has died; stop flogging a dead horse.

My personal statement started flowing like a waterfall from my pen after I changed topic. Oh well. I think I'm over 500 words now. I'll have to cut it tomorrow; it's literally 2am!

an intellectual tirade on apologies

2008-06-06T20:51:00.001+08:00

My keyboard seems to work fine in everything but IE. Weird.

Anyway, the subject of apologies is a tricky one. Too often they are used, regardless of sincerity or culpability, as a method of "smoothing the situation" and pouring oil on troubled waters. Is it really possible to apologise for something you didn't actually do? What if you disagree as to whether you actually did it? Is it really right to apologise just to make others feel better, even if you yourself have no personal reason to apologise?

Case study #1: You reject a teammate's submission for group brainstorming. He is upset and starts hysterically yelling and crying, his tantrum extending to violence against others and inanimate objects. The next day, a teacher asks you to apologise "just to make him feel better".

Would an apology there, when you have done nothing wrong, be justified? Instead of consolation, explaining what you really meant, even reevaluating the decision if necessary, you apologise for something you didn't actually do, just to make him feel better. Doesn't this defeat the purpose of an apology, when the raison d'etre of an apology is to express your regret and guilt for something you've done wrong? At least that's how I interpret it.

The core issue here is that he feels he has been hurt by you. You do not think you have hurt him. And in fact, if all you said was that you didn't think you could use his piece, then you did not hurt him - his hypersensitivity has created and magnified the hurt. This hurt does not originate from what you actually said, it originates from his interpretation of what you said, which cannot be attributed to you because it is such a gross distortion of the reality. His reaction was also definitely disproportionate. Therefore, why should you apologise for something he actually created in his mind?

Case study #2: You make a remark, a remark that was not intended to be offensive in any way, a remark that was supposed to be positive, maybe even soothing, maybe even an apology. The other party takes offence at your tone and starts berating you. Obviously a misunderstanding has occurred - yet you feel your conscience is clear; you have done nothing wrong. Do you apologise?

Maybe you could apologise for the misunderstanding, just like you'd say you're sorry your friend failed a spelling test, or you're sorry one of your relatives lost her cat. But apologising for what you've done? What did you actually do wrong that wasn't misinterpreted by the other party? Your intentions were good, so maybe you expressed them wrongly. Reflect on what you may have unintentionally done that may have contributed to the misunderstanding, and apologise for that, if any. But you have no reason to apologise for something you do not feel that you actually did.

If the other party feels that you are being rude, and you do not think so, it comes down to a difference in interpretation - it's his/her interpretation against your intent. Only you know your intent, unless the other person is psychic. And if after reflecting you still feel that you expressed your intentions through actions correctly and unambiguously, then why should you apologise for the other person's interpretation? Interpretations are subjective, and he/she has a right to his/her own interpretation. But he/she has no right to make you apologise for his/her interpretation of the situation.

Case study #3: You are accused of bullying. You feel that you are innocent. The other party, however, obviously disagrees and is genuinely upset, crying hysterically, and may even be traumatised. Thinking back, you realise that you have never gotten along with this person, and you have been involved in a series of hostile conflicts with him/her, in which you did some things you now regret. You deliberately induced emotional distress to win the conflict, but you disagree that it was actually a case of bullying, because you were not trying to stage a campaign against the person, just to win the conflict. In retrospect, you do regret some of the things you did, though.

Barring the possibility of emotional manipulation or faking by the other party (don't call me cynical but it is a possibility), since you have done things you regret, you should apologise for these things in this case. If you do not feel that you bullied the person you can say so, but apologising for specific things you did cannot be taken as an acceptance of guilt for other things.

You could also ask yourself whether the things you did really may have constituted bullying.

Enough of case studies. All the case studies above are of obviously ambiguous situations. Cases in which you have knowingly, intentionally done something wrong will not be presented.

I love this essay.

Anyway, should people be forced to apologise? Even if not forced (because the answer, that that would lead to insincerity and defeat the purpose of an apology in the first place, is too blindingly obvious and is not worth an intellectual exploration in an essay dedicated to dealing with the ambiguities in this area), should people apologise entirely spontaneously/with a little prompting, or should people have somebody checking on them, asking if they've apologised and trying to prompt an apology if one has not yet been offered? (I've experienced that before, completely unnecessarily as I'd already apologised, by the way.)

Ideally people who feel that an apology is necessitated should offer one spontaneously. I will not extol the moral virtues of that here, or the social benefits. But we do not live in a utopia (an utopia? EL SA1 paper 2! vocabulary question I didn't get wrong~) and this does not always happen. I feel that a little prompting might be justified in this situation, because there are people who know they should apologise but just need a little pushing.

But somebody breathing down your neck, checking on you regularly, patronising you and acting like you're a child of three who doesn't know how to apologise? Maybe I'm biased because of the abovementioned unpleasant experience, but I don't feel that this issue is even debatable. Assuming that the people involved really aren't actual children of three (or five, or seven, or socially at that age) who are lacking in the appropriate social skills, such unnecessary checking and misplaced "concern" for "accountability" is fundamentally condescending.

I'm losing my steam. I'm running out of things to write in this non-rant-yet-opinionated intellectual essay. Goodbye.

HOUSE SEASON 4

2008-06-01T21:03:00.003+08:00

I could bore you with the details of how I looked House up in the indexes of countless information books, even 2008 Guinness World Records paperbacks, how I brought my House notebook around and stared at it constantly, how I'm filling Firefox with House tabs to print and put in my notebook, but I won't.

I'm too ecstatic to do that.

HOUSE SEASON 4 IS ON AXN MONDAYS 10PM!!!!

Finally I will be able to escape from the House withdrawal induced by the lack of new House material. Satisfying this by having 6-hour House marathons and watching 10 episodes in a row can only provide highs for so long, and I can't do that every day anyway - not even every week. This is especially true for the episodes where I know the diagnosis.

And now HOUSE SEASON 4 IS OUT!!

I can stop burning with curiosity as people online discuss the Season 4 finale or "the latest episode". Previously I could only sigh, stick House pictures in a 555 notebook and rewatch lots of old episodes from Seasons 1 to 3 that I had already watched before. Now I can find out what happens to the new team that came after everybody left in Season 3.

I had almost given up all hope of seeing Season 4 in Singapore before 2009. And then my sister calls me out of the computer room for a House advertisement. I expect it to be a Channel 5 advertisement about the Season 1 episodes I've already seen, but suddenly I see 40 fellowship candidates sitting in front of House, and stuff about the competition being on. Then I can barely contain my ecstasy as the screen changes to a shot of the House logo, accompanied by "THE LATEST SEASON" (or something to that effect). I start jumping up and down and run back to my room to flood an ongoing MSN convo with my elation.

HOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSE

WATCH HOUSE (actual watch shop name, by the way)!

house notebook

2008-05-30T09:02:00.002+08:00

My latest project is to print out lots of House pictures, then cut them out and stick them in a little 555 notebook I can carry around at all times. Then I'll have a readily browse-able compilation of House pictures!!

My glue is annoyingly ineffective, but never mind. I still have double-sided tape.

The cover of this notebook has been covered with a piece of white blank paper. On top of this white blank paper is a photocopied picture of House from the Season One DVD cover. Yes, I actually photocopied the DVD cover. In fact, I photocopied the Season Three DVD cover too. I want Season Four to come out!!

Inside the notebook, 4 pages have already been covered with pictures of House. The first page has the photocopied House pic from the 8 Days TV schedule on it, the one I keep obsessively photocopying, sticking on index cards and bringing to school. The second page has this on it, except only the part with House.

The 3rd and 4th pages have the House pictures from the Season Three and One DVD covers.

I am currently printing more House pictures!!

supplementary is over!

2008-05-29T08:49:00.002+08:00

Supplementary is finally over. Going back to school for a condensed school day in 5 hours instead of 6 during the holidays has finally concluded. Now we have genuine school-free holidays.

The June holidays are like the halfway point of the year. It's like getting your last ice-cream stick in 1.6 (not the sash because that's the PSLE period). You can't believe you've run 5 rounds so fast, because it seemed like torture while you were actually running them. Same for the year.

I am going to change my blogskin AGAIN. Stability in appearance isn't something present at my blog at the moment, but the rants are always there, albeit less regularly. =)

BlogSkins mass convos rock. The next one's 8pm on Saturday.

i can't separate myself from what i've done

2008-05-28T13:04:00.004+08:00

when i type in all-lowercase you know i'm really upset.

the last day of supplementary, last day before the real non-school part of the holidays start, and i have to do something retarded. it's not as if my brain disappeared and reappeared today, so i have no excuse. i don't want an excuse anyway. i have to face the facts.

no elaborations on rest of supplementary. it would be trivial and irrelevant.

such obvious things i could have done to solve the problem instead of being idiotic and impulsive, yet i didn't think of any of them, and i know that if it had been someone else instead i would have thought of them straight away. that's my old problem again, getting too emotional over minor things like somebody leaning into my arbitrary personal space, then not thinking clearly and doing something a three-year-old would know not to do.

fine, maybe not a three-year-old. a five-year-old, probably. the point is that it was retarded.

i hate my stupidity. i'm not supposed to be retarded. that should go without saying. maybe it's not a matter of mental retardation, it's a matter of impulsivity and common sense.

for the first time in years (or at least months) i doubt i'll be able to sleep at night. i thought i'd shaken the habit of indelible, intrusive guilt at inappropriate times, but i know this is going to be added to my list of sporadic eidetic memories that i wish i'd rather forget.

sporadic eidetic memory is annoying.

for the first time in years i can get scolded without having an inner-third-speaker attack, without ranting and railing inside, without boiling with anger and seeing red. because i know i'm in the wrong. nope, no crushing anger, no fury, no rage. it's not that i don't have a right to feel it. of course i do. i just have no reason to feel it.

and i'm not going to fake it, defend myself furiously, scrabble at trivial facts with which i can disprove the motion of my guilt. i can't go against my conscience, neither to apologise for something i didn't do, nor to deceive myself and pretend that i'm innocent.

i think today i took a step forward. i'm not deceiving myself. i'm not trying frantically to awaken my inner third speaker and turn the issues around. i'm not obsessively replaying the mental videoclip of this incident either.

what i've done is playing now. how suitable.

on the school bus on the way back, i was just staring out the window, sorting things out in my mind. admitting guilt to myself, expressing myself to myself in coherent eloquent words.

the boy/s behind were playing given up. i'd been tired of that song from the number of times i'd heard it playing from handphones on school buses. but today, my other emotional responses had been dampened even more than usual. i mentally played the lyrics, word-perfect.

wake in a sweat again
another day's been laid to waste
in my disgrace

stuck in my head again
feels like i'll never leave this place
there's no escape

meanwhile figure.09 (hence the title of this post) was playing in my head.

all my emotions are dampened, except for the overpowering guilt - i can't even break out into an involuntary grin when i see my new house wallpaper.

stupidity is a horrible thing.

you know you're obsessed with house when:

2008-05-27T20:35:00.002+08:00

You Know You're Obsessed with House When:

You are sitting in the backseat, idly reading a book, when you hear the word "house" and you immediately spread the book on your lap and squeal excitedly, "HOUSE?! Where??"

