First order of the new year:

NEW LINK.

Blogger

Yes, I have finally succumbed to Blogger because photography is my second love and Blogger makes uploading pictures so much easier.

Thank you dL for 6 years of memories <3

5:43 p.m. on 2008-01-01

the one about gambling.//

For a long time, my life flows as if it has been predetermined. Majority of the important decisions I have to make were either made on my behalf by older and wiser folks I look up to, or pretty much predetermined by the kind of (shitty) grades I attained. To go to Tao Nan was something I had no say in; TKG after that was determined by my grades; taking MEP in TK was a given especially with Miss Soh's influence (not that I am unappreciative); SA which was determined by my grades... so on and so forth.

Before I continue, I have to reiterate that I am not complaining about bad decisions that my parents have necessarily made for me previously. Au contraire.

So anyway, for once in my entire life, I have to make my own decision that will decide my academic future. My whole future, even. It's one choice that, for once in my whole life, the folks that always had the answer to every question I had have zilch knowledge of. Pillars that I could once count upon have suddenly collapsed. And I'm lost.

I must admit that I am way in over my head in trying to choose 2 majors (or even 1) for my degree. It's a Bachelor's, for crying out loud, I can't afford to make a grave mistake on this. I was already bent on MP&E/Film Scoring until Ross sent me this e-mail:

When you choose your major, go with your passion, what is it that you can do for hours and get lost in? If you love to compose and create images with your music, then film scoring is a great choice. CWP is also a good choice, you learn to arrange in many styles, perhaps even cheesy boy band style ;-P

They are all exciting options, but whichever you do, as a musician, you will probably wind up doing many things. I do a lot of technical/software things, including teaching in the synth department, but I learned all of that on my own, my degree was performance. We can master anything we are driven to learn.

I am beginning to see why they have Pro Music as a major.

Have I ever mentioned how much I detest gambling? Not just the monetary kind, but all sorts. People think it's just me being righteous and such, no gambling/drinking/smoking, but it's more than that. Call me kiasu or miserly, whatever, but I just hate the kind of emotional rollercoaster you ride. Some call it adrenaline rush... sure. It provides unnecessary tension and anxiety and I don't think my heart can take it. I get panic attacks and my heart races when I play first-player shooter games, I can't imagine what I will be like in real-life.

But as Murphy Law's goes, I am now being pushed to do the thing I hate the most - gamble. This time with my life and future. Calculating the odds and the chances I am taking with the majors I pick. What sort of income will I have? Will I be self-sufficient? Will I be able to earn enough for Mom to retire early? Will I be a performer or a techie?

Well there's nothing much I can do. This is one decision I am making on my own. Not even academics can warp me in a certain direction.

Unless I don't make the cut for MP&E, though that would suck real bad.

3:41 a.m. on 2007-12-27

the one about christmas.//

The joy is not in receiving, but in giving.

So true. Every year the yield of presents dwindles, but it's all good, because now, each and every present holds a more significant place in us.

Especially if they come in the form of a 4GB iPod nano. I swear, Auntie Keng outdoes herself every year! It's a pretty silver nano and I'm still amazed at how tiny it is! All the thanks goes to Auntie Keng for being so extremely generous! Other equally awesome presents include Aunty Mag's Jacob handphone chain and keychain, stuff from Body Shop and such. :)

So anyway, this Christmas season, I was just reflecting on all that has happened this year, all the awesome opportunities I have been blessed with, and I can safely say that even if things screw up 4 years from now, I can look back and say that for once, I followed my heart instead of the crowd. That would be real handy when I graduate from Berklee and I come back to Singapore and no one wants to hire me because it's such an obscure major. Ha yeah.

And of course all the awesome new friends I've made this year. I don't think I've made as many friends in a year as I have this year. So many different people of different ages from different schools and different countries, even. I'm glad. All the SA people, Camp Hutan people and of course the Berklee people. I love each and everyone of you!

So here's wishing that everyone had a really great Christmas and with 2008 approaching, make those resolutions! I'll do my year-end summary soon enough. And with nice photos from the Japan trip.

12:20 a.m. on 2007-12-26

the one about Berklee and home.//

Marvin: Welcome to Berklee man.

