*880 - the most beautiful day of all ... at least, in my brother's life :)

I'm so delightfully happy happy happy to see my brother so happy happy happy. Today was a beautiful beautiful day. I'm so exhausted now that I can't think of more adjectives to describe how I feel and how it went (hence the repetition) but in sum,

:) :) :)

!

More next time. For now, how we began the day (spritely):



And how we feel now at the end of the night (pooped):



(Elisa's face is a better indication of how we feel; I know I look like some species of Angry Ape.)

*879 - tomorrow

Tomorrow we wake up at the crack of dawn to get our hair whipped into submission by brother's (very enthusiastic) hairstylist friend, and then pack the goodies we've been making and preparing over the past couple of weeks into the car, and then zip off to the church to set up our pretty dessert table, and ohhh it's going to be such a lovely, lovely day :)

*878 - the bakerina's catastrophe

Day One of the baking commenced on Wednesday--a hundred cupcakes are sitting in the freezer now, waiting to be frosted tomorrow. Day Two of the baking happened yesterday, where Sis and I were having so much fun with the gelatin sheets that we turned an immense amount of cream cheese into unsaveable goopy gelatinous lumpiness, much to our exasperation and amusement, so we will have to begin again from scratch today. Hahaha. Right now, a mound of pink cream cheese, half-salvaged through scraping through a sieve, sits lumpily in our fridge; I suppose I could make something like a pink garlic chive dip out of it, perhaps??

Me and my cupcakes!


Sis and I with our cheesecake bases!


The gelatin sheets, pre-soaked!
(At this point, filled with hope and great expectations)


Tired, sweaty, wholly unattractive, and ... actually rather tickled by the spectacle :D
(With what we salvaged of the cream cheese)
This bakerina's worst baking catastrophe ever, I think!

*877 - to ... blog?

Once upon a time, the surface answer would have been "to keep friends updated with my life" and the veiled answer would have been "to prove to myself that I am cool."

Now, the first answer still holds slightly true because I do know that some friends read this, but now there are many more people who visit this and I don't think I have that many friends in real life who are that interested in what I have to say haha!

The second answer also still holds slightly true because it's nice to know that some people out there are intrigued by my musings. But now that I've grown up a little and found myself somewhat, I don't have to prove to myself, to a large extent, that I am cool because I know I'm not very cool at all (but happy with it--mostly!).

So my answer now is a little silly and whimsical. I write because I know there are people out there who, like me, have a thirst for words, silly ramblings, taking a peek into someone else's life--so, in a way, I'm contributing a few crumbs back to the cupcakes that I am helping myself to every once in a while (okay, that's kind of a yucky analogy). And there are people out there who might, maybe, sometimes, be touched by something that I say. And then I write for myself, because stringing together letters and words and sentences feels like art, and while I'm certainly no great artist in this realm, it still brings me a great deal of joy because I feel like a creator of something very organic and very much an extension of myself.

There you go. My wacky answer to the question, "Why do you blog?" Not that anyone actually asked me that (hahaha), I just felt like answering my question to myself ...

*876 - bubbles

Sorry, I most definitely do feel the need to push down the previous leggy nightmare with happy photos so here it is: the childhood wonder of the malleable, holdable, squishable, stick-together-able bubbles. (I have no idea what they are called, but they sell for less than 10 cents a-piece now!)

The ladies of the family goofing off.





It's truly a wonderful thing that one takes for granted so easily, living with the family. Above friends or boyfriends, family is really the only true constant in my life. Here, I never feel alone, because no matter what terrible things happen in my life, I come home at the end of the day to a happy, loving, blessed family.

I wish I could squish them into my luggage and whisk them over to Boston with me ...

*875 - home remedy for bruises?

My apologies for making you observe my mottled stump of a leg, looking oddly severed due to the nature of the photo, but here it is:



Ahhh!! The spots nearer the ankle are vicious mozzie bites that are not the point of this picture, albeit ugly.