You know the diagnoses of the pilot (neurocysticercosis) and the second episode (subacute sclerosing panencephalitis) by heart, and can reel them off to any unfortunate passers-by you happen to corner, along with misdiagnoses (necrotizing fasciitis) and other correct diagnoses (erythropoietic porphyria, hemochromatosis etc), despite how difficult most of these are to pronounce (especially with a stammer) and even type without getting your fingers all tangled up.

You spend part of your group's FPS time scribbling "HOUSE M.D." all over your groupmate's foolscap cardboard backing AND the team copy.

You aren't actually upset that your leg hurts because of a sprained ankle 2 months prior, because it means you can limp really realistically. You're just upset it's in the wrong leg.

You photocopy gigantic 8 Days TV schedules just for the House picture. You cut the picture out and paste it on an index card, and bring this index card to school. You get really upset when water gets on the picture.

You actually have a whiteboard in your house, for solving difficult Maths questions. You use it for differential diagnoses of unexplained smells.

You got into trouble with the librarian for using the whiteboard in the Periwinkle Room for a differential diagnosis of Sports Day (hyperactivity, personality disorder and seizures). Your teammates are also slightly upset with you, because you're supposed to be helping out with the article on Sports Day for the school newsletter. You wail and groan when they erase the differential diagnosis. You actually start ordering labs.

If somebody mentions the POTW (patient of the week) to you, you can instantly recall the episode, as long as it's from season 1 to 3 (because SEASON 4 ISN'T OUT IN SINGAPORE YET!!!). You can also reel off plot details, interesting scenes and subplots. The episode title is a different matter, though.

When you sprained your ankle two months ago and sat in the sickbay for nearly an hour, you didn't drive yourself crazy with regret of your stupidity, nor did you try frantically to distract yourself from the pain. Oh no, you wondered if they would give you a cane. You spent the next 10 minutes or so imagining how great it would be if a by-product of this injury would be you actually being able to imitate House realistically, and start formulating plans to get your hands on small mints you can pop.

You spam people over MSN with paragraphs full of HOUSE.

You corner unlikely people to ask if they watch House. You have done this to all your teachers, most of your friends, parents of classmates/6Kers, your piano teacher and blogskinners. You are trying to expand your House-asking pool.

You actually made a House MSN emoticon.

Your MSN display picture is a picture of House, as is your wallpaper and sometimes your personal message.

When writing an article for Sports Day (mentioned above) during Publications, you and your groupmate decide to highlight and capitalise every single occurrence of "House" in the draft. Since this is an article about an inter-HOUSE event, in which students of different HOUSEs come together to compete with those of other HOUSEs and build bonds between HOUSEs in friendly inter-HOUSE competition, the paper quickly becomes about one-quarter blue, especially as you have made it your goal to squeeze at least two occurrences of "HOUSE" into every sentence.

You squeal out loud during the RGS open house (yes I know!!) when you see the lists of HOUSE Captains and HOUSE Achievements displayed prominently near the entrance. This reminds you of when several ex-NYPS seniors currently in RGS came to NYPS and you started asking them if they watched House. When one of them answered yes, you started jumping up and down and bombarding her with inquiries about various episodes.

Seeing the word "House" alone causes you to break out into an involuntary grin.

During Sports Day itself, you jabber away to the person beside you (abovementioned Publications groupmate) about House episodes.

You're upset that while many people try to tell us about cooperation, nobody has ever said that there's no I in team before, because you KNOW in your heart that when they do that, your heart will gladden with the follow-up: "There is a me, though, if you jumble it up."

You received the draft copy of an article for the school newsletter to copyedit during Publications. You instantly start drawing boxes and lines to further your mission of rendering every single proper noun in the article in the House font. You stop when you realise you have to give the article back.

You are actually compiling a list of symptoms of House addiction.

HOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSEHOUSE

111 wpm?!

2008-05-26T19:40:00.003+08:00

111 words

Speedtest

NOOO. This is obviously not my top speed. My top speed is in excess of 120 wpm. Admittedly it is usually achieved on typingtest.com with the same text ("The Irrational Side of Managerial Decision-Making"), but still.

I remember how when I was P4 I would get typing-test mania and type madly for up to an hour, trying the same test over and over again. At first I got 80 wpm, then 96, then with frenzied typing and constant refreshing I broke the 100 ceiling. Then I typed at about 105 wpm for about a year, and in P5 I levelled off at about 110. Then near the end of the year, I hit 120. I was ecstatic.

I MUST NOT REGRESS TO P5 LEVEL.

Supplementary today was uneventful. My favourite part was the Chinese oral talk. Everyone was laughing and it was really fun.

I was a little sleepy, though.

holidays

2008-05-25T18:34:00.002+08:00

My cbox is malfunctioning. Again. I am trying to flame 'random', who has just returned to my humble blog to grace us with his/her presence, and throw sweets at us from the stage. The flame war is actually heating up again. RANDOM IS ACTUALLY ONLINE. And my cbox has to malfunction.

Anyway, the first semester of 2008 is officially over! There was no thunderclap on the last day of school, nothing to signal that half the year had passed in the blink of an eye, nor anything to signal cliche overuse on the part of a certain P6 GEP blogger. (LOL.)

The last day of school was uneventful. It was the day of the Secondary School Roadshow, which was marked by me constantly reading Microtrends, which is the book I'd been reading during assembly that day and had a reference to House on page 306!! Not the obscure "subacute sclerosing panencephalitis" kind only completely obsessed addicts like me get, an overt reference, with a brief summary too. This had caused my great hyperventilation during assembly, causing several people to look strangely at me. I kept rereading that page over and over again.

My cbox is working sporadically now.

But because I have the DVDs and because of the RGS open house, I was not allowed to stay up to watch House on Friday!!

Fine, it was the first episode, but I CANNOT NOT WATCH HOUSE!!

I am trying to squeeze 5-hour House marathons into the busy unwritten TV schedule which states that I hardly get to watch House at all. :( Detoxing and withdrawal symptoms are not good.

Oh dear, now that my cbox is functioning, the flame war has died down! And there's supplementary tomorrow, which means I have to wake up early again. On the plus side, though, the bus will be free of annoying P1-P5 students making noise unnaturally early in the morning. =)

HOUSE!

mental retadation + 1.6 + overload + HOUSE

2008-05-22T20:20:00.000+08:00

Here is an excerpt, rearranged in chronological order, from a brief cbox flame war regarding my performance in a NAFA test I didn't take.

lsjflnanl: ur nafa suxs. ha
ariel: i am not in the nanyang academy of fine arts, nor do i own it.
lsjflnanl: what r u takling abt?
ariel: what is nafa?
lsjflnanl: / the fit thing lah idiot. stupid
ariel: i suppose you mean napfa.
ariel: idiot. stupid
lsjflnanl: is nafa lor u really IDIot and STUpid lor.
ariel: well i'm pretty sure i didn't do my napfa test at the nanyang academy of fine arts.
ariel: nor did i go to north american fur auctions, or the national association of fleet administrators.
lsjflnanl: u r stupid i wun boder to takl to u anymore. idiot. mentally retaded.
ariel: im not retaded. maybe you are.

This is perhaps the first ever flame war I have experienced in which the other side has actually given the entire debate to me by insisting on his/her correctness on a relatively minor issue, a situation made especially "retaded" by the fact that he/she was actually wrong about that simple detail.

NAtional Physical Fitness Awards is the name of the test I took yesterday, by the way.

Anyway, today was our 1.6 km run/walk. I was 7th out of 12. Not a particularly good score but it's OK, I suppose.

I do hate auditory overload. Such as during assembly this morning, when ALL the different announcements to all the different levels in different locations were being broadcast simultaneously over the PA system, while the microphone used by the teacher actually trying to say something to us was malfunctioning. I'm going to suggest in LEAD now that morning announcements are either announced separately or entirely done by prefects, or basically anything that doesn't result in admonishments to keep quiet being broadcast unnecessarily to the whole school. And I wish the microphone wouldn't keep malfunctioning.

On a vaguely related vein, people should not start grabbing me from behind and pulling me down to make me "calm down" during FPS presentations. I mean, I see your rationale. Obviously I'm getting way too heated up in trying to ask a question regarding an irrelevant solution to the presenter, and if you don't start irritating me even more by inducing sudden sensory overload I would probably go on a killing rampage with an axe or something. Then you'd have to clean up.

I photocopied the 23 May TV schedule in this week's annoyingly huge issue of 8 Days because of the House picture inside. :D

Nothing much to post. I'm stuck on the 3rd portfolio reflection!

concert + napfa

2008-05-21T19:01:00.003+08:00

The concert was today. 6J was the first item, followed by 6K and then 6F. The performers had to be in the hall at 10.30, and I arrived at 10.28. A microphone to amplify the muffled piano was eventually found, and the foot pedal for the bass drum collapsed and had to be fixed. Meanwhile, I waved at people from the stage.

There were long speeches before we started performing. First something about keeping quiet, then something about the Music Programme and the people teaching in it, then the guest of honour (i.e. the principal) was invited to hit a drum placed in front of the stage for just this purpose. Then we started.

The nervousness that had risen quickly disappeared (although I started smiling uncontrollably for no particular reason) as I set the beat by hitting the drumsticks together four times. Then the piano started playing and three seconds later, the assembled audience (the entire P6 level) let out an "Ohhh" of recognition. Obviously most of them knew what song we were playing, which wasn't really a surprise (we were playing What I've Done).

There were no major rhythm mistakes on anybody's part. This came as a relief, as the rehearsal yesterday had been marked by half the song becoming grossly uncoordinated because of a few piano mistakes. I could only imagine how mortifying that would have been on stage.

After the performance we got the loudest applause of all the 3 classes! (I am from 6J by the way) The teacher said she'd forgotten what our song was called and asked the audience. Many hands instantly shot up; obviously lots of people could recognise our song.