Yeah, so true. Everyone says so. It's the one and only place to be for your ambition. The only mantra I have in my head now is "It's where I want to be. I chose this in July. There's nowhere else I rather be." The mantra pounds in my head as I try to make calls to the Bursar who lovingly added another $900 to payment due, so that I can go "Yes yes, this is why I am tolerating this administration nightmare."

Bitchin' swell. The tuition's already expensive enough, I don't need another $900 added to it, thanks.

Less than a month to B-town and this time, I feel even less prepared than I was for the summer. No house, no visa, screwed payments plus the whole switching from TWO to full-time. I'm going to be so pooped even before my first lesson on the 22nd, which is going to be Private with Ross and I'm excited! Haha this whole first name standard thing will take some getting used to. Treating your professor as an equal (on a human level, rather than a achievement level), a companion, a friend. I love it.

Am going to blog about Japan soon enough, but I'm just going to end this entry with a little food for thought for myself.

I found myself going emotional when the SIA plane landed in Changi and the captain said "Welcome to Singapore, and for the Singaporeans and residents onboard, welcome home." Those 2 words never fail to strike a chord within me, even if only being away from home for a mere 10 days. I can't pinpoint the exact emotion I felt, but it was just this sense of peace and comfort. And this is just from 10 days away from home.

It just seems like home, albeit a tiny piece of land, has this powerful sphere enveloping it, protecting its citizens from any harm that they might otherwise face. Like how when you were a kid, mom and dad was the epitome of security. Presence of mom and dad = safety, absence = danger, as simple as that. The idea of home provides the same sense of security. Even if that idea is skewed in such a dangerous world today, it's good to know that home still provides some form of shelter from the world beyond the sphere of protection.

Imagine what I would be like after Spring or Summer. I think I'll start bawling on the plane.

2:50 a.m. on 2007-12-24

the one about May emails.//

Haha so I just set up Apple Mail to store all my messages on my Mac and I was just reading e-mails from May from the wonderful trio of e-mailers - Vivian, Yan and Guangjie. Just some really funny stuff that I've found after reading all these e-mails for the countless time.

found anybody to share their tv with u?

And how was the letters we wrote to you? Did you cry reading it? I think the pen i used was water proof. So it should be safe.

Joel: You know, everyone's immensely entertained that I'm talking to you over the phone.
Me: Ask them to get a life and fuck off.

Hmmm then its not my fault you set off some smoke alarm ok, its you careless! Heh. Next time i talk to you then you forget your baby is it? HHAHA.

and btw, congrats on your fridge!

btw, tobey makes me thk of uncle toby's breakfast bars HAHA

hmm i'm falling sleep, i shall stop here, i'll prelying ptobrerly o [end of email]

As for the korean guy, i can wallop the hell out of that bony fella.

You seems like a dwarf next to him. You might wanna consider platform shoes.

okay I need to go drop atomic bombs (figure that out yourself)

Cos down here half a tray of those take away packets of fried rice is $3.50 and that's only in my school. So with the exchange rate and everything that's like 4 bucks??? You can buy a LARGE bowl of beefball soup with that amount of money in singapore AND get a teh peng.

HAHHAA and yes when xin ni comes online and you are online as well I will downgrade her to MAID.

He should know our match making services were like shit.

If you need time to study for your GED GPP OR GST or whatever just say alright?

maybe I'll ship all my shoes back to perth with me! I cannot bear to be apart from my shoes!!!

and my hand is still burnt. Is it too late to put colgate on it?

And my scandal with bee kuan is now like all over the place lah, and the problem is i dont know who in the world is spreading it.

WE WILL ALWAYS BE FRIENDS AND KEEP IN TOUCH EVEN IF YOU'RE IN THE US OR ON TOUR AND I AM FREEZING MY ASS OFF IN THE ANTARCTICA!

I have way more but nothing I can post here since it's not a private blog. HAHA.

1:13 a.m. on 2007-12-13

the one with no title.//

Japan in 5 days! And I have to go back to work. Ha damn. I do miss that place though. And I guess I can really get down and focused on my works when I'm there, even though I have Reason 4 at home. I really don't do anything remotely productive at home... too many things prove distracting. I still have 2 or 3 tracks to do, and then I'm totally out of ideas, which isn't a good thing considering that I'm halfway from supposedly my quota. Ugh this is not looking pretty.

