Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Apologies for disappearing for two weeks. I shouldn't have left you, without a dope beat to step to, step to, step to..
So last week was:
My superdupercrazyinhuman feat of completing two papers in two days. Especially crazy was Monday night when I started a 3000 word paper at 8pm, due at 5.20pm the following day. Would probably have died if the girlfriend hadn't come to the rescue with a grilled chicken sandwich, and two humongous cans of energy drink. As well as I can usually take last minute assignments, I was really pushing it with that one. I found myself, at 4.50am, typing random words like Apple and Hey Day in my essay on "Using deterrence against China". Even though my eyes were physically wide awake, my brain was falling asleep and tripping over itself.
I eventually did manage to get the entire paper together, after 2 hours of sleep and skipping all of my classes the next day. (and after a frantic 40 minute rush to format/edit the paper, grab my bike, cycle down to the lecture and hand in the paper -just- in time as my TA was leaving. Awesomeness.) I doubt I'll ever do that again though, my body might just collapse from sheer exhaustion.
A talk by none other than Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics, an event I'd been looking forward to for weeks now. Although arguably the furthest thing from an Economics text you can find, Freakonomics was what got me interested in the field in the first place. I think that it actually made Economics, well, sexy. It was sexy to be a nerdy smart economist who could quantify and model everyday occurrences, which I never got round to achieving, but found my one true academic love anyway. But I digress. Levitt's talk was much like his book: he covered random anecdotes from previous studies he had done, all of them quirky, some of them controversial, all of them extremely interesting. He jumped from telling us how he wrote a computer program to assign his friends into housing assignments, to explaining how the Dictator's Game didnt really demonstrate altruism in society, to how he hired a prostitute to teach his economics class at UChig. He was an excellent speaker, though it had been obvious that he had done that whole speech many times before.
The one quote I took away from his talk? "If you're not as good as everybody else in doing something, you're better off doing something completely different, and being the best at it."
Spoken like a true economist.
My excruciatingly painful and exorbitantly expensive ROOT CANAL done last Thursday. So I'd been having a super sensitive molar for the past year, which I highly suspect was the result of a botched filling last summer by one of those sketchy neighborhood gahmen dentist clinics back home in Singapore. This sensitive molar started acting up in recent weeks, rousing me from my sleep in excruciating pain. To cut a long story short, yes, that stupid dentist had screwed up my tooth with her crappy filling, so I had to get a root canal at Penn Dental which set me back by $600 frickin US dollars.
In case you didnt know, a root canal is an extremely painful procedure where the dentist drills through your teeth, takes out all the nerves, and fills it up again. (Okay fine, all you smartypants who are screaming bloody murder at that horrible explanation) To my surprise, my dentist did an excellent job and thanks to his very effective anesthetic, I didnt feel a thing all through the procedure. However, my only gripe? Keeping my mouth open for THREE FRICKIN HOURS. Omg. They put this clamp in your mouth so you can't close it even if you wanted to, with a latex thingy around your tooth to keep the saliva out. and it hurts like a bitch. No kidding. It sucks to be conscious of the throbbing pain in your open jaw, while not knowing when it'll end, and you cant even ask your dentist how much longer this is gonna take because your mouth is, well, clamped open.
Lessons learnt?
Start your papers early, learn Economics, and keep your teeth clean.
he rocked the party at 11:43 PM |
Sunday, April 13, 2008
This year's Spring Fling weekend was easily waaay more enjoyable than last year's.
In a nutshell, it was:
1) Dying with the girlfriend: she had the fever, I had a massive toothache. Nothing like pain to bring 2 people together.
2) Meeting the girlfriend's brother (who's literally a rock star!) and his 2 friends who were thinking of coming to Penn. Telling him army anecdotes and why he should pick Stanford over Penn (haha), liking him from the start, and seeing how adorable the girlfriend is when she's fussing over him :)
3) Fried Oreos, silly funfair games (see below), drunk people, bad rock bands, Dhamaka$tric+lyFunkFreaksoftheBeat blahblahblah on stage (twinge of longing, again), being silly and prancing around in the Quad
4) Fling concert featuring OK Go, Gym Class Heroes, and Ludacris! The lineup sounds more impressive than the concert actually was. I was sitting so far back that I couldnt even see their faces, plus I didnt know most of the songs from the first 2 acts. Ludacris was pretty awesome but the roommate forced me to leave early so that we could prepare for:
5) Club 709's VIP Party! Or rather, our highly successful house party we threw for our friends. 200 people invited, 400 bucks worth of alcohol, black light, blue, purple and pink cellophaned lightbulbs, self-made mojitos, our entire living room, sans furniture, converted into a MASSIVE dance floor, and AMAZING turnout! Our room has never been so packed before. To top it all off, the cops came to bust it. (ok fine, they told me to tone the music down in a really stern way, but it was still pretty cool)
6) Club Singapore's Fling picnic: hoagies and Singlish accents :)
7) Pregames and pregames and pregames. Appreciating my home for the social focal point that it is. Its fine, i really dont mind cleaning up after these sessions.
8) Carnival on College Green with free cheesesteaks, ice cream and cotton candy, DJ spinning next to the Button, silly inflatable obstacle courses, Twister and laser tag.