After us was 6K, playing Apologise. Again, better than rehearsal. :)

After that was 6F, playing Stand By Me. They had NO pianist and relied on a recording of the song, while the rest of the class played their percussion instruments. I think playing the rhythm of a prerecorded song is a different matter entirely from actually coordinating the piano and the drum into one piece.

As for the NAPFA test, I actually scored ABCDE. Not in order, though, as there is no way I can only get C for Sit and Reach (the medieval torture instrument thing), or A for sit-ups. E for Shuttle Run is a bit more realistic but I got it up to a B.

2 of our teachers were at the Shuttle Run station, and because our form teacher had too long a queue of noisy P6 GEPers lining up behind, I went to a different teacher, who WATCHES HOUSE! (I know you're wondering why I was asking the Shuttle Run teacher about House. Same reason why my wallpaper is House, my MSN display picture is House, my personal message is usually a quote from House, I got all excited about injections because of an obscure reference to House episode 1-02 ["Paternity"], in which a 16-year-old adopted teenager had subacute sclerosing panencephalitis [I don't even know how I can remember this, much less PRONOUNCE and TYPE it] because his biological mother hadn't been vaccinated, I keep getting overexcited during everyday conversations because of occurrences of common words such as "house"...I could go on. Sorry, long digression.)

Anyway, obviously my results will be closer to last year's than P4's.

fed up with my computer

2008-05-19T12:44:00.002+08:00

I am completely fed up. Windows Explorer is hanging, the worst possible program that can hang, so I can't click ANYWHERE on my taskbar, or whatever you call the bar at the bottom of the screen, I can't alternate programs with alt+tab, Windows Media Player has frozen, I don't know if my MSN contacts are talking to me or not, and I can't even work on my portfolio because I can't --

Wait, I just tried to minimise Firefox and end explorer.exe, which caused the taskbar to temporarily disappear and then slowly reappear again, all my programs intact. :D

I'd better close some windows. I have way too many Word documents open at this moment.

long time no blog

2008-05-19T08:41:00.002+08:00

I realise I haven't posted in a long time.

First, my computer ate my first portfolio. My entire first portfolio, my 3336-word GEP essay. First Word hung. Then Windows encountered some sort of 'save permission error' because the drive wasn't properly inserted (despite the fact that it had been properly inserted for the past 30 minutes and I hadn't touched it at all). By this point, of course, I had already opened Task Manager to end the program.

You can guess what happened next. The 'save permission error' only appeared after I had clicked End Program. Thus I had no time to copy and paste all the contents of the file into a different document. The entire portfolio was saved as a WRL temporary file. Then, of course, Word closed.

My entire first portfolio gone.

I had to retype it from my draft, a 3336-word essay about the GEP, plus edit the references due to the MOE website restructuring that only makes everything so much more complicated, plus make the essay more 'objective' and less 'emotional', THEN edit my reflection, etc. Also, my keyboard decided to lag at this time. Here's my reflection account of the event:

In addition, my keyboard somehow fell sick and started lagging horribly. It would take up to a minute to register a 10-word sentence I had just typed in 5 seconds, often hanging into the bargain. As I would not wait for it to finish lagging and would just keep typing, I would have typed a whole paragraph by the time it recovered, and due to the keyboard’s lagging this paragraph would be littered with words run together, letters omitted and ungrammatical run-on sentences. I would then have to go back and correct every single mistake I had not made, while the keyboard continued lagging. As a result, the same 120-word paragraph I could have typed in a minute would be stretched out over three or four minutes instead, an incredibly frustrating process. This may have benefited me in typing tests when the paragraph I had typed in 15 seconds would not register and would later spill out onto the screen in a few seconds instead, giving me a typing speed of about 200 wpm, a far cry from my actual speed, but in my portfolio it was just frustrating.

Basically, my keyboard is crappy.

Anyway, the random flame war is heating up! Or rather, WAS heating up, now that my cbox has cooled down again. Such a pity - I was looking forward to perpetuating the largest cbox flame war in my blogging history.

Thinking about changing my blogskin. Also making a blogskin.

Summary of today

2008-05-14T14:34:00.003+08:00

The teacher during assembly didn't know how to translate "poker cards" into Chinese and thought that a bus accident was a just cause you could "sacrifice" your life for ("We do not want to see anyone's life being sacrificed for nothing.") Sacrificed for nothing? Then what did you sacrifice it for? And in a bus accident? I'm nitpicking here, but whatever.

There really is no point coming to our FPS team just to ask if I've apologised for accidentally injuring somebody's arm the day before. "Even if it's an accident you can still apologise, right?" Well, that must explain why I apologised yesterday. "When there are accidents and injuries it's my job to ensure there has to be some accountability!" Don't make it sound so serious. It's one scratch on a person's arm; don't rush her to the ER, will you? As intelligent human beings with brains, we are perfectly capable of dealing with the immense social issues raised by such a major life-threatening injury. Accountability. Obviously if you hadn't come to sort it all out, we'd be running away in fright, completely evading our responsibility. I am not a frightened three-year-old who runs away after breaking the family heirloom vase. You don't have to 'make sure' that I've apologised. I do have a brain.

Anyway, my Science scores are lousy. :( And I REFUSE to get a writing book and 'start writing again'. Sorry, but illiteracy's never been my forte.

Our FPS group has one completely comatose member vegetating at a table, one occasionally productive member who communicates with the comatose member the rest of the time, two always productive members, and one sometimes productive member who scribbles "HOUSE" all over the draft foolscap and on the team copy as well. This has resulted in HOUSE-covered foolscap, messy House logos written sideways, and the word 'house' written in all-lowercase on the solutions page in the actual booklet. I guess you can guess who the last member is. :)

I'm just glad my keyboard isn't acting up today, apart from the occasional lag.

it's really hard to limp with both feet

2008-05-13T16:43:00.002+08:00

Both my feet were aching today, left because I'd sprained it two months ago and right because today was Music lesson, i.e. our second-last rehearsal for the concert, at which we played the song three or four times. It's really hard to limp with both feet, so I alternated the foot on which to limp.

My pointer is jumping everywhere, sometimes out of the freaking text box, and my keyboard is creating typos I didn't type. This is forcing me to type slower than normal. I do not want to do that!

In fact it keeps jumping backwards and selecting text and overwriting it with the stuff I'm cu

See, it jumped out of the text box again.

This is really annoying. It just jumped two lines up and backspaced part of the last word fragment.

Why is my computer so retarded?

the first time i can describe gep exams as 'optimistic'

2008-05-13T15:08:00.002+08:00

For the first time in my 3 years of GEP-ness, I can describe a major GEP exam as 'optimistic'. The SAs, no less. Unfortunate it should come in my P6 year, the result slip of which is not given until Term 3 and that is not included in DSA, but never mind.

I was bored so I was doodling several things. Firstly, a whole diary page of figures in various postures clad in a NYPS uniform, the hairstyle copied from the 6A HCL textbook, and secondly, and more importantly, a list of exam results.

English Paper 2 91/95 Compo 33/40 Oral 27/30 (unfortunate, isn't it) LC 19/20 Report Book 92.5%
CL Paper 2 87.5/90 Compo 34/40 Oral unknown LC 19/20
HCL Paper 2 unknown Compo 33/40 Oral unknown LC unknown
Maths Main Paper 85/100 (!) Alternative Assignment 18/20 Report Book 77.1% (which may not seem like much but it's an improvement from last year)
Science unknown

Basically, it's much more optimistic than it's ever been since I got my brown envelope --

WHY IS MY POINTER JUMPING EVERYWHERE WHENEVER I TRY TO TYPE?!
This is frustrating.

cbox

2008-05-12T21:27:00.000+08:00

I can't post on the cbox! No matter what I type it still prompts me to please type a message!

can't type a proper title for fear of making a personal attack

2008-05-12T14:29:00.006+08:00

During assembly the first person in each row had to go up to the courtyard stage to get a stack of circulars for their class. Being the first person in my row (arriving at school at 6.30 am), I went up.

I was being blocked by people, and annoyed, I grumbled aloud, "If people weren't blocking me this would be a whole lot easier!"

Of course, as luck had it, a teacher heard it, instantly assumed that that incredibly offensive remark was obviously directed towards her, turned around and started saying in this irritating voice, "EXCUSE ME, are you referring to me?"

Obviously my remark had been general and wasn't even particularly offensive, although of course if you had one of those really sensitive vulnerable cardiac blood-pumping organs you might faint. I replied, "No," and went back to 6J.

Evidently she hadn't yet had her fill of wrongful accusations and egocentric assumptions. Marching over to my class, she started ranting at my teacher, "Just now I was blocking her and she...I don't even know what she said...so I told her off."

Okay. I bet any three-year-old could poke a million holes in that statement. Three, to be precise.

1) So you were blocking me and I'm in the wrong. Wow. I don't even know what to say.
2) You don't know what I said and you told me off?! I know the human brain has the tendency to fill in blanks in memories, but a three-second-old memory? Completely blank? I laugh.
3) Even if you'd known what I said why would you think it had been directed to you? I know, I know, obviously ALL remotely negative statements I utter aloud are directed to the person directly in front of me, no matter how random that person is.

Yes, yes, of course you're right. Anything I say is about you, and in fact it's so incredibly offensive your heart will explode if you don't put me in my place. You told me off? You asked me in a foregone-conclusion voice whether I was referring to you, more like. But of course, you can't say that, or then you'd be in the wrong for assuming bad faith in the first place, and I'd become the first primary school student in three centuries to actually be in the right when the other party is a teacher. No? So obviously, I was COMPLETELY in the wrong for DARING to open my mouth to lament the fact that I was being obstructed. And OF COURSE, no matter how much I myself know otherwise, the comment was about YOU and was offensive to boot!

My MSN personal message is currently:

// obviously the world revolves around you, that's why your head is in the clouds.

Directly after the incident, I had my worst inner-third-speaker attack of all time.

Assembly was lousy too. Awards for 'respect' and 'responsibility' (with the teacher asking WHY they'd given the awards to these particular people, as if we didn't know that they'd gotten the Respect and Responsibility awards for being respectful and responsible), and that wasn't even the worst part. After the prize presentation was some sort of PowerPoint presentation about school rules. The slides were in English but the presenting teacher felt the need to translate it into really ungrammatical and un-fluent Chinese. Suffice it to say that the 'effective' bilingualism didn't help me at all.

