go bears!

i would have murdered someone

thanks

boarded bus 960 today on my way home and sat right down on a sodden seat cushion (sodden thanks to the air-conditioning, which was leaking terribly). i suppose i should have wondered why there were 2 empty seats when a bunch of people were standing, but today was a long day and i was exhausted. the seats certainly looked dry -- the dark colours hide the dampness -- and naturally no one around had the decency to warn me about them. anyway, i (foolishly) decided to be civic-minded and do the job myself by standing in front of the unusable chairs, only to discover that people do not understand the phrase "THEY'RE WET" unless one pantomimes deluges, hurricanes, tsunamis, etc. i did earn a lot of scowls, and i must give particular commendation to one malay girl who trod on my toes while trying to barge past me to claim one of the seats. this, of course, put me in a simply splendid mood for the rest of the evening.

(and then my mom went out and i had to eat at waffletown.)

yesterday: dinner with jy, cp, yen, fay and, er, steve (can he just be er-steve from now on? i have no idea if it's even appropriate to mention his name here. will the relevant people send assassins if it's not? thank you.) at big fish in siglap. (yes, just like the tim burton film. but without siamese twins and matthew mcgrory.) full credit to jy for finding out about it - the food was really good, and the owner ridiculously patient in putting up with our shenanigans. we had antipasto - smoked salmon, lobster salad, octopus, the works - and then just about every other dish on the menu among us. mussels, garlic-and-butter-drenched, and so much better than the ones i had at oosters once (ugh). seafood cioppino with a gorgeous tomato-based broth. several varieties of fish (rainbow trout, was it?) poached and grilled and what-have-you, and er-steve had squid-ink linguine, which is a dish neither my mom and i have ever dared to try, but which looked, i suppose, as good as squid-ink linguine can. the food was too good for us not to have dessert, so we ordered, among us, banana fritters, creme brulee, tiramisu, and chocolate souffle, by which time we were so stuffed that we ended up staggering home instead of hanging out at fay's house as planned. oh, and cp told a story about his favourite colleague that was so funny i nearly wet my pants, but you're going to have to ask him for that yourself.

i wasn't being entirely facetious with the second molecule. i spent most of my time in the office last week wading through the literature on caffeine and its effects on mood, behaviour, electrophysiology and BOLD imaging. there are a lot of papers, and very little consensus among them. surprising, considering that caffeine is the most commonly used psychostimulant in the world.

(by the way, trawling journal databases is probably the part of my job that i like the least, and there's been a lot of it lately. will call it quits on wednesday.)

the week, in brief

and just because i need more frenzy and panic in my life right now, i go and unearth things like this

Currently reading:
Glass Mountain - Cynthia Voigt

su-lin pointed out to me last night that when i stop blogging it could be one of two tihngs - either i've gone into a depression, or i can't talk about anything because circumstances have gagged me. in case anyone cares, this time it's not the first thing.

backsliding, sort of

i've been working two jobs since last week - someone from nie asked if i would help out on a project for a few months and the money was hard to resist. i think this is the first time in my life that i've done something purely for the sake of money - i feel no love whatsoever for the job (and the-place-that-cannot-be-named doesn't count because at least 2.8% of the reason i was there was to keep nagging parents off my case).

anyway, i think that with this endeavour i have at last crossed back over the line that marks out three standard deviations from center - seriously, how many people in singapore aren't motivated by money when searching for work? when i'm working on this project, all that's on my mind is what the extra dough is going to buy me next month (clothes. it's been a long time.), and i'm pleased, pleased as a puppy in a beanbag, that after all these years of high-falutin ideals i'm getting to indulge in just a tiny bit of normal greed.

Currently reading:
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke (Sorry JY. It was in the library, and I couldn't wait for your scheme to come to fruition.)

Drinking is something else. Drinking for me means only wine, and I did not need any Australian to persuade me of its pleasures. I like to brag that I have drunk a glass of wine every day since the second world war, and though this is not true in the fact, since I have spent much time in places where there is no wine, it is true in the principle - the chance of war introduced me to wine, and I never turned away. I believe in wine as I believe in Nature. I cherish its sacramental and legendary meanings, not to mention its power to intoxicate, and just as Nature can be both kind and hostile, so I believe that if bad wine is bad for you, good wine in moderation does nothing but good. If I am ever challenged, I refer people to that seminal work, Wine is the Best Medicine, in which the great Dr. E. A. Maury, pictured on its jacket looking terrifically healthy with a glass of champagne in his hand, prescribes a suitable wine for almost every ailment - Entre-Deux-Mers for rickets, young Beaujolais for diarrhea, two glasses of Sancerre daily to lower the blood pressure...

When I was very young I drank, like most of us, with a lack of discrimination and an unvarying enjoyment that I now envy. Thinking of myself then, I am reminded of the great Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay, who I witnessed drinking, I rather think, his very first glass of wine of any kind. It was at an official banquet in London. I sat next to the very old-school and gentlemanly funcionary who had arranged the occasion, and early in the evening he remarked to me that he hoped I would enjoy the claret, not just the last of its vintage in the official cellars, but perhaps the last in London. I was much impressed, and looked across at Tenzing, who was most certainly enjoying it very much indeed, having as a standard of comparison only the species of alcoholic porridge the Sherpas call tsang. His was a princely figure, and as the lackeys filled and refilled his glass his face shone with pride and pleasure. It was a delight to see him. After a while the old boy on my left turned to me again. "Oh, how good it is to see," he said with the true warmth of approval, "that Mr. Tenzing knows a decent claret when he has one!"