The point is that I currently have a gaggle of angry bruises, the surface area of which add up to the area of about two of my fists. I'm not entirely sure what happened, but I know it happened on Saturday, probably at St James because I was being jostled around wildly, but the odd thing was that it couldn't have been anything terribly dramatic because I was not in any extraordinary type of pain at any moment.

To add to that, I have a scattering of milder-looking bruises from dance today on both knees.

So, my concern is not that they hurt. My concern is purely aesthetic--what do I do on Saturday when I have to be all prettied up for the brother's wedding?? I don't want to look abused!!

Hahaha lots of concealer, foundation, and powder, probably!

*874 - riches

I wonder what it would be like to be $$$$ rich. Not celebrity rich, but "normal" rich kid type rich.

Have recently chanced upon some friends of friends' blogs (in the Rafflesian world, I think the "two degrees of separation" concept holds better) and, wow, what a lifestyle of decadence! I guess it would be nice ...

... to float into a bar without having to howl over $21 bar cover charges a la last night (haha! we almost turned away, but now I think it was worth it!)
... to be able to take two dance classes at Jitterbugs in a row without jaws dropping at the $40 that just vanished (seriously)
... to have lots and lots of gorrrrgeous clothing and to join the ranks of the designer bag wielding folk
... to eat at fancy restaurants that I always wish I could try, yummm
... to have half a dozen maids at your beck and call (ok, not sure if I truly believe in this one)
... to have a car of my own--how convenient that would be!! But soon, hooray to $6000 cars in the US :D
... to be pretty?? Have you noticed that the rich kids are pretty and hot?? I don't really understand how this one works.

Well, to be fair, I'm perfectly happy where I am right now because my family has been blessed in many many ways and my complaints are not truly in earnest at all! Just pondering upon the fact that money dictates your lifestyle and does have the ability to bring (amongst other negative things), to some extent, happiness.

*873 - dreams

I am gleeful after Inception, and Tubby is testing reality with his spinning sticky tape totem.

And the photo is blurry, but that's what sometimes happens when you use a self-timer.

*872 - blessed

When a heart is broken, there is no sure formula for patching it back up again, except to pray and believe that He provides.

I wish there was something more I could do to help patch up the broken hearts around me.

*871 - on a more serious note

My data is not working out well. 40% has had to be cleaned away, and that points to ridiculously bad data. Yet, no significance.

Guys, if you ever participate in research studies (e.g. online satisfaction surveys by companies, experiments in college), DO THEM IN EARNEST or don't do them at all! Whether you take it seriously or not actually makes a difference, believe it or not. Data is so volatile that even just one person's faulty answers can cause a study to fail.

*870 - oei

TUBBY OKAY ANOT?!?! - asks the lightweight

*869 - away from home

Honestly, I'm terrified of leaving home again.

*868 - satie

I have a new favorite composer (being able to say something like this makes one sound very much more posh than one actually is): Erik Satie.

My first dabble into playing Satie was with Armando: Satie's "trois morceaux en forme de poire"--the name in itself is brilliant! And then I found out that Gymnopedie was written by him. As well as a host of other amazing, amazing avant garde pieces, all annotated without bar lines and accompanied by scribbled remarks (poetry).


Above = what I have been working on--often, I wish my 11 year old self didn't give up on piano lessons so early (for the sake of dance! I guess if it was one or the other, I approve). Still, glad I'm able to tinker on the piano regardless.

Anyway.

Satie! My mind is blown!

*867 - !!

MOSQUITO BITES AARHRHRHHHGHGGGHHHH!!!

*866 - postmortem

Rather unexpectedly, the third installment of the Tooty Fruity Tea Party series has left me feeling ... hollow? Kinda. Achey? A little. I think leaving this time will be sadder than ever, because it's different from leaving temporarily for a semester. It could be the beginning of a life displaced. When I've previously returned, it's been a "returning to the place I will eventually return to". Now when I return, it might be a "returning to the place I have left". It might.

