A Dreamer's Diary

Finally, two exams down. Hopefully, I won't need to re-take the last one. My brain feels like fried already....On the up side, firstly, I can use whatever I learned for my fanfics ( I am quite sure this is not the reasons people take language exams, but as a side benefit....). Secondly, I am on my downtime right now, and it means more time for things like this neglected journal.

Of course, me being me, I have already planned a lot of other activities. Hopefully, it still means that I will really finish all my forgotten fanfics and still have time for my journals. So far, there are museum tour coupled with a walk along Singapore river for tomorrow, mid autumn celebration with my friend on Friday, and flea market hunting on Saturday...

I really, really loved this week => Especially since I also finally visited the Hush Puppies warehouse sale yesterday, and there really are a lot of nice clothes there! Hush Puppies on Giordano's price!

Additionally, the book I reserved finally came yesterday. Now, I do love all Jeffery Deaver's stories, but Lincoln Rhyme and Kathryn Dance are so far my favorites =>

On the down side, I finally exchanged my last MRT card this morning. Exchanging the card itself is not bad. I already did so for my other cards. Unfortunately, this card was kind of hiding itself on my drawer, and since I was quite busy lately, I just can change it today. Which is, of course, the last day to do so. Wow, the queue...it was about fifty people long, and never came shorter. One person went away, another came. It took me forty five minutes on the line. Fortunately, I brought some books with me =>

Time is slipping from my fingers...again...

I don't understand how it can be. I supposed to have quite a lot of spare time this month. Maybe it is because I am the type who lined up ten activities for every spare hour I have...

It seems to me that there are simply a lot of things that I should have done or should do soon and not enough hours in a day...

Right. I want to go to graduate school and they said it is an awfully needed skill there, time management is. Still...

And I am not even a workaholic!

Why on earth my friends got time to fool around and go here and there, and I have to count every hour that I have?

So, here I think that my English is good enough. And no, I am not saying this because I am conceited. I know what I know and what I don't know, and while I definitely am not Hemingway, I am not totally awful either.

The problem is, lately I haven't had a chance to really practice a good English. Meeting people who will understand what you said even if your tenses are a mess is nice on that it is easy to communicate. On the down side, though, nobody will tell you that yes, you are wrong, it should not be like that. Moreover, I have no time for writing lately, which is usually a good source of learning for me.

Anyway, I was reading IELTS book this afternoon, and realized that oh no, I didn't know that used of this tenses or that tenses....I can safely foresee awfully lot of time typing like mad after this, using stories for exercising my English...

Then since apparently one blow is not enough, I have to put the speaking CD into my CDRom player. I totally, totally wish I can speak with either US's or UK's accent.....Well, at least for this one, I have had years to come to term that yes, my accent, while not mess up, is not beautiful at all....=<

But this also made me think about another matter. When will we finish learning something? Take English as example. What is the measure of yes, I finally conquered the language?

One common benchmark is when one can communicate using it. But, there is simple communication, like asking people whether they have eaten or not and so on, and more complicated communication, like explaining some obscure theory to the experts of said theory. Also, there is accent, which is quite hard to learn.

Then I have heard that if you can read a book on that language, then yes, you have mastered it. But language is not a fix thing ( except maybe dead language like latin, but don't let me start on it. It is hell to learn and I don't even know why I want to...), it has new words every day or week. Besides, the number of words on a language can be so gigantic, that I heard even authors still find dictionary helpfull. Not to mention, words with the same meaning can have subtle nuances that differentiate them.

Then said that you have perfected it all. There were still idioms, and phrases, and slangs. It seems like by that definition, mastery of a language is a daydream....

Then how about other things? Like math or computer or art? Is that really a point when one can stop learning and say, yes, I already know all that are to know?

I think that the phrase "there is sky above sky" is not only applied to people....

A few days ago, finally clearing my main email's mailbox, I found a nifty feature of Yahoo, where I could provide some keywords and had them sorted my emails automatically accordingly into corresponding folders. Since I was fond of subscribing to this and that and really, only a handful of my emails were actually important or useful, I was happily arranged for whatever emails I would likely want to be put into some folders. I devided this folders by their categories or sender.

Unfortunately, I was also quite good at forgetting whatever things I had done. Why, only this morning, with eyes half opened, I put my frozen strudel to the table instead of the plate on microwave. So when I opened my email account again, I kind of having this "huh?" word popped up on my head.

