A Relatively Boring Holiday...
Yong Chen's "A Brief Series Of Mundane Days"Unbelievable. Two weeks of holidays have just passed me by, just like that. I could almost swear that barely a few days ago, I had just alighted from a turbulence-hit flight-that-was-delayed-by-air-defence-maneuvers. Now, I’m packing my stuff, getting ready to head back to SS15 one last time. This holiday has been really
really dull indeed, so dull that my days were smeared into a bleary time-smudge of sleeping, eating, and procrastinating on my studying. You could say that I was living the ideal
babi lifestyle, and in fact, I was indeed living it! My pre-holiday plans to play tennis or squash, swim and to catch up on my studying seem to have been grounded to dust beneath the omnipresent heel of procrastination and blown away by the winds of laziness. Ah, well.
C’est la vie. Well, at least my
vie, anyway. It’s
very characteristic of me to make grand plans for things that I want to do when I’m free and then forget about them the moment I have enough free time to carry them out. And now, viewing the final few hours of the aforesaid smudge from hindsight, I must say that my holidays have been a total waste of time. Here’s a brief summary of a typical day in my life these past two weeks:
MorningWakes up (approx. 10am), scarfs down breakfast, takes a bath, plays the piano for a while and immerses self in a book until lunchtime.
Afternoon
Puts down book for lunch. Resumes reading after lunch (if book has not been completely read – if book has been completely read, switches to another book). Switches on computer after reading and listens to music.
EveningPlays computer games (mostly CounterStrike and SWAT 4). Looks out the window at around 5pm to 6pm and thinks
it is too hot/it is going to rain/it is raining or some other excuse so that I won’t go down to swim/cycle/play tennis or squash. Continues playing computer games until dinner.
NightAfter dinner, sits in the living room for a while, talking to parents or vaguely watches television (I’m not really into the idiot box). Retreats into room and continues reading until approximately 11pm. After that, either surfs the Net or listen to music. Stops at around 1am and switches off the computer (note – computer has been switched on since the late afternoon). Picks up another book and reads until eyes gives out at around 3am. Finally succumbs to Slumberland’s calls. Repeats the same itinerary the next day, with little or no variation.
On final count, I reread the entire Star Wars – The New Jedi Order series, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, five Dale Brown novels, the fourth and fifth Harry Potter books and two classics. I can’t believe it. I did it again. I went on a book-reading spree! And going on a book-reading spree doesn’t seem like a good idea when the A2 exams are so near I can practically taste them in the air, with each heartbeat reminding me that time is indeed getting short and each dawn reminding me that it is one day closer to THE exams. I need more self-discipline. Damn… If I was only this dedicated to my revision…
Visiting My GrandparentsOn the other hand, I finally fulfilled my promise to myself that I would visit my grandparents at least once whenever I return home for the holidays. Last Sunday, I managed to visit my paternal grandma in Kota Tinggi and well, she’s still the same as ever. Good to see that she doesn’t have any more aches here and there, since she used to complain of having aches in her hands. I was beginning to worry for her health just last year, and it’s great to see that she’s alright! After all, I’m rather attached to her as it was she who took care of me when I was much younger. And just a few days ago, I visited my maternal grandparents. I drove my mum there, and after alighting from the car, I was immediately confronted by a hulk of a mutt. Now, I used to be on good terms with the previous dog that my grandparents owned, and after it passed away, I didn’t get to spend much time with the other puppy that they bought to replace their dog. Hence, you could pretty much say that, to the dog, I was fair game. Figuratively and literally. Standing on all fours, the dog’s muzzle could reach my stomach! The dog growled, and for a few moments I thought my life would reach an ignomious end as shreds of meat spattered all over the car porch of my grandparent’s house. Well…until Grandma came to the rescue, hauling the dangerously large mutt away and enabling me to scamper inside the house to safety. Once inside the house, I decided that it would be better if I
befriended the dog, so to speak, and that was for two reasons. One – I will definitely be visiting this house again and the better terms I am with this dog of theirs, the less I will have to worry about being ripped apart after walking through the gates. Two – It usually doesn’t hurt being nice with animals. After establishing ‘diplomatic relations’ with the dog (done by persuading the dog to be patted by me and not chew my hand off at the first chance it gets), I faced another problem. The dog then decided that it would like to
play with me. It tried to make me throw things for it to chased, and when I didn’t do it, the dog tried to jump up and knock me over. How do you say
no to a dog that ignores the word and is too big to be shoved away without hurting it? I took a stick and pretended to throw it. It pretended to run, but gave me a look that said
what am I, stupid? and tried to make me play with it again. Then only did I remember my grandma saying that the dog was very playful indeed. Groan… Giving up, I went back into the house and left only when I had to drive my mum and my grandparents to lunch. Even then, the dog tried to follow me to the car, but was restrained again by a word from my grandma. Pretty smart, that dog. At least it knows who’s in charge and it’s definitely not
me. The rest of the lunch was rather uneventful. My grandpa asked me what I was going to study next time, and when he rattled off a few words in Mandarin, I just nodded and uhhed at random as I couldn’t really understand what he was saying. Then, at the end of lunch, my mum told me that he said that I was going to study something related to aerospace. What?! I thought he said medicine! Maybe my Mandarin needs polishing…seriously. Ah, well. At least now I don’t have to worry about getting mauled by a huge monster of a dog whenever I visit them again.