And here are the things we can't wear in school:

Hand bands
Wrangles
Bracelets

WTFH (what the fei hua, 'random' and other aspiring flamers) are 'hand bands'? Does anybody wear bands on their hands? Wouldn't that sort of defeat the purpose of having hands in the first place? I would've thought the wrist was far more suitable. And as for 'wrangles', I fervently hope the people who designed the presentation weren't English teachers. If they are, I weep for my generation. And they complain about falling language standards.

Oh yeah, and hairstyle rules (for girls):

Short hair
Above ear level.
Long hair
Tied up neatly with black, blue or white rubber bands.
Only black hairclips allowed.
No accessories.

Okay, so either 1) your hair is above ear level or 2) your hair must be tied up. What happens if your hair is below ear level, but too short to be tied up? Don't tell me there's a mysterious rule against having hair in between? Because during P4 GEP orientation, they told us it couldn't touch our collars. Are there people with their ears at their collars? Or is this a slippery slope? They'll be expecting us to either shave all our hair off or have it hanging down to our waists next.

There were other assorted small errors, like rules on handphone use during curriculum time supposedly being under "Dismissal Rules - After School", and apparently they had to tell us that we aren't allowed to SMS, record, play games or listen to music with our phones in class (duh) AFTER they'd told us that we weren't allowed to use our handphones from 7.30 to 1.30. Okay, so class is OUTSIDE curriculum time. Where does that even come from?

We also aren't allowed in public places wearing school uniform without being accompanied by a parent or guardian, which raises two questions: 1) Is walking home to your house (!) considered a 'public place'? and 2) Is being alone in public any more dangerous IN school uniform than OUT? Or is this just so we won't break our facade?

Anyway, the presentation dragged on with tautologies, lousy grammar and oral-failing Chinese until the last few slides. On the second-last slide, I saw:

Behaviour of a NYPS Pupils

Did these people fail P1 English?! Aren't ARTICLES taught well before university? No point banning Singlish in classrooms until we get rid of this sort of gross error. Behaviour of a NYPS Pupils. A NYPS Pupils! I laugh. Maybe just a simple typo, true. But a typo would have to slip past plenty of editors for several hours each time to prevail on the big screen in the hall, especially a typo that egregious. A NYPS Pupils. This isn't like me complaining about my FPS team not knowing what a transorbital lobotomy is anymore. This is teachers not knowing basic grammar.

Then the last slide had:

School
is
a
SAFE
and
FUN
place
to
learn!

Then why all those rules?

Throughout the presentation, they also constantly highlighted words unnecessarily, which was probably not that irritating to everybody else but just to me because they were in the completely wrong colour and made "not allowed" an unnecessarily big font, as if we had patches of light-sensitive cells where our eyes should be. Small problems, though, compared to the utter lack of language proficiency, the ridiculous piles of rules and the COLOURS. Red and green for words ranging from purple to brown. 'Department' was the only word coloured remotely correctly.

I guess it doesn't matter to most other people though. Well, long post, I've got to sign off.

exam week + flamers

2008-05-10T18:18:00.000+08:00

Did you really think I'd blog during exam week?

Day 1: English

This was pretty easy. One question (a vocabulary question) was eagerly debated within the GEP. Luckily I put the correct answer. I mean, limbo, nirvana and sanctuary most emphatically do NOT mean 'perfect society'. So the only answer left is 'utopia'. I didn't even do it by elimination. To me, it was perfectly obvious.

The comprehension had a LOT of opinion questions, though. Why somebody did something, what the author meant.

Oh, and in Synthesis and Transformation, one of the questions was: "Siti likes swimming. Gregory dislikes swimming." I immediately started giggling hysterically because of course he doesn't like swimming! He can't even run! Nobody else understood why I was laughing and I had to explain it to them after the exam. If you don't get the joke, go buy the House DVDs and watch them over 10 times every single night. That is not an option. And our group name IS House M.D.! OK, I'm getting hysterical.

During assembly the P6 Level Dean announced that today the P6s from 6A to 6I would be having their Science SA. I would've been happy that we were being acknowledged if she hadn't wished them good luck and...conveniently omitted all mention of us. Wow! We don't exist! Of course, being the 1% minority we don't deserve good wishes, quietness during exams or even an acknowledgement of our existence. We are to live in oblivion, only rising to public attention when one of our members does something wrong.

UPDATE: We got back our results today (although not the papers themselves) and for the Paper 2 I got 91/95!! Then for the overall final report-book mark (I don't know what to call this) I got 92.5, which is the highest in class, tied. What a good way to end the week :)

Day 2: Maths

Surprisingly easy, considering this is one of my worst subjects. Even the geometry was easy. The only difficult question was the last question, Question 48, something about a lorry driving from one town to another and having to speed up to compensate for a 30-min lunch break.

For the first time in I-can't-remember-how-long the only reason I left a question blank was that I couldn't do it, not that I was out of time.

Music was cancelled because the music room was locked and the teacher wasn't there. I don't know why. This would've been our last rehearsal.

UPDATE: We got back our section A results and I got 19/20, or 95%. We haven't gotten our total Maths score yet but the teacher is 'very impressed' with my improvement and rates it 9.5/10. So my confidence wasn't misplaced. :)

Day 3: Normal Chinese (Compo + Main Paper)

I finished compo just on time. Something elaborate about cheating in a test by putting the textbook under your desk and referring to it secretly. I emptied good sentences (jia ju) into the compo from the mo-xie department in my brain, a very overtaxed department given my tendency to only learn 2 paragraphs of mo xie in 5 minutes the night before the ting xie.

The main paper was also incredibly easy. 1h 40 min for it is way too much; for the first time since I joined GEP I spent 1h of exam time NOT doing the paper. It felt more like a mock paper anyway; none of that tense exam atmosphere. I don't know why.

Day 4: Higher Chinese (Compo + Main Paper)

I finished compo 2 minutes ahead of time. About encountering an old woman whose husband had abandoned her and whose children had driven her out of the house, so plenty of emo jiaju and other stuff.

The main paper was slightly harder than the CL one but was still pretty easy. Spent 40 min not doing the paper. It also felt like a mock paper.

Day 5: Science

The teacher ACTUALLY ANNOUNCED DURING ASSEMBLY that the GEPers were still having exams!!! Progress, finally! I mean, after so long, she actually told the mainstreamers to keep quiet during our exams! Prior to today, we'd always been nonexistent, our exams not mentioned, silence during our exams not required, we weren't even told to keep quiet during assembly for mainstream exams. But today our existence is acknowledged.

Anyway, the Science exam was pretty moderately okay, by which I mean that it was mainly easy and moderate with one or two difficult questions thrown in. My SA results are looking pretty optimistic.

This was the day when we got back all the UPDATES mentioned for English and Maths. I spent much of it floating around in utter ecstasy owing to my English scores, not dampened in the least by the teacher's compliments regarding my Maths scores.

---

Anonymous people flaming on my cbox (in fact, non-anonymous people flaming on my cbox as well) are just inviting a torrent of flames from me and other bloggers who read my blog. Don't think you can make judgments regarding my life, my choice of words and my content, because you can't. You are in no position to do so, other than perhaps the position of the typical brainless idiot thinking they have a crystal ball with which to see deep into my poor complaining NYPH GEP soul.

Go on, keep flaming. Create a full-scale flame war if you like. At least then my cbox won't be dead, and I'll get a chance to exercise my inner third speaker. I only wish I had a premium cbox account, so more messages could be stored. Then I'd have a complete record of your stupidity.

You stumble upon my blog, you glance through a few posts, you read my profile. Then you instantly think you have a complete knowledge of all the things that make me uniquely me. You psychoanalyse me, 'counsel' me, try to make me put on a facade. Well, I'll tell you one thing, the position of a stupidly grinning perpetually happy NYPH GEPer is one I will never assume. Partly because NYPH does not exist, but mostly because I do not live in a fantasy utopia (I DID get that English vocabulary question correct, earning my 91/95) where people ARE perpetually happy. Maybe you do, maybe your pathetic neurological circuitry doesn't let you deal with the cruelty and brutality of the real world. But not everybody has such pathetic neurological circuitry.

Guess what? I'm perfectly capable of flaming back. I have a brain, an inner third speaker, and a pair of hands which type at 120 wpm and therefore take less than an hour to reply to your 'arguments', unlike you. I'm sure you spent lots of time, maybe a few years, mastering small muscle control so that you can type at more than 0 wpm. Well, good try. A few more years and maybe you'll type 1/12 times as fast as me. Of course, then you'd have 10 times as many mistakes, and I wouldn't be able to read your messages at all.

You think you can judge my life? Do you even HAVE a life, a life that goes beyond mastering the necessary muscle control and brain development needed to type stupid messages on other people's tagboards? I mean, I appreciate your effort. Pressing those little keys? The muscles must burn. I'm sure the last 10 words are pure torture.

(By the way, where is the refresh button on my cbox?)

You really thought I would just take it lying down? You thought I would accept your flames, meekly nod in agreement with your deep profound advice for improving my life, and start living a new life as a forever happy GEPer in NYPH? I laugh. Hysterically.

As an outsider, what do you think of the human race?

Labour on Labour Day?

2008-05-01T17:49:00.000+08:00

Yesterday, the last day of April and also the day before Labour Day, was flooded with homework. For one day of holiday, we got 4 mock papers. 4. Fine, we did most of one of them in class, but that's 3 1/2 to 3 left depending on how much you did in class, and 3 mock papers on 1 1/2 days is pushing it. We don't even get this much work on weekends. SA week is annoying.

Plus, it means CCA is cancelled, and I LIKE CCA. Not to mention the whole 'half-a-year-is-gone' sense of urgency thing.

Anyway, today I tried in vain to remedy a pen's circulation problems, which didn't work as water added to improve circulation wouldn't go past the first centimetre of the ink tube. I have no idea why. I have, however, discovered that one can drain some blood out of pens by pushing a scope into the ink tube. It is quite interesting to watch, actually. The ink starts to drip from the nib, slowly, after your scope has completely mixed the gel with the ink and now the ink is being pushed towards the nib and then it starts bleeding.

I also performed a routine ink-viscosity followup treatment. The original treatment for circulation problems is to create a relatively large breach in the gel (usually with biopsy procedures, then moving the needle from left to right, creating a deep and wide drain in the gel), then to add water to the ink tubes. The procedure has to be redone every few days but it works wonders. Fortunately, the followup was carried out harmlessly. Unfortunately, inky blue water dripped onto the tablecloth and onto a hastily positioned Post-It note.