Some of the emails I would like to keep were daily ones. Every day, I would automatically received one of each. Yet when I opened my mailbox, there was none!

For a few moment, I was surprised and a bit worried. That was, until I realized: I had ordered them to be put automatically into the their respective folders. I checked out the folders, and yes, there they were, phew.

Memo to self: I should note down what changed I had done. Problem with this approach was, I often forgot to read the note...

So, another day on my life...studying, not working, because this is weekend, getting the stress, playing some brain game, getting more stress, studying, reading fanfictions, studying again...I can write a book that will put everybody to sleep with my life as the plot...

I was studying, when I couldn't ignore the grumble on my stomach any longer. Apparently, two sausages and a handful of wedges on the morning couldn't last me until dinner...So, ransacking my cupboard it was.

Unfortunately, I was on the low end of snacks and food supplies. The truth is, I plan on going out tonight for repleneshing them. So after a few minutes perushing my half empty cupboard, I saw the waffles.

A couple of them will tide me over until dinner without making me lost my appetide for said dinner. They are easy to prepare, just pop them into microwave, and they taste good. More importantly, they are there.

Furthermore, I had all of the accompanying tidbits. Which led me to have one of my favorite breakfast for tea time...waffle with strawbery and blueberry, topped by mapple syrup =>

On the brighter side, it fullfilling my blueberries quota for the day. I do love the little blue things, but a frozen one being defrost is not high on my list...

1. Not all that seems bad at first will really be bad, just not all that seems good at the beginning will really be good.

2. Sometimes, it depends on pure luck

3. Sometime you had to take a chance

4. The more fact you know, or in this case tiles opened, the easier it is to determine about the case (which remaining tiles are bomb)

5. One small lmistakes can bring a downfall

Queueing. A simple word, not so simple of an act. I had previously thought that my day of striving for place on public transportation had came to an end. Turned out I was wrong.

I am not a stranger to free for all system. Anybody who had ever boarded Pakuan Train at rush hour will know. Thanks to it, I can even step into the train from about fifty centimetres below without hold on to any hand rail. It is, to put it simply, an art.

You could wait in one place for half an hour and then the door was opened a few steps beside you and suddenly people who just arrived would get on first and get the seats. Nobody would want to let anybody else to board first, be it young or old.

This free for all for was not owned exclusively by Pakuan's passengers. Even now, I had experienced being cut in line by about anybody and everybody, from elementary school boy, young girl, working man, middle age woman to a granpa, believe it or not.

The worse was bus stop, since you can't know where exactly the bus will indeed stop, hence the same problem as Pakuan. But more or more I realized that there's more to free for all method than simply cutting line and obstructing others.

Not queueing, turned out, was an exercise in cooperation as well!

The other day I was waiting for a bus. It was a long, annoying wait under the drizzle. I was waiting behind this man, about twenty something. The bus came, everybody fougth to board it and this man didn't move.

Maybe he was too kind or too polite. Maybe he never experienced this "me first" kind of queueing, but people kept on cutting line in front of him and he could do nothing. Both him and me ended up waiting for the next bus.

So yes, even if it was free for all, fighting to board, it needs cooperation. If the person in front of you slow or unused to do it, than no matter how fast you are, chance are you won't be able to board as well!

These are a really, really belated entries, but I put them on nevertheless. Since I already grouping another Saturday Stroll on wordpress, so this one will be put there as well : pleiades.wordpress.com.

Allergy and me is kind of old time friends. I have allergies to a lot of things: dust, prawn, chocolate, alcohol, metal, etc, etc. But this kind of allergy, I only had it one other time, when I was eighteen years old and nearing my final exam.

I love math, very very much so. I also am quite chummy with physics. But I hate biology and don't even ask me about chemistry. In fact, the first time this happened, it was chemistry allergy. Yup, you read it right.

At first I suspected a cold. I was studying and suddenly my stomach felt like a ship in the middle of storm. My head ache and I felt rather cold.

With the final looming, I couldn't afford to get sick. So reluctantly, I closed my book and decided to take half an hour rest. Amazingly, after about five minutes, I felt fine, totally fine. So I took up with my study again and promptly wanted to throw up.

It was repeated for a few times. Everytimes I tried to study, I wanted to throw up. So yes, I decided that it was an allergy allright, to chemistry.