Patricia Volk, When I Became A Gastronome

announcement

i think i've forsaken capital letters. in the past, i used to use small caps when i was being flippant and write properly the rest of the time. laziness, unfortunately, has trumped all, so i'll just make it official, shall i?

wow. a week since my last post. i've been most remiss.

chinese new year was a giant ball of suck, and i don't want to talk about it so don't ask. i will let you know that my boss invited us over to his place -- but only to make a separate point. he lives in one of those condos overlooking ri/rjc, which meant that for the first time in my life i got an aerial view of the campus. what immediately struck me was how everything i disliked about the new school when i first walked through it became irrelevant when looking at it from afar. the sterility and stern colours and general unpleasantness give way when you can see the shape of things. more than the sum of its parts, etc. typical raffles i would say, always about how things look from the outside. the boss pointed out that you can tell what the school's priorities are from how the place is laid out - with the track and tennis courts near the dusty roads and the classrooms tucked away round back (some of us i think probably can't imagine it any other way.)

it also transpires that no one in the lab knew i was a rafflesian, which shows you that all those days really are gone. to think that once upon a time that was how our lives were defined. time passes - but it's things like that that alert you to the fact, that scare you suddenly into the insidious present.

the west wing has been cancelled. i know that a lot of people who liked it back in its salad days gave up on the show once it started becoming crappy (circa the tail end of season 4). you've missed out - the last year or so has been really good, what with alan alda and jimmy smits and janeane garofalo and stephen root(!) joining the cast and debra cahn churning out masterpieces of writing. nevertheless, i'm glad that it's ending this year, and thankfully, the news of cancellation came early enough that the writers will be able to flesh out a proper denouement. it's a good time to wrap up - with bartlet leaving office and the administration moving on to other things - in fact, it's the time i always envisaged the producers would call it quits.

the only bad news: aaron sorkin isn't come back to write the last episode. i can't imagine how someone could create a show and not want to write the finale. my suspicion is that he's still bitter about all the criticism that was levelled at him while he was still writing/producing; if that's the case then he's being awfully childish, and i will not look kindly on studio 7 on the sunset strip when it comes out later this year. (though i will still watch it because i'm weak that way)

memoirs of a geisha

it's watchable, but i've seen spaghetti westerns that are more japanese.

ever since starting my saturday lessons i've found myself proudly telling people that i have "class". to anyone who's been subjected to this and thought i was being a pompous ass, i do apologise. i guess i feel like shouting about it not because the experience is fantastic or anything but because it feels like i'm segueing back onto the right path (i want to say a transition back to being in school full-time, but there's no wood around me to knock on right now).

spent most of saturday manufacturing what felt like a billion pineapple tarts with n. & co. in an oven i doubt i could have fit my head into. this was, i think, my first experience of semi-industrial baking, and from now on i shall remember it whenever i start getting funny business ideas like this one. inertia is definitely not the only thing. the first tray is enjoyable; after that only cussing dulls the pain.

general pastry tips:
1) air-conditioning is your friend
2) what the customer doesn't know can't hurt him
3) carrickfergus is not a baking song

(mostly) for chris

so that we can finally put this argument to rest. (i blame tolkien and company for even making me think about such things.)

as my computer script is running

working overnight. the lab always seems to be a different colour when it's dark outside. yellow-tinted. there's too much light. proper sleep labs keep the illumination constantly below 50 lux, which i would much prefer. it's distressing to be in light for 24 hours, and that's not something people understand unless they've tried it.

it's quiet - until you concentrate and realise that the xserve drives are humming, and the air-conditioning is singing e below middle c.

the lobster in the aquarium has gone into hiding - do they sleep at night? they never talked about that in bermuda. our lobster has several appendages missing; there used to be 2 lobsters but they fought, and as the remaining one would probably say if it could speak: you should have seen the other guy.

the water in that aquarium gets changed about once a year, by the way, and it's been a funny shade of ochre for several months now.

on my desk: an elephantine coffee mug that says "GO AHEAD, I"M ALL EARS", springfresh "azure breeze" air freshener, a siemens calendar, a demotivators desktopper (PROCRASTINATION: Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now), a multi-purpose magnetom device, a stack of unmarked neuropsych tests, a permanent marker, several moldy rubber bands, CD-Rs.

and...it's done.

had three lunches today. the first: leftover beehoon from a gathering of general practitioners at the auditorium upstairs. half an hour later, jh called me up to say that he was free to get some food, not something that happens often. this was the first time, however, that we actually succeeded in getting together for anything other than (ugh) delifrance. then there were leftovers from some party or another going begging that looked awfully appetising, and so it was vegetarian thingummies and walnut brownies and very plump, flaky curry puffs. i'm obviously out of control.

i missed the sun.

i have extirpated all traces of my name from this blog. bwahaha.

(i'm currently at one of the peaks of my sinusoidal paranoia function, by the way)