36 days before I land on US soil and I haven't even gotten my apartment and visa done yet. What the fly much?

Still trying to decide if I should stay in Boston for the summer. I think I just might. The only thing that would pull me back here for now is camp. If it's going to happen in June then maybe I'll come back from May - June and then go back for courses to clear gen eds. Other than that I don't think I can stand another 4 months rotting here like I am now.

I'm excited to go to Japan. Although if I had it my way we would be going to Europe. Ha but it's fine. At least it gives some excitement to the mundane life I've been living for the past 3-1/2 months. Scurvy cur.

1:04 a.m. on 2007-12-10

the one about baking.//

Unappreciated and unloved. Boo.

I realized that every time I get upset or irritated with anyone I will inadvertently walk to the cupboard and take out the flour, sugar, butter, eggs... and bake. The angrier I am, the more elaborate the recipe. Today wasn't so bad, so I just wanted to make muffins until I realized that my muffin tray was missing. Gr. But I still needed to vent my anger on some dough and batter so I prepared them and froze them. Now I just gotta go buy a damned muffin tray tomorrow. Ugh, this is so not my day.

Who knows, maybe tomorrow I'll be irritated enough to make apple pie.

I need to get out of the house more. I swear this place is like a pressure cooker just waiting for someone to crack.

I'm so horrible at time management. At the rate I'm going I probably would have to skip half the OG outing on Saturday to finish a small percentage of the shit I need to get done. :|

11:02 p.m. on 2007-12-05

the one about dance, betrayal, iban and running.//

As an ex-dancer, I once had battered, bruised and blistered feet. Maybe not too much of the first 2, but I sure as hell got my fair share of blisters. Ha. I do miss those days though. My childhood was so closely linked to ballet. Granted, it was hard not to be, considering the fact that we danced 12 hours/week, and more during the holidays. During the holidays it was almost like a freaking summer school, 4-5 hours a day. Whoah. I miss it, but I'm not too sure if I miss dance or I just miss childhood as a whole. I think people are so impressed that such a fat person like me can still strech. Bahaha yes, it weirds them out every time.

But... but... but... How do you do that?? I'm like, half your weight and twice your height and I can't get my leg past 90 degrees!

Random musings.

I hate how I always get caught up in the moment, getting all excited like some 2 year old kid in a candy store, and then reality hits you square in the face. I almost always anticipate the dark clouds coming, but at the same time, always brush it away. It's not that I thought that the dark clouds would never come... it was just that I didn't think about it entirely.

So yeah, my dark cloud has caught up with me today and I'm all disappointed, but hey, I anticipated this. I just chose not to believe it. Maybe I thought for once things would be different, but they didn't turn out so. Life's just a huge vicious cycle, non?

On a happier note, met some of the Iban people today so it took my mind off them broken promises and lies. So it was Jiayu, Xinhui, Linda, Davis, Kien Yan, Wei Quan and I at the Settler's Cafe this afternoon, playing the weirdest games that I haven't even heard of. Yes, there are more board games beyond Monopoly, Scrabble, Upwords and Game of Life. Ha yeah 3+ hours of shouting and screaming was really fulfilling. And we're meeting again next week for dinner. Oh yes, I love my Ibannies. :D

My stamina has apparently drastically improved since the start of this year. I don't even know why, it's not like I've been training for it. I do think it's 100% psychological though, I actually feel less tired when I'm listening to Rent. HAHA. I managed to run 1.6 in 8 minutes, which I know is hella slow for many but it's my achievement anyway. It's not like I celebrate when I get my leg past 90 degrees. Going to try and run 2.4 without dying tomorrow.

Gotta go practice teh piano now because I haven't done so all week. Really! At the rate I'm going, people would think I am going to change my principal instrument to violin. :|

9:26 p.m. on 2007-12-04

the one about ;Play.//

So I'm trying out Starhub's ;Play Video-on-Demand feature. I don't know why they want to put the semi-colon in front of the 'P', it just makes it so much more annoying. I don't think having a smiley face (I figured they might be trying to do this - ;P) aids any of the shit it's giving me.