Of course, today's one is not with chemistry. It was GRE. My stomach had been queasy for a few days, but I had suspected the food. It was just this afternoon that I realized it was indeed my GRE that caused it.

Hence the time to write this journal. I had abandoned it for quite long time, I know, so I planned to put some belated entries. They are quite late, I know, but still, better late than never, right? =>

I should post this one on Friday, but due to some annoying cold....

There's a hush puppies' warehouse sale on Suntec from Friday to today. I had planned to go at Friday actually, then since I felt a bit under weather, I toyed with the idea of going at Saturday instead.

Well,I am glad I sticked to my original plan, dizzy head or not! The sale began at 10 a.m and I reached there about 7 p.m Friday to find that a lot of nice shoes already sold out!

They had this crazy price of nine dollars for some shoes without boxes. Maybe it was the last season's mode...but in my opinion shoes' style always came back again and again. Besides, some style like pantofel can't ever go wrong...Moreover, I am not a fashion follower anyway. In fact, I rather not following a trend if it ended up with me wearing the same thing as twenty other people at the room...

Anyway, they also had 19, 29, 39 and I thought the most expensive is 39 or 49 dollars shoes, which a bargain, really, since I never found one hush's shoes that costed least than 50 or 60 dollars.

Better yet, my casual sandals' age are almost over...so the timing can't be better for me..I seems to work them to death...=

My sicknesses are funny in they are always the same things over and over: cold, throat infection, gastric problems or alergic. Of course, there's always the odd sicknesses, like chicken pox when I was five, but mostly it is always on of those four. In the up side, it made me quite good at always keeping some necessary medicines, both at home and office, for the 'first aid'.

This weekend I contracted the one I hate the most: throat infection. It made me dizzy, gave me runny nose, hold my voice hostage and changed my brain into feathers. Words are not enough to describe how much I hate it.

So I tried medicine. I slept earlier and took a nap. I wore jacket and set the air con at higher temperature. I also drank like crazy, litres and litres in a day. The result: today my voice back a bit and my head had been upgraded from feathers to sponge....

In short, I am totally miserable.

Yet, this afternoon, I got a nice surprise. It is raining, and rather heavily at that.

Why this is a nice surprise? Because Singapore had been hot, hot and hot lately. My friend told me that it is normal, since this is a hot season and at night my bedroom does have AC, but still...I am more of a polar bear than camel type, I am afraid.

So rain is very, very welcome. And right now, with the rain singing outside and my laptop playing Traumerai over and over, I can almost forget that I am miserable...Almost.

Time. The word is a temptation, I swear. Sometimes, it feels so easy to just hold back my plans for one more year. That way, I will have more time studying, more exams to take. Still, it will mean putting my life in stasis for one more year, isn't it?

I once read a part of Little House on the Prairie, where they wanted to send Mary to a school for the blind. They had saved and waited and then just when they almost really do it, there's some disaster or others and their saving was kind of wiped out. They ended up sold one of their cattle, because they decided that whatever happened it would be that year.

Sometimes, tomorrow, or next year, or next month feels so tempting. Yet, it doesn't mean that tomorrow or whatever won't have its' own additional hurdles, isn't it?

So yes, maybe putting a time limit and sticking to it no matter what happened is the best way. Because honest, I guess there will never be the best time for doing something. You will always have something else that you had to do as well.

Just watch the cold mountain movie and promptly became blue...I felt like crying. Oh, and I also felt so annoyed. I mean, if people can kill others indiscriminately for a trivial reason like that they are different, is homo sapiens really a correct name for human? Considering that homo actually means wise.

It's also very beautiful how they pictured the war and the killings on winter and changed the scenery to summer or spring for the end.

I read another story that utilized season like that once, where the author used winter to emphazise stasis and days and nights blending into one big constants time span. Then spring came and with it life began a new.

It really made me really, really want to see the four seasons...Unfortunately, travelling is expensive and I sincerely doubted that visiting four seasons countries for a few days or a week will be enough to capture what depicted on those stories: desperation and long nights of winter, the welcome of spring, etc.

Every morning I opened some news websites or newspapers, there are always some articles about recession.

It scares me, to be honest. All the news about people losing their saving, their home, their jobs. At the beginning, like any other news, it felt rather far away, something that happened to people you don't know, in a place far, far away. Then the things started to hit close.

