**~ Underneath the Stars~**...

Monday, December 24, 2012

GPA, Funk Movement, OCIP- 2012 at its end

12/24/2012 11:34:00 PM

results are out and okay so my GPA is like shit.

ah well.

sighpie. i will try my bestest next semester i guess. this girl will study smarter and harder next sem and try harder to get a social life (which was practically non-existent in the last semester entirely). which is really sad btw. my newest goal is to get a balanced life, exercise and work hard at the same time!! A level period motivation please come back!!! That period i totally ran 8km every 3 days or so to destress... so fit lorrrr, now my stamina is damn bad!

***
anyway, our concert for SMU Funk movement is coming up on january 19th! :) i think our popping dance item is frigging cool teehee :) am so glad i joined the popping genre instead of locking for this performance. it's really so much more fun and exciting. puppet and animation and robot ftw!

***
thailand ocip was really eye-opening. really have not been blogging for a long time and i have this innate laziness to try and type out all my thoughts. perhaps i will post the reflections i will inevitably have to do for the post-ocip for school here to elaborate some other time.

meanwhile i just have to say that teaching the village children english was eye-opening. They are so damn quick in learning and picking up english, so many bright young minds hungry for knowledge and interested in learning and then i look at myself and feel quite pathetic that i've become so jaded. We learnt some thai too :) really so interesting, i love languages like nobody's business :) felt so happy that i could remember the words to say "Where is the toilet" and remember all the numbers so can bargain in thai later in the R&R in bangkok :D thai numbers really freaking sound like cantonese!! maybe somewhere in distant history, they descended from the chinese. Anyway, the kids damn cuteeee. haha there was one girl named poi who looked like Dora the Explorer, damn cute leh with short hair and chubby cheeks. wanted to grab her and bring her home with meee :D hehe so cute to hug.

then we spent the next 7 days constructing a childcare centre from scratch. wow, new found appreciation for the construction business and all the workers in their super dirty cement stained clothes we frequently see. However our situation was slightly worse for that 7 days. Construction workers in Singapore get cement from cement mixers, we actually had to mix cement from SCRATCH with chunkos (how dyou spell that) and shovels.

16 pails of sand (painstakingly shoveled and carried in) and 1 bag of cement mix to form a pile on the floor.
Use the chunko to till through it to mix the 2 thoroughly.
Then create a mini volcano with a crater in the middle and fill water into it
It will now look remarkably like a grey lava cake
Wait 10 minutes
Start mixing with chunks
Get ready for intense backbreaking work and sweating

I think some of my sweat went into the cement HAHA. anyway, after all that, the amount of cement produced is so little you could cry hahaha. perhaps enough to lay 1-2 layers of bricks around the house. Laying bricks is less intense though, but no less troublesome! Like making a cake with many layers and parts. Must put cement of the right amount at each part and must align it properly and such and such. When we reached the higher levels of the house, we had to climb onto these wooden bench/scaffolding support to lay more bricks. OMG damn scary. The highest part of the house (at the top of the wall near the roof), i was damn scared and started getting a fear of heights hahaha, handling heavy bricks at the top of such a height is no joke.

Supposed to spend 11 days in the village and 3 in bangkok for R&R before we flew home. Towards the 9th to 11th day, got terribly sick with some sort of stomach flu and fever. Took one day off from construction to lie in bed sickly. And had damn bad stomach problems from the 11th day to 13th day (being my 2nd day of R&R). tsk during R&R i didnt feel like eating much of the damn nice food we were eating (can imagine how bad i felt, seeing as i usually eat everything?) and spent the whole day rushing off to the toilet in between shopping LOL. Something like *pain pain pain omgpain wtfpain ooh that dress looks nice let's buy it. pain pain omg pain. wheres the toilet. ooh omg cheap shoes. ahpain feel like puking. omg lets buy that*

But anyway, in the village it was really eye-opening. The toilets there have no flush and you bathe with the cold water from buckets that you splash on yourself that are super not clean but you take what you get. No one likes to bathe after 6pm because its so friggin cold you feel your face frozen in place (believe me, we had one day like that coz we ended construction late). There are technically spiders everywhere that you dont care any longer, even in the toilet right next to your head. Mud everywhere until you dont really bother to scrub your legs properly lol. When we reached bangkok finally, i really appreciated the wonders of a proper toilet omg, never felt happier just walking down a street on the first day of R&R. Normally when we leave Singapore to go to another country, you look at certain dusty noisy hot roads and you get annoyed and feel distasteful right? Ive never been so friggin happy standing in the hot cement. And zomg an actual toilet with a tap and a flush. Gives things some perspective.