Outing With My Dear!Yay! I managed to go out with my dear today! She came back from Bukit Jalil just yesterday, and we arranged to go out today. However, her best friend, Hui Ling joined us for the singing session in Red Box. Hahaha… Usually my dear will have to force me to sing, and as I can sing as well as I can breath underwater, I refrain from singing most of the time. And that somehow upsets her a little, as she thinks that I’ll be bored. But I’m not. Seriously. Hahaha… Anyway, I was let off the hook and wasn’t made to sing at all. Furthermore, I had free entertainment! Both of them were singing like crazy! After the singing session (tried to treat Hui Ling but she refused adamantly…saying that my dear will treat her during the next holidays as payment), me and my dear went to catch a movie at City Square. Something incredible happened at City Square as I was buying popcorn! As I walked to the line at the counters to queue up, a guy was looking at me strangely. Then, the girl he was with recognized my dear! Before I could ask her who that was, he suddenly turned to me and asked abruptly, “Do you recognize me?”. I raked my memory to piece a name to his face, but I finally gave up and asked him, “Uh, who are you?”. He then said he was William, from my Bahasa Melayu tuition class during Form 3! He looked so different from last time! And when I said that I couldn’t recognize him because of that, he said that I had changed a lot and that I looked very different now, that’s why he couldn’t recognize me at first! We ended up talking about school and the old times during tuition until it was time to go into the theater (turns out that the girl was my dear’s ex-schoolmate). Does this prove that this is a small world or what? Haha… After the movie, we headed for home and went out for dinner with my parents (Japanese food again…yum!). My dad persuaded my dear to try the raw fish in the shashimi platter, and to my surprise, she did! That’s a first for her, as she doesn’t like to eat anything uncooked, no matter how hard I try to convince her that the stuff is really really good! Well, she tried the raw octopus and some smoked fish, and she said that they weren’t bad! Good for you, dear! Hahaha…
Whew...what a long entry! Anyway, that's all for this time, I'll write again as soon as possible. Ciao!
Very Berry-teresting!
Pardon the cheesy title. It was all that I could think of. If you can think of a phrase more befitting the title of this entry, please add it to the comments and I'll be sure to weigh your suggestions and perhaps even change the title to the suggested phrase. My nature-loving mum, who sometimes amazes me with the knowledge of edible plants from her childhood as a
kampung girl, brought some interesting fruits back just two days ago after a visit to her friends. According to her, she had plucked the fruits from some plants growing outside her friend's house and that she had eaten them in her childhood. Somehow or the other, the part about plucking the fruits from a plant that grew outside a house in Taman Pelangi put me off the fruits a little. It's not that I have an aversion to local fruits. It's just that...well...Taman Pelangi isn't exactly known for its agriculture and who knows what might have been fertiliser, right? She insisted that they were Malaysian Raspberries. I had never heard of raspberries growing in Malaysia. She said that they were edible. I wasn't so sure. However, being the designated family guinea pig when it comes to interesting foodstuffs, it was my painful duty to sample the fruits that she had brought back.
The fruits in question were akin to elongated raspberries, deep red in colour and had tiny strands of who-knows-what poking out from the berries. Not the prettiest fruits, I might say, for they looked like a cross between a rambutan and a raspberry. Anyway, I just took one, threw it into my mouth and chewed. It wasn't much of a revelatory gastronomical experience - the fruits were a little sour, and tasted a little like strawberries. However, after sampling a few more fruits, I discovered that the fruits weren't too bad, actually. In fact, the taste was rather...
interesting. And, of course, I'm still alive. Which means that these fruits are indeed edible. Hurray Mum! Now you've taught your son two kinds of fruits to eat in case he gets lost in Taman Pelangi and can't find his way to the nearest
mamak stall (the other being the Indian Cherry, but that's another story)! I've taken a few photos of the fruits so that everyone can see what they look like - but don't go popping any lookalike fruits into your mouth!
Photos of the fruits - no flash.
Photos of the fruits - with flash. (note the hair-like protrusions from the fruits)
P.S. - If anyone can identify these fruits and provide me with their scientific name, I would be most grateful!
That's all for this entry! Ciao!
I'm Back!
First and foremost, I would like to apologize for the long delay in adding new entries to this blog. The reason why I delayed adding new entries? I’m mortified. Mortified at myself for not beginning preparations earlier for the A2 trial exams. Mortified at myself for even thinking that I could cope with the new chapters in each and every subject without any meticulous preparation. Mortified at myself for having squandered precious time before the exams instead of revising for the exams. And finally, mortified at myself for being overconfident and allowing myself to think that these exams were to be taken lightly. As you can guess, the exams didn’t exactly go smoothly for me. I won’t make any excuses nor will I hide behind explanations as to why I found the A2 trials so difficult. I just didn’t study enough. Period. And that explains all that is needed to be explained. I could probably throw you a billion examples to illustrate how screwed-up my papers were, but I digress. In doing that, therein lies the risk of the poor reader falling asleep on the keyboard and waking up only to find that his or her unfortunate keyboard has become a receptacle for the sleep-drool of the sleeping reader. Hence, I will only briefly gloss through some of the more…interesting examples of my experiences prior to, and before papers.