Restrictions:

1) Only Windows XP. Okay fine, so Singapore's anti-Mac. It's okay. I fired up good old HP-Lappy and signed into ;Play. Not very pleased with the whole Mac-not-supported thing, but it's okay. Surviving.

2) Only Internet Explorer. Of all the web browsers in the entire world, you just had to pick the shittiest one. Oh, okay, since it comes with Windows, I let it pass. Already not very impressed, and I haven't even gotten to downloading.

3) Weird viewing policies. As far as I understand this, every video has an 'expiry date' 30 days from the day you download it. Sounds easy enough. But! The very first time you view it, it sets off a ticking time bomb - 24 hours after the first time you view it, the video self-destructs. No, really. It just automatically deletes itself from the hard drive. It just makes things so inconvenient for us (my family) because 5 of us would watch 1 HK drama at any given time, and we all have different viewing habits. I do not appreciate a 24-hour time bomb.

4) Download Manager. I was prompted to click on a link that would proceed to start my download. The instructions explicity said "Do not close this page until the download is complete." When I tried to open the download file in the Download Manager, (which took bitching long to download, might I add) it kept giving me this error message. Repeatedly popping up after I acknowledged its existence and axed it. Wtf. I was going to proceed to restart my computer, thinking that it was turning all demented on me. When I closed IE (and in turn the webpage), the download started! I tried this again with another video and the same thing! And they actually explicitly said "Do not close this window." Uh.

5) Download speed. Considering that Starhub proudly boasts a 100mbps download speed for any site hosted on a local server, taking 10 minutes to download a 400MB file is pretty silly. Coming from the Starhub website itself... it's laughable.

6) File size. I'm concerned about the resolution of the video. Taking that a HK drama episode is 40 minutes, 400MB for each episode puts it to about 10MB/min, which is pretty low. xViD files are like 700MB for the viewing-friendly sized ones. Hmm. And this is definitely not xViD. Not impressed.

Conclusion: I think I'm going to start boycotting Starhub. Just like I am Sony. T_T I do not appreciate the fact that we pay bundles of money for a understated connection speed. I wish we had stuck to Pacnet. But all is well because I only have to put up with this shit for another 40 days and it's out with Starhub and its supposedly 100mbps download speed and in with Verizon FiOS. :D

10:30 p.m. on 2007-12-02

the one with the reflection.//

This year's been a good year, ups and downs, more ups than downs for me, I'm thankful for it. Thankful for all the friends I've made this year, for all the good luck I've been receiving from above and beyond, for the opportunity to see Berklee through a student's eyes and just thankful that I got through this year in one whole piece. Kudos to all the people out there who've made this year awesomely memorable for me. I know I probably say this every year, but this year is one that I will remember for a long time. I can hardly believe it's only been 365 days, it feels so much longer. I've been to B-town and back, I've been a Saint for 5 months, I've experienced working life, I lived in an apartment all on my own, I've been a freshman college student, I traveled halfway round the world to pursue my dream, and for once I actually feel like I have friends.

It's a stupid thing to say, I know, but it is finally feeling true. I mean between OG4, 07A08, 07S24, the Berklee people and Iban, it's hard to think otherwise. That's just all the people I've met this year alone. Not forgetting the family, long standing besties Qi, Dawnnie and Lishan, TK people, MEP people, FOURcast, Qui and so many more, I'm happy. Happier than I've been for a while.

Even if everything was taken away from me in the next minute (which I sincerely hope not, but just for analogical purposes) I can still be contented with the knowledge that I've enjoyed every single minute of it. I can, and I will.

This is such a la-la-la entry.

I'm still having trouble coming to terms with the previous entry. It's weird, I know. I just felt that I could have gotten to know Reuben better if we met under different circumstances. It's just tragic, I guess, but life goes on, as does his afterlife. People remember and commemorate him. I do so by playing 'Back Home' every time I sit at the piano. I just hope he isn't too disappointed with my Ear Training/Solfege skills because I know I got some of the chords wrong. Haha.

Yeah, it's been a good year, and there's only 29 more days until the end of it. It's unbelievable. This year has been such a whirlwind, although it didn't seem like it when I was stuck in my apartment in Boston bored when Margie was out practicing, or stuck in Math lecture in April. But all is good.

12:33 a.m. on 2007-12-02