Anyway, R&R was awesome even with my sickness. Went shopping at all the awesome places. Thailand is crazy cheap :O Meals at so called expensive restaurants for such cheap prices that you feel like someone's gonna jump out at you and yell "JUST KIDDING". You can get the best dishes in a jap or italian restaurant of good quality for less than 10 bucks that would cost you up to $25 in singapore. And the shopping centres are crazy. We went to the famous DMK and Platinum (or Pra-tu-nam). One entire floor for bags, one entire floor for shoes, many entire floors for clothes. In each floor there are like 50 little shops, each crammed to the brim with all the diff styles you could ever find. And shoes/heels/etc sell for 4bucks each, you can buy 5 pairs for the price you buy 1 pair in Singapore. (you can guess what i did, which is crazy when you think about it in numbers, but that's what every tourist who goes there is doing, you realize when you look around at all the shopping bags.)

didn't enjoy food much though on account of my sickness but that's okay.

as usual, there are some people i can and cannot stand on the trip. seems like every overseas learning trip/school trip i've gone on (taiwan, middle east, thailand), i don't really like the people. But it's okay, im grateful for the opportunities nonetheless. This was the most cliquish and disharmonious group of 23 people who ever went on a trip tgt actually, but it's okay im glad we made some difference in the village and i did make some better friends on the trip actually :)

the 5 girls (Agnes, Prajakta, Eileen, Ishika, Akangsha) who took care of me when i was sick, and whom i spent most of the waking and sleeping moments tgt

Clarence, Hiren, Kinkei, Zhi Cheng (our brick-wall-laying 'boss'). haha they sort of remind me of my jc homies, nice normal guys who aren't douchey skirt-chasers, know when to be tactful, are super nice and have their hearts in the right place. But anyway, i guess the group of us from the trip wont be seeing each other that much coz we are all from different SMU schools and such and wont have so many opps to meet! :(

***

Am quite doubtful and scared for next semester. Am no longer having classes tgt with grace and hiren (ogmates who were stuck tgt for the entire of last sem), don't know anybody in my new classes and hoping i will get to keep the few close friends i have made in this sem (which is mainly only about the 2 of them give or take a few others here and there-- have been quite a loner this sem with several acquaintances and thats about it).

But i will take it as it comes.

Will need to work on that regret that keeps rising up bitterly everytime i hear about overseas universities and opportunities and stuff like that. Why did i not apply? And at any rate, it's too late to be regretting anything but to live life here to the fullest. Maybe it is a blessing in disguise waiting to be discovered.

Will also need to work on maintaining contact with my old friends :/ have realised i am doing quite a shitty job. barely speak to most close ones for weeks at a time, and those who went overseas, am supposed to be whatsapping them but each side barely answers each other on time or long enough anymore that i feel its getting hard :/ there are super close friends who i used to spend days at a time talking and spazzing with in the past and in the hols but whom barely cursorily talk on whatsapp tgt nowadays. maybe theyre just busy, but i wonder whether maybe our lives are getting farther and farther apart and my life in singapore just seems so mundane in comparison, though it is busy as always. And then i wonder about this repeating again in 2 years time when more of my close friends leave for overseas. Even those in singapore, like my exco and the homies etc, i feel like we havent had a heartfelt talk in ages. I used to spend 70% of my waking hours with the exco, but now i havent spoken to mir/dj/syakir personally in like months, or yingyao/waichoong/kenneth for that matter. We do have a whatsapp group that is active in the last few months, but there seems to be something impersonal there even while reading all the group msgs. And i feel like i speak to jack/merv none at all, chris & amos about once in a fortnight. Which is actually not bad now that i think about it. Ah, at least we keep in contact. Perhaps, it is not that your friends have to be there always, but that when the time is right, you know you can pick up right where u left off. Let us hope that it is.