Then the spring was lost and I had to transplant one that didn't fit.

That's about it for today's Stationery Hospital activity. As for academics, yesterday and today I have finished all my mock papers, 8 pages of assessment and Science reading of the textbook (which we don't use in class) and part of the encyclopedia (why did I even do that? Searching for 'synesthesia' in the index?).

No wonder they call it Labour Day. I spent nearly all day in my bedroom, doing schoolwork.

Oh, and by the way, I've found one black G2 pen and two green pens in the stationery cupboard in our computer room in our HOUSE, fresh and untouched! I can't wait to biopsy them.

Yay.

Anyway, the mystery of the police prank-caller in our school is still unsolved! Yesterday, we had to wait 20 MINUTES for the culprit to own up, an exercise in futility as whoever he/she was, he/she did not own up. This resulted in flag-raising being seriously delayed and one period of lessons being lost. Sounds insignificant? I can biopsy at least five pens in a period, including time for lead-changing, pen-capping etc., and cleaning up.

Biopsies aren't supposed to be messy but sometimes I just can't resist the urge to push a long scope into the ink tube and watch the pen bleed it out, then save it by stanching the bleeding and removing the scope.

Anyway, on a more serious note, more people must be online. Only 8 OUT OF MY 73 CONTACTS are online. This is deeply unwikipedish.

I was supposed to shower, but it's dinner time. I'll shower AFTER dinner, I guess.

police, prank calls and bleeding it out

2008-04-30T15:19:00.000+08:00

Today, during assembly, the principal announced over the PA to the whole school that a student had called the police repeatedly in the morning and the police were in the school hall. My first thought was, how retarded. I mean, I wish I had some more philosophical, profound meditation as my first thought in this case, but my first thought pertained to mental retardation, so what can I say?

But calling 999 for no reason is the oldest trick in the book. I mean, you see it in compositions, stories, cautionary tales about young naive children with too much time on their hands. It's a total cliche. Reminds me of one case where somebody put "human chrysanthemum tea" (teacher's words) into someone else's waterbottle as a prank. I'm not condoning it, but at least that was remotely original.

Do people have nothing better to do than call the police repeatedly for no reason? I mean, if you're doing something WRONG, like prank-calling, you DON'T tell the police that you're doing something wrong, do you? That doesn't even make sense.

I won't touch on the end-of-composition tying-up-emergency-lines wasting-police-time part because it's obvious.

Anyway, today I saved a pen from exsanguination! It had had 3 foreign objects inserted into it and when removal was attempted, it started bleeding (it) out. (Exsanguination is normally called bleeding out but I've been on a song-title-quoting spree the past few days [e.g. "A papercut caused the person to bleed it out from the inside!"] so I'll call it bleeding it out! LOL) Of course, I had minimal experience in removal of foreign objects from ink tubes, so I removed the nib before pushing the foreign objects one step closer to the edge (that's a very lame song reference but never mind). Naturally, trying to push the objects out with a scope resulted in severe blood loss, with blue ink spilling all over three pieces of memo paper and staining the table. Luckily, fast action saved the pen from bleeding it out, and it still has rather good functionality.

Later I attempted the procedure on another pen and it had only moderate blood loss, due to the employment of the new technique of not removing the nib before pushing the foreign objects one step closer to the edge.

As usual, my hands are stained with ink.

On the school bus back, despite the shakiness and crowdedness of the vehicle (one biopsy needle broke because a P3 girl bumped into me), I managed to do 3 biopsies on 3 pens my friend lent me to biopsy. One of them was an LP (lumbar puncture).

Can you believe it? I did 3 BIOPSIES on a shaky bus!

XD.

Tests, Biopsies and Rants

2008-04-28T17:17:00.000+08:00

English compo was easy. Really easy. I did Question 3 and finished my 6 1/2-page composition in about 40 minutes.

I didn't even know I was capable of writing that fast while simultaneously maintaining a shred of legibility.

I can't write more for fear of other GEPers from other schools stumbling upon this blog and gaining more information. Suffice it to say that English compo today was EASY.

Chinese listening comprehension was a little bit harder, due to tricky questions. I mean, it's essentially comprehension with the passage broadcast in audio form instead of on paper, minus the free-points questions, so of course fewer people get full marks.

Oh, today the Stationery Hospital biopsied more pens. The procedure for pen biopsies is actually pretty simple. All that's needed is a pen and a mechanical pencil with lead inside. Oh, and paper or something to put the biopsy material on later.

1. Remove the ink tube from the pen.
2. Extend the lead of the mechanical pencil all the way.
3. Remove the stopper of the ink tube.
4. Insert the lead deeply into the ink tube. It should at least penetrate the gel blocking the ink from leaking out. If there is no more ink and the gel has sunk too deep, take out the nib from the other side and do it from there instead.
5. Close the ink tube and put it back into the pen.
6. Put the biopsy material back onto the paper by slowly withdrawing the lead.
7. Done!

Simple, isn't it? I specialise in it. All I need now is more patients.

Oh yeah, rant time. Supplementary class today was cancelled. Why? Because there was no 4.00 bus! Why? Because the bus service relies entirely on the mainstream exam schedule and will cancel its 4pm bus if mainstreamers aren't staying back!

That is just lame. I suppose I don't exist? The 4 GEP classes on the 6th floor just faded into nonexistence? Or maybe we're mirages created by the sun? Of course I'd have to rule out the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis, but then the bus service wouldn't exist either and neither would the mainstreamers.

As a result, supplementary was cancelled and we lost a valuable chance to gain additional knowledge in time for our examinations!

Why was supplementary cancelled because of MAINSTREAM EXAMS?! Do mainstream exams even affect us? Why should we lose an opportunity to improve our work because other people would be having examinations the next day? See, when I put it that way, it sounds stupid. But to the bus service that doesn't care about GEPers, it makes brilliant sense.

Don't you think they might at least BOTHER to check if OTHER PEOPLE would be inconvenienced by their decision to cancel the 4 o'clock bus?! And it's cancelled until the 9th, meaning that TOMORROW'S SUPPLEMENTARY is also in jeopardy! (There isn't any more supplementary from the next week onwards.) I am absolutely fed up with having to relinquish valuable opportunities to learn because the bus service is so psychologically myopic it can't look beyond the 9 classes out of 13 in the P6 level.

Newsflash! I exist! You didn't know that, did you? You thought this blog was computer-generated?

The 1.30 bus back home was incredibly crowded. I listened to my handphone FM radio a bit. Lots of static, though.

I'm getting hooked on listening to Channel 5 dramas over the radio.

Elation and Frustration

2008-04-25T18:51:00.001+08:00

MY INTERNET IS BACK UP.

Fine, it was only down for 20 minutes, but that was enough to make me tremble all over and to make my heart rate increase.

The patient (my computer) presented with sudden disconnection from MSN, persisting despite repeated troubleshooting. This was quickly followed by inability to load Wikipedia, Yahoo, Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com. For some reason, Google, STOMP and the Super-Simple Userbox Maker (don't ask me what that is) worked perfectly, if a little slow.

My father helped me install AVG (free antivirus software) and plugged in the LAN line. Soon, websites started slowly loading, and Wikipedia was up in no time!

AND NOW I CAN LOG IN TO MSN!

---

Anyway, the librarian in school today was SOSOSOSO infuriating. Marched into the Periwinkle Room in the library during our CCA to interrogate us on who had locked the door and why we were writing on the whiteboards without permission.

We didn't even know we needed permission to write on the whiteboards during our CCA!

Fine, one of the whiteboards was filled with non-CCA-related stuff (me acting House and scribbling 'symptoms' of Sports Day all over the board while ordering tests and doing a differential diagnosis - if you don't watch House you won't get it), while the other had some interview questions, but that wasn't even her main point. Her main point was, "WHY ARE YOU USING THE WHITEBOARDS WITHOUT PERMISSION?!?!"

So we erased the House stuff and the questions on the board (amidst my wailing of "WHY ARE YOU ERASING THAT?? I'M DOING A DIFFERENTIAL DIAGNOSIS!! ONLY I CAN TOUCH THE MARKERS!!!" and some assorted carrying-voice rants about "Do you have foolscap? You know, to write the QUESTIONS on? No? OK, I suppose...we'll have to erase them and...").

Then she interrogated us about who had locked the door.

You know what? "Short, sweet, grab a file." (Again, WATCH HOUSE SO YOU CAN GET ALL THE JOKES ON THIS BLOG.) Giving us the third degree about locking the door does nothing to help us and doesn't change the fact that the door was locked in the first place! Yeah, yeah, we get the point!

When she got out of the room, I started whispering about a stalker.

Then later she started combing the library, telling us to pack up at about 3.57 pm, including the room in which we were working - utterly OBLIVIOUS, as I would say in my oral exam, to the fact that WE WERE ALREADY PACKING UP! I started loudly instructing everyone else, in a deliberately carrying voice, "OKAY EVERYONE, CONTINUE PACKING UP JUST LIKE YOU WERE DOING BEFORE! HURRY UP!" It's a wonder she hasn't boxed my ears by now. I've been doing this to her (indirectly, subtly flaming her in a carrying voice) for a LONG TIME now.

Several post-oral P6 GEPers started streaming down from the 2nd floor of the library and agreed that THEY HATED this librarian. She had been stalking us throughout the WHOLE ENTIRE CCA. Even when we GOT OUT of the library she partly opened the door, just enough to stick her upper body out and stare at us.

Did we offend her in a past life? Don't we have any privacy around here? Why must we be repeatedly interrogated and told things we already know, one of the main reasons I joined the GEP, and STALKED OUTSIDE THE LIBRARY by some librarian whom we WISH was a stranger to us?! Honestly. I am fed up with this person.

LOL!!

2008-04-23T14:39:00.002+08:00

I was fiddling with my pen in school, so I dismantled it and started playing with the ink tube. I have found that one of the most effective methods to remove the nib in this case is to jam the whole thing into a stapler, so that's what I did.

Then the nib came out, and gallons of ink came flying out as well.

The glittery green ink formed a graceful parabola on my blouse, which in case you didn't realise is white. I sat through the rest of the talk (for about 2 minutes) while trying to clean up and then, while covering the affected portion of my uniform with a copy of Friedrich (convenient, since that's our English literature book for P6 and we were going to discuss it anyway, so it wouldn't seem unusual for me to be clutching it to my chest), asked the teacher whether I could visit the toilet. Permission granted.

I spent 20 minutes in the toilet trying to wash my blouse with it on.