9) Pan Asian's third post concert afterparty
10) Absolutely no work done. (actually, I havent been doing work since 3 weeks ago)
11) Spending my time with you and loving it :) And yes, dear reader, perhaps its timely for me to release a picture of the one that has been occupying my days, my mind, and my heart for the past 2 months:
(actually, i put up another picture before this, but she exercised her veto rights over it.)
he rocked the party at 11:00 PM |
Friday, April 04, 2008
Couldn't have said it better myself.
he rocked the party at 8:52 AM |
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
So it just occurred to me just how all my current, most pressing problem can be solved with money. Moneymoneymoney.
With money, I could move into the Radian, a wonderfulexpensive new housing project that's being built just half a block from where I'm staying. Brand, spanking new furniture, recreation room, gym, retail shops, restaurants, and best of all, your. Own. Washing. Machine. Yes, and it also costs almost twice my monthly rent. Don't get me wrong. I love my room (aka Club 709). Its cosy, warm, and I have an amazingly comfortable queen sized bed. I have the best roommate in the world. Our place is the number 1 choice for pregames, beer pong, dvd watching, and silly drunken games. But I hate being cut off from the world, I hate being woken up in the middle of the night by the glare of the kitchen light.
Oh, why do I even bother. It's not going to happen anyway.
With money, I could do what I can't publicly state on this blog. Such a paradox, such a paradox, that the very source of my opportunities should also shackle me to a fate I dread.
A small, gnawing, cold disquiet has gripped me the past few days. Perhaps due to a combination of factors. Damn it, it's always these small, little hiccups that clump together and ruin my mood. I get tired, cranky, and stare into space. (and blog long, incoherent posts, apparently.) Am I jaded so easily? Perhaps it is opportunities, or the opportunity of opportunities, of a new, exciting future that fuel my spirit. Take them away, tell me that I (and I hate to say it) failed, and I am an empty shell. It always begins with that word "unfortunately".. as if its a fucking twist of fate. Then a sympathetic smile, the cursory courtesy, and they leave you alone to rot and mull over what went wrong.
Another form of disquiet lately, affected by small, unintended words. A sense of foreboding?
I need to steel myself.
Oh, give me back my innocence, my optimism, my life-grabbing zest.
he rocked the party at 11:06 PM |
Forgive my totally uninspired title; its 4.06am, I've just woken up from taking a 15 min nap on the girlfriend's kitchen table, having fallen asleep after 2 readings on terrorism. (gawd. those IR classes are really interesting, but the readings just -kill- me)
Had the best deal ever when I went up to New York with the girlfriend last weekend to watch Spring Awakening for a mere $40. For all you uneducated, uncultured readers (its okay, I fall in the same category), Spring Awakening is a broadway show and last year's Tony Award winner. It has a sexually charged, powerful plot, amazing singing, and subtle, adult, ironic humor that i love. It also featured, among other things, a full blown sex scene between the 2 leads with lots of exposed, ahem, body parts. Definitely suitable for kids (if you've spent all their lives convincing them that babies come from the stork). Was certainly one of the better broadway shows I've seen lately though. I still cant decide if Rent or this is better.
Denise (who was visiting Penn for a month long stint at the hospital) left yesterday, so I went with her to the Mutter Museum because she really wanted to go. It was totally warped and disturbing, yet alluringly fascinating as well: exhibits on cojoined twins and strange illnesses, toolkits of sharp instruments, an entire shelf-ful of real human skulls, a drawerful of objects that people have swallowed (including buttons, jewellery, bones, and hardware), and the body of the 'soap lady' - a lady whose fats decomposed into soap once she died.
The parents are visiting this Thursday. Am half excited, yet guilty that I can't spend as much time with them as I want to. Even with absolutely no Pan Asian, Oflow, Club Singapore events going on, I'm still uber busy this weekend (where half of Penn's organizations have decided to throw their parties/shows/retreats, etcetc), and the next (which is SPRING FLING, baby!) Penn is wonderful for providing all these opportunities to have fun/get drunk/watch hiphopacapellacultureshows/walk for cancer research, but it sure as hell frustrates you when you have to split your precious weekend time between them. Its even worse when you need to plan an itinerary for your family who has never seen Penn before. (mmmm, i have a feeling that they wont take too favorably with the sight of half of Penn walking around drunk at 3pm during Fling weekend though)
The girlfriend's feeling apprehensive about meeting them. I keep telling her that she has nothing to worry about. My parents are the nicest people in the world. It sometimes seems as if they are trying to make a good impression on my friends/significant others instead of the other way round.
Watching that dance group is a bittersweet experience indeed. But its different from previous semesters. I no longer feel the sense of injustice/indignation that came before (the 'dammit, I can do that too, why the hell wont you pick me?!' feeling). Instead, there's a gnawing discomfort that what if, what if I am really not good enough? What if I am destined to be trapped forever in hip-hop mediocrity, executing moves that are cool for an amateur but no where near professional? I used to think that my style, my essence, my attitude, my moves were close to the same standards as those supposed semi-professionals. Yet, many instances of feedback and aesthetic frustration on my part constantly challenge that belief, leaving me seriously doubting that one talent that I used to flaunt so confidently and smoothly. How, how, how do I tangibly improve my dancing?
Speaking of dance, the girlfriend and I have been suckered into the America's Best Dance Crew craze. Kaba Modern is my favorite, while she thinks Jabbawockeez deserved to win.
(by the way, you're the best thing that's ever happened to me) :)
he rocked the party at 1:05 AM |