Friends in college--wonderful, incomparable, truly blessings. But friends who grew up with you, the ones who saw you through the pimply adolescence, who endured the silly tantrums you threw as a young 'un, who cried with you over medals like your lives depended on getting that gold, who studied with you after school till the security guards chased you out, who made you feel like everything was ultimately okay, who were so much a part of this big abstract concept of "home" that you never realized until you left--it's just a different kind of friendship altogether.

Each time I come back, I already feel more and more like I do not belong in this country. A silly Singaporean who's always chosen not to speak Singlish, who prowls the aisles of NTUC flabbergasted at the absence of tortilla chips and vanilla pudding, who sounds funny when asking for the prices in Chinese, who thinks the world (country) would be a better place if people would yell "thank you!" to bus drivers as they get off, who misses her ang moh boyfriend dearly.

And yet, I don't belong over there, a little Asian with my roots someplace else, struggling to assimilate and make do with things still foreign to me--toilet doors with gaps, how I can't say "queue up" or "car boot" or "spectacle case" or "I have a stitch", how I can't put commas outside of my inverted commas, how one has to be loud and beautiful and polished and confident to survive (in the Hotel School, at least), how it's harder to connect to people who aren't from the same place as I am, how people look at me funny when I speak with my non-American accent.

But then here there is 80-cent strawberry Pocky, pig trotters in black vinegar for dinner, mangoes that are actually sweet and non-fibrous, MUMMY AND DADDY AND THE SIBLINGS (in capitals because this is a very important point), all the wonderful friends who still are friends despite three years of almost-absence. This place is still very much home to me, and I'm going to miss it dearly, dearly, dearly.

*865 - limbo

It's been two days (I think; the time difference of being halfway around the world muddles me) since I left and I miss you horribly.



The problem with sitting at opposite ends of a table is that you have to take solo pictures of each other, with awkward smiles and waving the camera away!

Anyway. I have now entered the odd in-between phase of post-student life and pre-working life. This entails the following:

- Reevaluation of current wardrobe and a different mindset when out shopping (Is this work-appropriate? Can I dress this up with a blazer? Will it go with my pencil skirt?)
- Careful scrutiny of cars on the road, because I will have to buy a car in a month's time
- Addiction to ikea.com and other furniture sites
- Need for intense bumming, while I still can

*864 - home sweet home

I must say, I'm holding out pretty well--it's 9 pm, and I'm already dying to slither from this chair and onto my bed, but the important thing is that I am awake and I will conquer this jetlag! Yes!

First day home has been lovely: catching up with the Mum. I honestly can't remember what else I did today, besides some banana-bread-baking to keep myself awake.

Yawn!

*863 - and we're back

Rochester by day ...







And by night ...





Very thankful to escape the scalding heat of Ithaca and in to the lovely air-conditioned indoors of Armando's home. The weather these days is, in fact, good training for my return home to Singapore--kind of. Same scorching temperature, but much greater humidity in Singapore. Yeughhh!

*862 - homesick

How I wish I could bring you back home in my suitcase
to give you a belly from the enormous amount of good Singaporean food
to let you taste the real laksa (not the packet mix crap we make)
to show you the convenience of eating with spoons and no knives
("I don't like spoons," he says, "I don't!")
to show you the curry sauce at McD's and the taro pies at BK's
to show you what heat and humidity really mean
to show off my lovely family
to do all the touristy things
to do everything that we Singaporeans do
to exponentially increase your tolerance for spiciness
to let you practise your "aiyah"s and "ah-bu-den"s on the real folks
to satisfy my curiosity about an angmoh's perspective of Singapore
to satisfy my curiosity about Singapore's perspective of an angmoh
to have you leave with a burning tan whether you want to or not
to show you how tiny a country we are and how high we build
to have access to all the horrible sitcoms we want to watch
to introduce you to all my favorite haunts
to lounge on my rooftop at night with flutes of champagne
to show you all the things I talk about that you probably imagine different in your head
to show you my friends
to show you my roots
to show you my childhood
to show you my home
to show you why I love it
(that's where a part of me, cheesy as it sounds, will always remain)

Some day, we shall do that together, shall we not? :)