Then my friend came to the toilet to ask me if I needed a new uniform and we went down to the General Office to get one. I got one WITHOUT a name tag (good, as it meant that I wasn't stealing someone else's identity!) and ran back up to the 6th floor for 15 minutes of class.

Then when I arrived back in class, I found that my waterbottle had leaked onto the floor in my absence, creating a small flood!

LOL.

I fiddled with my new handphone (Nokia 1650 (not a typo), temporary replacement for my disintegrated and irreparable 10th-birthday Nokia 6280 phone) on the way back, wearing the name-tag-less, clean blouse.

Nice day, eh?

Science lesson

2008-04-18T23:42:00.001+08:00

During Science lesson we went down to the Science Room to conduct an experiment. The experiment was called Soil Analysis. Basically we poured water through a funnel with soil inside filter paper within the funnel and timed how long it took for 20 ml to accumulate.

I was already rather irritable. We had a Science worksheet to do, worksheet 3, which was about three pages long. We had been given 5 minutes to read it. I muttered under my breath about how 5 minutes to read a 3-page worksheet wasn't necessary, at which point both groupmates sitting next to me suddenly barked at me to shut up at an irritatingly loud volume and intensity. I yelled right back, which they deserved. However, OBVIOUSLY for not wanting to be yelled at for next to no reason I deserved to be scolded loudly by the teacher! "What's the problem?" the teacher asked. I tried to explain, only to be cut off by the 2 groupmates who conveniently omitted all incriminating details from their version of the story. Naturally this was my fault! I was the agitated one despite the fact that they had started yelling at me first! The teacher greatly improved my state of mind by trying to emotionally manipulate me by saying that a few days ago she had heard that I made a lot of comments in Science last year (THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH MAKING FREAKING COMMENTS. HONESTLY.) and she had said that I had improved and "maybe she had spoken too fast" (a statement which she felt necessary to repeat several times to underscore its blatant truth). Obviously this put me in a brilliant mood and benefitted the situation unmeasurably.

The last straw came when somebody from another group had to walk between my group and his group, our tables I mean. I had lifted my stool up on 2 legs (in the Science Room there are no chairs, just stools) as I tend to do at this time. He had to pass by my seat and, rather than opening his golden mouth to utter the words "Excuse me", otherwise signalling me to move my chair or actually passing through the other passageway that was available and unobstructed, he chose to step on the stool, bringing my partially elevated stool down on all 4 legs rather abruptly and upsetting my sense of balance. He had completely ignored the fact that the mysterious entity bringing the chair up to forced bipedalism wasn't actually an invisible phantom but was an actual human being who had already been in a bad mood for almost the whole day so far.

Yelling at him, I earned wonderful heartwarming reprimands from the teacher. I retorted, "Yeah, he stepped on my chair and it's all my fault!"

"It's your fault how you react!"

Right. Which is the bigger offence, stepping on somebody's chair and nearly making that person fall, or reacting negatively when somebody does that?

I guess it's the latter, right? Common sense has changed so much nowadays.

I stomped over to his group's table and demanded an apology. Obviously this was a horrible offence and was responded to by the teacher marching over to me and summarily pointing a finger towards outside the Science Room. Somehow wordlessly commanding me to leave and not resolve the situation would help my mood and completely solve the problem.

Well, I didn't leave. Instead I repeated my statement to the offender. When he didn't respond, I added, "You stepped on my chair and apparently it's all my fault."

Then I went back to my seat.

Later, I periodically demanded an apology, which he just ignored. Every such demand from me was met by some sort of reprimand or admonishment from the teacher, as if wanting not to be completely ignored was worthy of the death penalty.

By the way, intermittently thumping me on the back or suddenly tapping my shoulder won't actually help improve my state of mind, it'll just exacerbate it.

Then he DENIED that he had stepped on my chair. Oh, that was really early for a "deny-everything" tactic. I hallucinated my chair suddenly falling! I hallucinated the footsteps that thumped heavily on the ground before ascending to my stool for some reason! "Think I have something? What's the differential diagnosis for unexplained hallucinations of a classmate being even more irritating than usual?"

Fortunately he apologised in the end. :)

I wish I could imitate people's voices better; then I could act this out perfectly.

homework

2008-04-17T16:58:00.002+08:00

Why, WHY is there so much homework today?!

It isn't even Friday, it's Thursday, the day BEFORE the day before the weekend.

Note the extra "before". It's pretty important.

Today

2008-04-15T16:52:00.003+08:00

The teacher during morning exercise today was just so infuriating.

She had previously announced that the routine would not move on to the next action unless everyone was doing it. So I thought, yeah, everyone better do it.

So basically most of the pupils were doing the exercise. One pupil from 6A wouldn't bend down to at least TRY to touch the floor so I (according to my brief survey of 6I and 6K, the 2 classes I can see very clearly from 6J, one of the few who actually physically touch the floor) was stuck touching the floor for an agonising 30 seconds.

That isn't my point, though.

Later, when we were bending down to touch the floor again, the teacher suddenly announced:

"GEP NOT DOING!"

I started ranting audibly. What do you mean the GEP was not doing? Am I hallucinating when I see the majority of P6 GEPers bending down to try to touch the floor? Oh no, I'm on LSD! Is blindness really that common nowadays? Or is it, like one third speaker on our debate team (not me) would say, just psychological myopia?

Meanwhile, the rest of the 4 classes had started buzzing with a frenzy of furious comments. "She doesn't need to make such a hurting comment!" "The GEP WAS doing what!" "GEP not doing YOUR HEAD!"

The GEP is conveniently ignored in times of ignorance (refer to my previous post) and is singled out for unnecessary, ridiculous, inaccurate scolding in times of absurdity, which is virtually all the time.

The wrath of the provoked GEPers had not dissipated by recess. Looking for a rantish convo, I asked around at the table of P6 GEP girls at which we were all sitting and elicited a variety of angry reactions, all furious and passionate.

I guess I was hallucinating this morning in the courtyard.

Music practice was our LAST REHEARSAL for the concert! In case I haven't written about this yet, our song is What I've Done, I'm playing the drums in front and the concert was SUPPOSED to be next Monday.

Of course somebody conveniently arranged an NYGH talk for that day and it was moved to recess next Tuesday.

At least we get a wider audience. (P5 and P6, as their recess is during that period too)

The pianist kept complaining that I was out of beat and informed me that "I suck" while campaigning for my removal as drummer.

For the record, he was the one who was out of beat, a fact testified to by many disinterested members of the audience.

I would play halfway and suddenly realise that it didn't sync with the piano any more. Of course at such fast speeds my drumming is more like spasming and my spasming is always accurate. I don't know why. But anyway he was out of beat. Lots of people agree.

We had a pretty good rehearsal marked by me periodically frowning at the piano because he had gone out of beat again. I always managed to resume however and spasmed through the whole song with no mistakes.

For some reason however he suddenly stopped playing before the end of the song once, forming a huge anticlimax because I hadn't rolled on the cymbal yet! This was a magnificent anticlimax.

During Maths supplementary we got back our CT2 papers and suffice it to say that apparently my great improvement in CT1 wasn't actually a good omen.

Our Maths leader went, "You don't look too good."

I snapped back, "Really?! I had thought I was smiling happily and brimming with radiance!"

I wish people would stop stating the obvious.

I went on the school bus after English supplementary and greeted everyone cheerily, my mood having recovered by then. An annoying P5 mainstream prefect told me, "Would you just shut up for once?"

I retorted, "Shall I call the police to report a zoo escapee?"

End of this post! Today was rather bipolar, I must say.

Assembly announcements

2008-04-15T16:43:00.000+08:00

You know what I would like to see? An acknowledgement that GEPers exist.

Stop bombarding us with announcements during assembly that apply only to the mainstream without telling us that they don't apply to us.

It's confusing and frustrating.

Yesterday, again, the teacher announced that supplementary was cancelled for today and tomorrow.

As usual, my heart lifted. As usual, all my previous disillusionment was laid to waste.

Then our teacher ran to the teacher (isn't that sentence confusing) and said something. After a pause, the teacher said:

"This does not apply to 6J to 6M, if your teacher has made alternative arrangements."

A brief nod towards our existence. Amended as an afterthought.

I'm not offended; I rarely am. In fact I don't even think I know what being offended feels like. But I'm frustrated. And annoyed.

Yet again, our existence has been ignored by a teacher. Yet again, my fellow classmates have defended this, because "she's a mainstream teacher and what if she doesn't know?"

Right, the activities of the last four classes aren't worth knowing about while GEP teachers are practically compelled to know when mainstream exams are! How else would they keep us quiet?

I hadn't realised I had faded into nonexistence. The last four classes at the far end of the courtyard are just mirages of the sun, yes? This is just ridiculous.

new librarian

2008-04-11T18:38:00.000+08:00

The new librarian is so unreasonable.

And patronising. And condescending. And insulting. And interfering.

I won't waste my time coming up with more adjectives to heap on this person, because then I would have to outlive the universe. The prospects of my lifespan being extended to such a degree are extremely slim, so I might as well not risk it.

It started when we were having Publications today (my CCA). Publications is held in the library and the teacher was incredibly late, so some of us went into the library.

Air-con, books and friends.

So we were sitting at a table, chatting softly, when this new librarian came over and announced, from the second storey of the library (not even having the courtesy to do anything more than softly shout at us from the staircase):

"Don't take up the table! Where's your work! Don't come here if you don't have work! Where's your work?!"

Dejected by this sudden invention of a new rule I had never heard of in my 3 years at NYPS, my friends and I went out of the library. After all, trying to convince unreasonable people not to be unreasonable is an exercise in futility.

Played at the Giant Steps for a while.

Then the teacher FINALLY came. So we tried to go into the library.

Now, there is no rule that people NOT from Publications cannot go into the library. And our CCA is also in the library.

So it follows that out of people going into the library at a given time, SOME might be from Publications and SOME might NOT. Simple logical principle? Apparently not.

The librarian stopped us and insisted on wasting our time by dividing us into two groups, for no reason whatsoever.

