they say

she’s running out of time.

deteriorating.

it may not be long.

i don’t know.

i guess for the past year we kinda saw it coming, slowly.

saw her give up, slowly.

saw my relatives get more frustrated and impatient with her, myself included.

saw the light in her eyes slowly fade into dulled lifelessness.

saw her coherence start to fail.

now that her mind is closing in, so is her body.

i do not know how to face her, or hold those unresponsive, fragile waxen hands,

and eyes that barely perceive me, merely looking upon me as yet another condescending grandchild come to humour the old lady.

i do not know how to face the woman who brought me up, and who has seen her first grandson marry, and her first great-granddaughter born, and know that she is unlikely to see her second.

she is but seventy-eight, she is not old.

Inadequate.

‘Tis one of those weeks.

The plague of the “I’m-not-good-enough”.

Of being an inadequate designer, of the frustration of not being good enough.

Of mistakes, and half-standard pieces.

Of thinking perhaps I’m not cut out to design anyway.

The quantum leap across the chasm between where I am and who I’d like to be.

Just being faithful in the things I do now.

But it is getting tiresome, I need to break the stagnating barrier I’m at right now.

If not there’s no point in me designing at all.

Dear students (the disease)

Although I myself am a student currently perched quite comfortably here in benevolent Coffee Bean, I find myself quite appalled by the behaviour of my fellow kind.

While I often lament the fact that service and coffee joint staff often treat us like a disease (so much for being the future of tomorrow), the way some of our species behave justifies this in totality.

Dear creature of impoliteness sitting at the next table with the bad hair and gross whiskers growing out of your chin, surely it is not too much to ask to share your four seater sofa area with a pair of tourists?

Did you necessarily have to react with such violent rudeness and a most unbecoming display of typical, embarassing Singaporean student behavior?

Yes, we disappear for hours while chop-ing tables with our masses of belongings.

We turn a blind eye during peak periods when people desperately seek seats while we avert our gazes and pretend not to notice anything beyond the screens of our graphic calculators.

We refuse to budge even though the manager gives us 5mins to leave, and we order a single drink that we think gives us the right to plonk our asses here for the next 24hours.

So do you have to top it all off by being obnoxious, rude, and most possibly, from the nerdoms of your exterior, from some distinguished educational instituition or another?

Sometimes I don’t know who I sympathise with more – patrons and staff of coffee joints who have to deal with the future of tomorrow (god help us) behaving as though they already own the universe, or the students who find themselves being treated like pariahs everywhere they go.

PS. Using a laptop offers some faint measure of temporary immunity. Graphic calculators brand you like the Black Death.

Things.

Okay such a nice lover-ly relaxing weekend. I know a lot of you are slogging out for one reason or another but I really haven’t had such a blissful, enjoyable weekend since uni started.

And I’m not going to feel guilty about it. HAH.

Went cycling on Saturday, and we ended up on the same breakwater we were at last year some one or two weeks before jason’s enlistment…

Top: last year, Bottom: this year

Okay, yes, rare and random zi-lianing moment.

And something else I wanted to blog about…

This hideous excuse for an advertisement:

WHAT IS THIS?!

Dear management committee of Siglap Centre,

As a regular patron of your complex, I am well aware that most of the shops in your building exist mostly for people do their groceries, eat McDonalds and do little else. But this sorry excuse for a poster advertising the 2nd floor which I have, in all 16 years of having lived in this estate, only visited twice, is quite, quite sad. It is in fact, thoroughly embarassing.

I can imagine your 2nd floor tenants must have requested greater publicity for their shops – and what you are now able to proudly answer them with is this mighty fine poster strategically plastered onto a single traffic light at the road junction. Awesomeness.

In yet more other news. This is Fish&Co’s Wasabi Crawfish Pizza.

Wasabi Crawfish Pizza

Looks nice right? Don’t eat it.

Okay. To give it some credit, the crawfish portion were generous and tasty enough. But its supposed to be pizza. Not a giant puff pastry. The entire base tasted like danish puff pastry. Not quite pizza material. And the cheese was a tad too salty for my liking but that’s just me.

Secondly, they should just call it Crawfish Pizza. Because there wasn’t even a WHIFF of wasabi in it at all.

But at least the service at this branch (Parkway) was much better than the last time Jason and I went there (Valentine’s Day last year). The service was awful, they totally forgot our order, we waited over an hour, and it was just altogether unpleasant.

We did have the swordfish collar though, which was… large. On the whole I still prefer the food at Manhattan Fish Market. But I’m still reeling from an overdose of Seafood Platter and both fish places in general because 33/06 used to go there far too much. Haha.

I’ll end this entry with a couple of nice photos.

Everything looks better in sepia.

Hmmmmmm. Open to interpretation.

Liz, what is wrong with you?

Am I even human anymore? Indifference is one thing but a total lack of empathy is another.

I’m closing in on my own world and now I find that I can’t crawl out of this self-absorption.

Wrapped in my own world mugging and designing. Okay, designing, then mugging.

Not even making time for the people I love, not practicing what I preach, and now one of the boys I used to teach has been admitted to hospital for something pretty serious (he needs a bone marrow transplant) and the first thing I can think of is ‘At least he finished his promos’.

The next thought that came to my mind was O. My. God. Like. Seriously. Liz, he could DIE and the only bloody thing you can think about is EXAMS? EXAMS?!!!!

Thank you, o kiasu Singaporean spirit, for instilling in me values I have every reason to be proud of.

NOT putting aside time for the people who are important to me because you need to STUDY. WORK. DESIGN. AND do other frivolous things just because you enjoy them.

As though I haven’t been feeling condemned enough the entire month because I’ve been so busy with everything I’ve crammed my plate with and the bf has mostly been looking at me from behind the great green wall of my Macbook Pro. ESPECIALLY when it IS our anniversary month after all.

Last night was the absolute WORST and yes I’m ranting but it’s been on my mind the entire week that I am actually conscious of the fact that my world has increasing been reduced to a big fat “I” in which I involve no one else in my business nor involve myself in anyone else’s.

Honestly Liz.

What IS more important to you? Yes the pursuit of your dreams. And this thing they commonly refer to as an education. But apart from that, seriously. You already hardly get to spend time with your mom and bf, and when you’re with them you think about work.

I’ve not even entered the working world and I’m ALREADY like that. God help me. And God help all of you who can relate to everything I’ve just rambled on about. Because if this is what life will be like, then I’m utterly ashamed to be alive.

There is more to this life than chasing paper dreams.

Enough of this.

@___@

Woah kay.. School has started. This would be far longer if I weren’t so tired. 

Haven’t even had time to update the baking blog with the experimental stuff I did last week. Wanted to bake today but am currently ready to sink into the sofa and sleep. In the two nights that I have spent away from this house my bed has already been taken over by my sister whose own room fan has died on her. And she didn’t even have the consideration to make my bed. How annoying.

Of course, more annoying than that would be this amazing piece of programming we NTU students have now become acquainted with called STARS. 

It controls, supposedly, the fate of our academic semester. Of course, we cannot really blame it for toying so carelessly with our futures (and GPAs). In fact, we, the users ourselves are both victims and culprits in this game of time and chance, since STARS isn’t the one holding on so coyly to that particular slot for that particular module that you’d particularly wish to have (your friends and the 60 000 people you don’t know and will probably never meet are). 

Tired I am!

And tired of STARS too. 

I’m just going to trust Daddy God that the timetable thats been mapped out for His beloved daughter is going to be one she’ll enjoy.