First and foremost (and seriously, this is the best example!), I boiled my bloody Biuret test during the Biology practical paper. I have a very good idea of what might be running through your mind now, and most likely, it’ll be
what the hell? or
whaddafuk?, followed by
how on Earth did this idiot forget how to do the Biuret test…it’s like, first grade! or something to that effect. Well, let this idiot answer those questions for you – I don’t bloody know! When I saw the biochemical tests to be carried out, what ran through my mind was
Benedict’s test and Biuret test – boil the shit outta them! and with a mental
woohoo! I went on to carry out those tests happily – with no inkling that I was making a big, big mistake. No wonder my “faithful lab partner” (yes, guys, tease me all you want) was giving me funny looks. To compound matters and to highlight the fact that yes, I am indeed an idiot, I was reading on how to carry out biochemical tests just the night before! I knew how to do it. I could have done it. But somehow, in those few fateful seconds, my reading on biochemical tests the night before failed me. To put it succinctly – I failed myself, for, how can an action fail a person? With the results looking a tad funny, my results and hence conclusion would definitely be even funnier, but somehow I suspect that Ms Ho would probably die laughing while marking my paper. Now, wouldn’t that be nice? Hahaha… And it goes without saying that I’ll be expecting very, very low marks from this paper. The only consolation I can get from this experience is that I’ll probably know how to do a Biuret test for the rest of my life. But maybe I shouldn’t speak so soon.
Secondly, there was this Chemistry practical test. The Chemistry practical paper was rather straightforward - a question on titration and a qualitative analysis question. All of us have probably done these questions over and over again until the knowledge of how to do questions like these are probably ingrained in us by now, so these questions weren’t much of a head-scratcher. The only possible problem that we might have faced during this paper could have been the ‘design experiment’ as we didn’t really have much exposure to those kind of questions. Personally, I found the paper rather straightforward, and everything seemed doable, but (you somehow knew that this ‘but’ was coming, didn’t you?) as usual, something went wrong. This time, it was my apparatus that caused all the problems. While cleaning up and rinsing the apparatus used in the experiment, I didn’t notice that the tap on my burette was rather loose since I was more concerned that no air bubbles formed in the tap instead and that the burette felt and looked alright to me. I didn’t notice anything was amiss about the burette until I carried out my second titration, when I suddenly discovered that my fingers were rather wet. To my utmost dismay, I discovered that the solution in my burette was flowing out by the side of the tap even though the tap was closed! I made a quick situation assessment, and my final conclusion was
you’re screwed since you won’t have time to do everything all over again. Giving up, I took the mean of the two readings, and moved on to the next part. My worst fears were confirmed the next day when Ms Chan told me that my readings were way off the mark. Another lesson learnt – check your burette thoroughly (especially the tap!), don’t assume that since it’s an exam, all the apparatus will be in perfect order. My only source of disappointment was that I couldn’t show Ms Chan better results than my last exam since she put in effort to make sure that I knew how to do titration properly when I scored a D for my AS practical.
Thirdly, there was the Chemistry Option paper, or Paper 6. This paper is the perfect example of why last-minute revision isn’t good for your academic results. Having done the Core chapters early, I thought I could focus purely on the Option chapters when the exam was drawing close. However, I discovered that some of my knowledge of Core chapters had decided to take a hiatus indefinitely to wherever-knowledge-about-Chemistry-goes-when-it-leaves-one’s-brain a few days before the Chemistry written papers. As a result, I found myself studying Core chapters as well as the two Option chapters a few days before the papers, which wasn’t in my plan at all (assuming that I had a revision plan to start with). And although it might sound like a walk in a park when I say “two Option chapters”, believe me, the notes of the two Option chapters are thicker than the entire A2 Physics syllabus put together. Trying to cram everything from the countless Laws by someone or the other in Phase Equilibria to the bazillion equations found in Transition Elements in the space of a few days is futile. I’ve had more success trying to coax my pet tortoises to do a 100m dash. The end result? Blank. Blank. Blank. All over my Option paper. Well, I guess I made marking my paper a lot easier for Ms Chan, although she probably won’t be too thrilled at my marks.
Blame in on my laziness that I didn’t begin revising any earlier when I should have. Blame it on my lack of discipline that I still managed to go for DotA sessions when the exams were just around the corner. Blame it on me for thinking that I could finish revising everything last-minute and yet understand and remember everything. But at one point the blaming must stop, and I’ve decided that it is now. Enough moping. Time to put the past behind me, and focus on the future bearing in mind the lessons I have learned this time around. Easier said than done. But I’ll do my best anyway.
And getting my results is going to be so, so fun.