The dialogue went something like this:

L = Librarian
M = Me
O = Others

L: Why are you coming in? [WTFH IS THERE A RULE AGAINST GOING INTO THE LIBRARY?!]
M: [annoyed, loud and slightly 'duh' tone] We have a CCA here. [Why do we even need to explain ourselves to you?! Again, you aren't empowered to throw us out of the library simply because you don't know why we're here. Your ignorance is your business.]
L: What CCA? [Busybody. Anyway as librarian PLEASE don't tell me you don't know what CCAs are being held in the library every Friday at 2 pm.]
O: [smattering of answers] Publications.
M: [same tone, intensified, even louder and more annoyed] Publications!
O: [one member, to me] Do you want to gain admittance or not? [Our gaining admittance to an area of the school dedicated to promoting and upholding the age-old virtue of the love of reading is hardly dependent upon our tone of answering one person's question, is it?]
L: Is everyone here from Publications? [yeah, like THAT matters. WTFH?]
O: [smatterings] Yes. No. I'm not. [etc]
M: [even more annoyed] No!
L: [divides us into 2 groups] You, go in first. You wait. OK, now you go in.

Point, ma'am? As Primary 6 students, we really aren't such idiots that we require you to help us enter the library without tripping on each other's feet. We are perfectly capable of gross motor skills that most people learn in their first few years of life (such as, I don't know, WALKING?!). And why must you give us the third degree before you deign to remember that we have a CCA to go to and therefore must not wait till the heat death of the universe to enter the library?

Or how about this? There is NO rule against entering the library without a CCA, a teacher's note and consent from the King signed in triplicate. So all that interrogation was to establish...what? That we can't set foot on your precious territory without having a valid reason?

I feel like saying WTF but am forcing myself to append the H (what the FEI HUA?). This is ridiculous. Is it ANY OF YOUR BUSINESS what CCA we are in? Is it even RELEVANT to the issue at hand? Is it IMPORTANT enough to justify wasting 2 minutes of our time blocking the library doorway, especially when we have already been delayed by the teacher's lateness?

Just to be fair, I'm going to try to find the purpose of all this interference.

Oh, dear! Purpose not found!

So for the rest of the day, throughout our ENTIRE CCA LESSON, this overbearing librarian constantly disturbed, interrupted and annoyed us.

DURING OUR CCA TIME, when we were getting our FOOLSCAP in preparation for an actual piece of WORK, she stopped us to remind us to arrange our bags properly, with the thinly veiled threat that otherwise, she would have to get the school to "move our bags to the canteen".

Good going there! Waste our time AND violate our property rights at the same time! And simultaneously violate our privacy! Oh yeah, and expose our property to theft in the mostly empty canteen!

Then she insisted that to use the computers upstairs on the second floor of the library, we had to give her either our EZ-link cards OR our library cards.

All perfectly fine, apart from the part where we had the teacher's permission, owing to our task being ACTUAL CCA WORK and all.

When the CCA ended, 5 minutes early, we went outside to find that they HAD rearranged our bags. My 2 bags (one my main school bag, the other one of those supermarket environmentally friendly cloth shopping bags) had been separated, conveniently put the furthest distance possible from each other. I would have thought that the fact that my 2 bags were placed in close proximity to each other would have clued her in to the fact that a shopping bag containing exactly 1 file and a few sheets of paper wasn't exactly a standalone school bag.

Seriously, OUR BAGS WERE NOT AFFECTING ANYONE. All passages were perfectly clear, nobody's path was being obstructed, and nobody would be moronic enough to trip over a huge cluster of bags sitting in front of the shelves in front of the library. The only thing "offended" (I HATE that word) was her sense of aesthetics. Apparently her artistic sense of style supersedes our property and privacy rights, as well as our convenience.

Got to go now. Bye!

Sports Day

2008-04-04T20:13:00.002+08:00

Blue House came first. Backwards.

It started with the teachers rickrolling us by playing Never Gonna Give You Up loudly from the radio/whatever in front. Having read xkcd and been rickrolled twice, I started laughing hysterically and tried in vain to explain this to assorted friends asking me "what was wrong with them playing that song".

I kept pestering one of my friends to open her bag of seaweed for us to EAT, but this was only fulfilled much later - good for us, because it meant that it didn't get squandered by the hungry mouths of the P6 GEP girls too fast.

Various sports events and announcements of results of completed events followed.

Loud cheering and repeated commands to "scream as loud as you can" resulted in me nearly vomiting several times (you know, when you scream too loud). I compensated for this by waving the blue pom-pom frantically and announcing our placing in various races loudly.

Throughout Sports Day *someone* kept insisting that she go over to Yellow House!

I wonder why...:D

Blue House contestants kept coming third at first. Apparently third-speaker-ishness is contagious, but we never get third for debates! D:

Now let me announce our points...

*drumroll* 4140 points!

A lot, you say? WELL RED HOUSE (the winning house) HAD 5090!

Somewhere near the end, I didn't really look at their points at the actual end of Sports Day.

I'm quite sure we had 4140 though, the number was reddish. Sorry, I'm synesthetic. I also distinctly remember how our points looked on the scoreboard.

OH WAIT STOP! All the different times I looked at the scoreboard are getting mixed up in my head and now I don't know which image is the final one. AAAAAA

Okay, here are the assorted photographs of the scoreboard in my head:

1. 1900 points. Beginning of Sports Day
2. 3640 points
3. 4140 points (unsure)

I'm pretty sure it's #3 but the trouble is that's one of my more UNCLEAR memories. The number WAS reddish, however. Fits 4140 almost perfectly.

I love my memory. Preserves incidents perfectly for blogging, remembers random details practically flawlessly and takes snapshots of random scenes like a camera - yet forgets about my homework.

LOL.

Okay, g2g. Too much HOMEWORK.

assorted annoyances

2008-03-31T19:42:00.001+08:00

I will skip the boring parts!

During assembly the teacher reprimanded us for going into the staffroom in the morning. It was exam season, and they wanted some privacy. ESPECIALLY, she said (nicely dodging the whole huge GEP-mainstream issue!), the 6JKLM (what kind of grammatical construction is that?!).

Forgive us if we don't know about the mainstream exam season, will you?!

Our Dear Responsible AV Monitor (DRAVM) left the AV equipment on ALL FREAKING WEEKEND.

We told the teachers about this, and surprisingly the reprimand was very light, despite the huge electricity bills that had been incurred in the process. I was also told not to be so sarcastic (in describing them as DRAVM).

It seems to me that if they're gonna do something affecting the WHOLE CLASS like that (if the equipment spoils the class suffers, and we were in danger of COP deduction), they should expect repercussions from the WHOLE CLASS.

We had photo-taking in the morning. As a result our recess was delayed.

So when we went down to the canteen for our late recess, I tried to buy something from the bookshop - only to find that they only served us during recess!

Yeah, we're nonexistent the rest of the time, aren't we? "It's your business if we have an extension!" That would be true if it weren't school activities that necessitated that extension in the first place! The school bookshop obviously cares less about the genuine needs of its actual customers than it does about following an arbitrary time limit to the letter!

So, I ran around flaming the bookshop loudly. Then I went up!

Sat through the rest of school.

After buying my lunch (garlic bread from Western stall), I ran to 6K to get snacks for the bus (I'M NOT ADVERTISING, this is an integral part of my story!). They couldn't sell me anything because they were counting money so I ran back.

Unfortunately I fell down and crumpled to the floor in a heap.

Although I didn't know it then, I had sprained my ankle and hobbled back to 6J in intense pain, just in time for supplementary. I endured this agony while walking down to the Science Lab (I AM ON THE SIXTH FLOOR) and for another thirty minutes while my Science teacher was explaining about forces, gravity etc. Then just before the start of an experiment, I limped (holding an imaginary cane like House) to the teacher and asked her:

"Can I go to the sickbay? I think I sprained my ankle."

She asked me whether it was 'very serious'. I replied that I was not medically qualified to make that decision.

Nice one.

I took the lift down to the sickbay.

When I arrived there a teacher (?) gave me an ice pack for my ankle (all the dialogue here is actually in Chinese but not everyone's computers can render that).

She told me that somebody else would be around in a while.

Next to me was the nurse (?) talking to a P6 mainstream boy about...I don't know, bones? Fighting? The subject changed really quickly. I wasn't eavesdropping, they were right next to me!

I waited for 15 minutes for someone to realise my existence, singing in Chinese "OH WHEN IS SOMEONE GOING TO COME" and staring at people having PE lessons in the basketball court below. My thoughts wandered. I waited.

Eventually the boy left and the nurse turned to me. I explained in Chinese that I had sprained my ankle. She told me to...wait.

Okay. I waited. Soon they forgot all about my existence again and I was reduced to singing softly and staring at the PE students out of the window.

Then 2 friends from 6J came down to get me because the Chinese teacher had started her lesson and if I was well enough I could go. Assorted struggles about how to get up and whether in fact I COULD get up followed, and in the end I partially hopped and partially leaned on them (they were more like carrying me actually but I was hopping on my good leg as well) into the lift.

Chinese oral lesson followed.

Teacher kindly offered to lend me her slippers (which happened to fit exactly!) so I, along with my friends who were kindly (hmm don't have a thesaurus with me now, so I'll have to repeat the word I used a line above) carrying my main bag for me, and also supporting me physically or something (how do I describe it?)

Got into the lift (YOU CANNOT POSSIBLY EXPECT ME TO HOBBLE DOWN 6 FLOORS WITH A SPRAINED ANKLE) with my friends. A 6Ier, also with a sprained ankle, got in with her friends doing the same.

Teacher got in around 4th floor and ORDERED THOSE WHO WEREN'T INJURED TO GET OUT OF THE LIFT.

I was furious. Yeah, I'll carry my 6kg bags myself, sure. I'll just IGNORE my sprained ankle and THE COMPLETE LACK OF PHYSICAL SUPPORT WHATSOEVER and hobble determinedly to my school bus, spending 2 minutes trying to get up when I fall WITHOUT howling in agony. It's not like they were getting a free ride. THEY WERE HELPING. Shouldn't such acts of altruism be encouraged, not squelched?! And why can't that teacher spare a thought for the fact that maybe someone with a sprained ankle isn't that good at balancing and carrying heavy stuff at the same time WITHOUT falling over?! MAYBE, just MAYBE, such people would appreciate a little help from friends, respected, trusted and loved (don't be sick please) individuals, rather than the aforementioned friends being thrown out of the lift (Chinese is so much more expressive: "chased out of the lift" or "[ordered to] roll eggs out of the lift") because they weren't actually injured? Let's all go injure ourselves, THEN we can help our friends!

Yeah, yeah, I'm one to talk about insensitivity, but I think that was just plain ridiculous.

Let me repeat that: RIDICULOUS.

Ordering people who are altruistically helping their injured friends (this happened to both the 6Ier and I) NOT to help their friends simply because they aren't injured is so...logical.