One of my friend, her company had layed off a few people. My other acquintance just lost her job. Yet still, the other had friends who had been layed off. It is kind of everywhere.

Then there's the discounts. Discount, especially fifty to seventy percent, is really nice for girls, me including. That's the clothes you wanted but previously way too expensive for your wallet that suddenly fell inside your budget. Then there's your favorite cosmetics that's suddenly you can buy not only the night cream but also the serum.

Unfortunately, big discount is also a sign of another thing: difficult time. If a lot of stores tried their best to get rid of their inventory in exchange of more smaller but immediate cash, you know there is troubles in economy (although it is hard for anybody to miss it this time, what with the news and all).

Still, there's a surreal feeling on the air. I still found myself queueing for quite long in the book stores, with about fifty people in front of me carrying a minimum of three books in average. People still buying the expensive things and sometimes in huge amount.

Of course, in one hand, it is good for the economy. People shopping means that there will be money on the market, some jobs lost was prevented, etc, etc. In other hand, it made me wondered whether the news about recession world wide are true...

So today is Valentine day. A nice celebration in principle, if not always in act.

Don't take me wrong, I am not bitter because I am single. Being single has its own perks, you know. I also am quite a romantic sometimes and used to made chocolate myself for my friends on Valentine.

It is the way this day was celebrated. I think that Valentine in many way had became another Christmas, with many adverstisement and reasons to spend money. It became more you had to give than you want to give. And here I thought, that since love is a gift freely given, than the act conveying said love is also not compulsory.

I wandered around yesterday after work. A small bouquet of flower turn out to be the same cost as one of my shirt. A big and quite pretty one will cost more than one year of my magazine subscription. Of course, to be fair, the flowers are quite nice, and if one is the type who like flowers, of course a nice bouquet will be very much appreciated.

Yet, I also had been the receiving ears of some people grumbling about the need to buy flowers, chocolates, gifts or pay for dinner. This is recession time world wide and additional few hundred or even million IDR sure seemed much a lot...

Some websites I visited had posted advices about more scale down, cheaper and still nice way to celebrate Valentine. I even read on MSNBC the other day about some people who will celebrate it simply by cooking for the significant others.

I know that definitely a lot of people will do it that way. It is just, I saw quite a lot as well who thought that Valentine mean dining and flowers and chocolates and gifts.

Personally, candlelit dinner is indeed nice, especially when it was conducted on that expensive restaurant, preferably with view to the whole city lighted up at night. It is also no needed to be said that I thought teddy bears are absolutely delightful (after all I had one wardrobe full of them, forcing my clothes to migrate). Chocolate is also very, very yummy, since I am a chocoholic. But I imagined that I will be just as happy with a regular bag of hershey and a magazine subscription.

One of my friend told me that is because I am still single and I will change my tune once I am in a relationship. I would like to think I won't.

Life is an amalgamation of romantic fantasies and harsh realities. Flowers and cards are nice but in the end of the day they are nothing more than a useless things. Some might argue that they are still be useful for memories and I am all for memories, but if sweet memories are what it is about, one rose and handmade card I believe will bring more memories than a bouquet and expensive store bought card. Saving, in the other hand, is quite useful. Presents like magazine subscriptions, books, CDs, or maybe courses subscription, if one had the money to spare, is also more useful in my opinion.
In other hand, cooking for your lover, making your own gifts also have their own merits since it's cheaper and way more personal. Unless of course, the recipients is way prefering the standard Valentine packet (dinner, flower, chocolate, bear).

One of my cherished memory is of a magazine I bought with my birthday's money on my second year at high school. It was Astronomy and it seemed so pretty on my eyes ( I know, poor me).

Astronomy is one of my favorite subject. In fact, for years I had dreamed of becoming an astronom, a dream killed for the fact that quite possibly, taking astronomy as my major would land me with meal on Monday and scrapping on Friday.

The magazine, in appereance, was a typical one, as many other imported magazine looked like. The one I bought was the edition from two months before and it costed me 50.000 IDR. The new one would cost me about 100.000 IDR and you know it was awfully lot of money for a magz.

Than for years, even after I was working, I always found better use for my money than another magazine. So yes, imagine my joy when I could finally not only attain another one, but subscribe to some of them =>.

Of course, this time it was not Astronomy. No, my new favorites are Sciam, Futurist, Times, and Sceptical Enquirer. I thought I will try Technological Review if I can save enough money to subscribe to that.