Isn't it precisely because they aren't injured that they're able to help?!

You can't expect me to hop down the stairs leaning on my friends, can I?

Given that I'm on the, oh I don't know, 6TH FLOOR and all.

Anyway, I made it without collapsing (but met my friends at the 2nd floor; they helped me to the staffroom) and got to the staffroom and borrowed my kind teacher's slippers.

THEY FIT.

So basically I was carrying two 6kg bags, one containing my socks and shoes, and hobbling to the school buses.

Got on just in time, where various people inquired about my ankle.

Got home, where my sister furnished me with a cane and a stethoscope so I could play Dr. House! XD

Sigh, if you don't watch House you won't get it. :(

WATCH HOUSE!!!!!

Okay, I'm getting off-track here.

Anyway tomorrow I'm to wear an ankle brace AND my OWN black slippers. I'll be bringing my teacher's slippers back and returning them to her (this I MUST NOT forget; that would be seriously irresponsible)

I wonder how I'll walk.

Oh, I'll probably be excused from morning exercise and PE tomorrow.

Sad, I LIKE morning exercise and PE. (You HAVE to admit it, this year's morning exercise is FAR better than last year's, or the year before's.)

Stupid clumsy me.

LOL.

change the truth by lying

2008-03-21T14:08:00.003+08:00

According to the powers that be, or at least one manifestation of them, in the foreseeable future I will be crying acid tears, suffering from internal bleeding and who knows what else they've prophesied for me.

"I believe that words have power. Whatever you say changes your mindset and changes your body. If you think that you're going to have cancer, your cells will deviate to that state and you will, eventually, get cancer [don't blame it on God]. If you listen to Beautiful Girls too much (suicidal... suicidal.. when you say it's oooh-verrr) you'll become suicidal, and sooner or later commit suicide."

Have we invented a new cure for cancer? Just think 20 times a day, as fervently as you can, "My cancer is over, my cancer is over," and ta-da! You're cured!

How many bestselling books debunking the tabula rasa theory (I have at least one) does it take before people accept that, guess what, our minds aren't blank slates that blindly accept whatever they are told through whatever medium?!

Believe it or not, we are capable of independent thought. We don't just run off to the kitchen, grab a pair of scissors and slash our wrists because of listening to Beautiful Girls.

It takes external factors to trigger something as serious as that. Such as something that's actually in your freaking life.

Yes, we are children, we can't POSSIBLY experience sadness or regret or any of those pesky emotions that hit you on your 18th birthday. Is this the same old argument again?

Let's just bottle things up inside ourselves until we explode and then we'll be as good as new. On the other hand, expressing your feelings and relieving yourselves of an emotional burden triggers suicide.

Am I breaking new scientific territory when I say that bottling things up may be more negative than acknowledging the presence of your emotions and finding ways to deal with them?

The harmful effects of repression have been acknowledged since Freud.

And, guess what? Haven't you found anything suspicious on my blog, since you peruse it so frequently? How about blatantly positive posts being followed by "I am bleeding inside"?

Here's a very subtle clue: IT'S PART OF THE FREAKING BLOGSKIN.

Honestly.

Did you really think I ended every post with that?

Many adults seem to be under the illusion that children's lives are totally positive and a bed of roses without the thorns.

Hence, when faced with the MCQ question:

A child is posting about negative things that happen in his/her life. Cause?

Something negative has happened in his/her life and he/she is expressing emotions.
Something negative has happened in his/her life and he/she is letting it out.
Something negative has happened in his/her life and he/she can't handle it.

They choose an option 4: "He/she is making things up out of nowhere and is actually feeling totally positive, so all this facade of negativity will lead to his/her life actually becoming negative! OH NO! WE MUST STOP THIS!!!!"

Guess what? Our emotions are suppressed at home. Our emotions are suppressed in school.

Our emotions are also suppressed online.

I guess we're just one step away from becoming robots with a smiley face permanently stuck onto our CPU.

When we are children, we must smile happily and suppress our tear duct and we can let it all out and emo all we want on our 18th birthday.

Has no psychologist ever covered the harmful effects of this?

All I can say is, I will blog about things that happen in my life, POSITIVE or NEGATIVE, and no misguided 17th-century amateur armchair child psychologist is going to stop me.

The above is not a personal attack. It is a reference to the general trend of ageism.

Paradoxically, your tirade about positivity has triggered a wave of negativity across the P6 GEP blogosphere.

My heart is racing, my whole body is trembling, and I'm having difficulty breathing.

Thanks, you gave my inner third speaker its first real practice in months.

But according to you, my inner third speaker doesn't exist.

Never mind, I hallucinated it all. All my posts on my whole entire blog are totally fake and are the product of a brain chemical imbalance.

Good luck trying to convince me of that.

Since school reopened - a consolidation

2008-03-20T16:20:00.004+08:00

I have been MIA for the whole holidays and most of T2W1 as well. So here is a consolidation of what has happened since school reopened.

First day of school - changed seating arrangements. New group is quite good (teacher said we would be very strong at Chinese 'cos of our members) but I keep inadvertently walking to the wrong side of the classroom to go to my old group instead.

The rest is not in order.

Wednesday was our Science test and it was quite easy! Despite the multitude of screaming pupils during the exam surrounding us on all sides (actually not as we're on the 6th floor where GEPers dominate), I managed to finish on time and even had time to check! :D

I mean, considering the fact that my Science scores are generally *vastly below average* (euphemism for "1 mark above baseline") the fact that this test was easy was great. Apart for one or two questions where I was hovering on the brink of indecision (does that make any sense or is it incoherent?) the rest was incredibly simple. Isn't it funny that Science tests should get easier when I move one level up?

In fact this year I've been experiencing an upwards trend in terms of results - from high-20s last year to 39/50 for Maths, 54/60 (around there) for Chinese and 37/40 for English. Science was easy and SS isn't here yet.

However, Wednesday and Thursday were also our sports heats (actually today wasn't 'cos it rained). On Wednesday, they conveniently moved aside a GEP exam just for their sports heats! Putting the exam AFTER RECESS (i.e. after our heats) is blatantly unfair to us as by that time all our energy is spent running around the track! Another example of blatantly ignoring the needs of people who happen to fall outside the group of the people known as the "mainstream"! They seem to have forgotten that this is our PSLE year, also known as The Last Year We Have a Chance to Redeem Our Results for DSA. So sabotaging our performance like this doesn't really aid the cause all those assembly DSA talks are trying to promote. If it were a mainstream exam they would never dare do that.

And the canteen is only allowed to sell plain water to students during "school time" except recess and after school. Even in obvious cases, like say after the sports heats when we had just run our 400m run which was why I wanted something other than boring stupid plain water! Is there any way to justify this rule whatsoever? Something that a three-year-old incoherent stuttering n00bish third speaker couldn't rebut?

I was nominated for 400m but wasn't selected owing to the fact that I came 12th...out of 12. I responded, "Congratulate me! I was last!"

Spent the rest of Sports Heats time sitting in the dance room learning cheers and getting yelled at (not me personally but the whole blue house in the room could hear it because it was so loud) in a high-pitched nasal voice.

Today it rained and we went up to class early, about 15 min before it actually started raining. Our English teacher predicted it and told us to go up and it was accurate!

Randomly web-surfing now.

Next post will talk about overseas trip, but this is about since school reopened.

Overreacting again, the sheep chorus

2008-03-06T22:54:00.001+08:00

My mother is now furiously banging doors and slamming cupboards and ranting about The High Spirit of Altruism and Sharing, for the simple reason that when I was hungry and cold and my sister had eaten, it actually took some persuasion to give my last McWing to her despite my hunger. For persuasion, read outright forcing.

So she's saddened because she has a daughter like me. Well, forgive me for not being the robot-sheep hybrid you need. I could have asked for one more packet? Forgive me if my bodily need for sustenance doesn't fit nicely into the 4 times table. I guess it was an unforgivable sin not to incorporate McDonalds packet servings into my circadian rhythm, wasn't it?

Like her needs supersede mine. My sister had freaking eaten. She had voluntarily shared her fries. Then, after altruistically contributing to society, my mother started telling her that I would give her a McWing. She did this repeatedly, despite my protests.

In hindsight it was stupid to give in. Firstly, it left me hungry. Secondly, it went completely unnoticed and the incessant ranting, moralising and emotional manipulation continued. Talk about selective hearing.

I guess all I can say is that it's completely my fault that I chose not to ignore my physical need for food. I am even more culpable for not being a sedated sheep on opiates. Sorry.

Fire drill day

2008-03-05T14:50:00.002+08:00

Today was a VERY eventful day.

The fire drill came in the middle of Maths. A certain person was freezing like Vista running on 0.5 GB of RAM when the teacher called him to ask for a perfectly simple formula, that of the area of the triangle (bear in mind that this is Primary 6), wasting all our time. I was ranting on my Maths notebook about this (isn't bh/2 a perfectly simple formula?!?!) Anyway, the teacher had listed 2 separate ways to write the formula (lb/2 and 1/2*bh) and was going to tell us why the former wasn't recommended when the fire alarm rang.

We weren't sure whether it was a real fire or just a drill (if it was a real fire we were glad we were on the 6th floor, for the teacher said it was in the canteen, which is on the 1st floor).

Stampeding down the stairs and colliding with lots of other P6s and P5s (everybody else was still on some other floor 'cos the P6s and P5s inhabit the 5th and 6th floors), 6J quickly ran to the basketball court in two lines.

We ran down the courtyard steps and sat, talking softly, in the basketball court.

The teacher did a head count of the classes.

Once we had looked into the canteen from the basketball court and confirmed that there was no fire, we got bored and started chatting. Of course this earned us reprimands from the teachers, who either wanted to hear the other teachers exhaustively enumerating the classes from the microphone stand, or didn't know that we had realised it wasn't a real fire.

Just in case some people hadn't noticed the utter lack of any flames whatsoever in the canteen (*makes lame jokes about flaming*), the teachers told us twice that it was only a drill, and complimented us on our quick response. Then they grabbed that opportunity to tell us that the P2s were the most actively participating level for temperature taking earlier that year (on Valentine's Day). Not new enough to the school to be utterly confused and "still settling in", yet not old enough to be jaded and unenthusiastic, I thought.

On a vaguely related note, my first portfolio (about the GEP) was dismissed as "ranting" by the teacher without any proof. My inner third speaker immediately heeded the call of duty and started truly ranting mentally about how just because I know how to use emotions and rhetoric doesn't mean I'm ranting. Oh well.

Lollish day.