It's silly, I know, but I can't stop grinning seeing my pile of magz!

Can't stop smiling, I got my first tablet, a wacom bamboo fun, the smallest one. It is really pretty, and I love it so much. Granted, so far I haven't been used yet of using a pen instead of a mouse (they also have a mouse, but I thought it is troublesome to change it now and then), but practice will make better, right?

Unfortunately, I got two troubles with this. First, the tablet will occupy the surface previously used by the tv, and I have no other table. So, using the table will need to wait until tomorrow, since I planned on buying a tv table tomorrow. Second, my wrist always hit the table's edge, so apparently I do need a wrist cushion...maybe I'll buy that bread shape one. It really is a realistic imitation of a bread...

Anyway, I still can't stop smiling. Finally...

I had been told many times by many people, different secrets of beauty. There is sleep before ten o clock, so the face's skin will get enough rest. There is the use mask one a week. There is the don't eat peanuts for fear of acne. There are a lot of diffferent advices, some proven, other not, some general, other just for people with specific skin conditions.

Yet lately, I finally found out the secret to beauty, so to speak. This secret is simple, easily understand, and can be used by young and old, sensitive skin or not. Unfortunately, this secret is rather horible...

To put it simply, and because it really is simple, it is : MONEY

Some people said that the cheap cosmetics and treatment work just as well, but actually it sometimes really is what you pay is what you get. Of course, not every expensive things are guaranteed to be good. If one asked me, I always believed in brand, although mostly I applied it on electronic instead of cosmetics. There are, after all, reason why the brand became famous.

But I am rambling on here, so back to topic. This last few months, I am trying a new day and night cream. It put a hole on my wallet, but I got a discounted price for the night one and the day one, well, I scaled back on eating and put a hold on snack (since I am such a poor bear =<). I am exposed to sun more these days and with greater intensity, yet instead of becoming darker, my face becoming whiter!

Also, had you ever read the treatments out there today? There was this artist when I was a kid. She was very good at acting, but there are some marks on her face, most probably a leftover of pox or something. I was told that day that mark on your face is permanent and I believed it. I mean, she was rich and famous, if there is a way to remove it, bar plastic surgery, I believed she would already did it. Yet today, mark, scar, anything, can be remove with routine treatment, although admittedly, for me, the price almost made me faint.

Or maybe you are watching one of those model reality show on TV. When the camera closed up the models's faces, especially when they were on casual situation, you can see that they are not that beautiful outside nor they have flawless skin. Yet give them a bunch of cosmetics, and the result was totally amazing.

So yes, the harsh secret of beauty is unfortunately money...

Friendster. It is half real life's friends and half cyberworld's friends, at least if mine is any indication. There is people I never met and probably will never meet, especially since we are living in different countries.There is old friends that I have met and played together for years and still do, or those that I haven't met again in the last few years. There is also, of course, friends turned strangers.

I got an old aquintance (I don't think friend is an appropiate word to use anymore, given what followed) that was, well, if not really BFF, then at least we had went out together in a group a few times before. In fact, together with a few other friends, we were the movie team, since we always were going out to movie together. Then university came.

Last year, a mutual friend of us told me abouth this guy's yahoo messenger. I am kind of a messenger's friends collectors, so I sent this guy email to his email address, asking to be added in his messenger list. Not too big a request, since everyone else from our previous group already did (I still kept close contact with most of them and loose contact with the rest). He didn't add me, nor he sent me a reply.

Thinking positively, I decided maybe he changed his email address. Not a strange thing to do, especially since based on his friendster's profile, he had made a lot of bigger change on his life. So, I repeated the mail, this time to his friendster's mailbox. I found out that he opened his friendster's account regularly, but never replied to nor added me.

My friend, ever the peacemaker, thought that maybe this guy simply didn't opened his mailbox. So, he told me he would ask him next time they chatted, although at the moment I was already kind of lost taste of adding this guy. Yet, still the same. My friend told him and he never added me.

Finally, I decided that three times were enough of goodwill. If we separeted fighting, or he hadn't added the other people on our previous 'movie team', I won't mind it. Yet since it was the opposite...

In fact, I was sorely tempted of simply deleting him from my friendster' friends list. Yet then, on the second thought, I rarely opened my friendster's account anymore. In fact, I opened this blog more often =p. So, I thought, why not just leave him there. One more number on the friends' count can never hurt =>.