i just realised that i've missed this year's NUS application, so that's like another half-chance gone down the drain. i went to do the NTU one instead and then came to the conclusion (once again) that i have no idea what i want to study.
common sense tells me business, since that's what i studied in poly. my heart tells me no, because i have not much interest in it, but then again, WHAT am i interested in? seriously none of the courses on offer even pique my interest the slightest bit.
i'm just applying for the sake of it, studying because that's what i'm supposed to do, because i won't be able to get anywhere with my stupid diploma.
i need to figure this out before it gets any worse.
seems that everytime a birthday comes by, everyone involved would wanna pool money together to buy a present, but they almost always have no idea what to get.
my birthday is still a long way away, but since i'm so nice i shall save you all the trouble of wrecking your brains...
- afi i heard a voice dvd it's AFI! i can't explain why i don't already own this but well you could help me.
- vans authentic in navy size 8 or 9 thank you. i could do with black too.
- motorbikehelmet so i won't crack my skull while riding, and no half-cap helmets please. those are about as useful as wearing a turban.
last night i was sitting in a police car, going round and round the neighbourhood, with nothing to do except to look at the buildings and vehicles go by.
one thing i noticed about newer hdb estates is that they all look very sterile, very artificial, very lifeless. like it's a place built by robots for robots to live in, if you get what i mean.
everything just looks too neat and too clean and too perfect, it just reminds me of the training village we have in camp. there's a fast food joint, convenience shop, chinese medical hall, etc in it.
it all looks quite realistic until you realise that everything in there is fake, and that's the kinda vibe i get from the new estates. i think living in one of those will slowly suck the soul out of your body.
mine's 11 years old. i hope my soul is still intact.
today i went back to the dentist to remove the stitches in my mouth. my gum was still very raw because my mouth is too small and my molars bite into the swollen gum and stitches when i close my mouth.
so if it hurts so much without me having to do anything, imagine how good it felt when the dentist removed the stitches.
i lay back in the chair and opened my mouth, ready for my torture. he took up a pair of scissors and some tweezer thing, and i closed my eyes to prepare myself. i felt him cut the thread with a quiet snip, and pulled out that section. ok that wasn't so bad.
and just as i let my guard down, he started prodding at my gums. "your gums are still pretty swollen and raw."
YES THAT'S WHY YOU SHOULDN'T BE TOUCHING THEM.
my mind was screaming and the pain was numbing my jaw, going down my neck, but i still kept my mouth open and didn't move in case any sudden movements would cause him to stab me harder.
then he took a syringe and started to poke it here an there to wash my gum. motherfucker. the pain was so nice that i didn't even feel him pulling out the rest of my stitches. it was finally over and he stuffed some gauze in my mouth to stop the bleeding in his final act of torture.
he said he'll be back to check on the bleeding and i fell asleep on the chair because i only slept 3 hours the night before. now it hurts more than ever and i just feel like biting down on the gum to destroy it once and for all.
5 things i have been doing 1. surviving on breakfast and dinner, or sometimes only dinner 2. drinking too much coke 3. buying more cds and vcds than i should 4. not watching the vcds that i buy 5. going out a lot
5 things i should be doing 1. eat more, exercise more 2. drink more coke 3. buy some clothes 4. buy some shoes 5. stop buying cds and vcds just because they're cheap
the longest i've slept in the past week since i escaped from camp was 4 hours. tuesday night was 3 hours, wednesday was 2. and i don't really feel tired in the day because i will start sleeping automatically once i have the time, like on the bus etc.
it's the same story in camp. i sleep around 5 hours at night, and then sleep a little (HA!) during lectures to make up for it. anyway i find it impossible to sleep longer than 5 hours both in camp and at home. i'll just wake up when i've reached 5 hours, like if i go to sleep early at 11:30pm i'll wake up at 4:30am and think it's time to fall in.
i think this sleeping pattern is super-efficient since i don't waste too much time sleeping, and instead sleep during all the useless hours (like on the bus) where there's nothing better to do anyway. unfortunately today i'm quite tired because i haven't been on enough bus rides to replenish my sleep.
i've never managed to see what the fuss about valentine's day was all about, maybe partly because i've never had the chance to celebrate it. but seriously i don't even know who's saint valentine or why is he involved in this whole lovey-dovey shit.
the only one time i've been involved in valentine's day was back in 2006 when a few of us came up with a fucking brilliant idea to buy roses from a nursery and then wrap them up nicely to sell to unsuspecting couples in the city hall area who were too caught up in the spirit of valentine's to realise we were ripping them off big time.
based on our calculations, we intended to sell around 200 of them i think and at $10 each, which would theoratically make us $2,000 richer. all the money talk eventually got to our heads and so we headed out to several nurseries at the thompson area to buy roses, and spent an entire afternoon hunting down the cheapest ones.
we then proceeded to my friend's house to wrap the roses, which took us all the way till night. somewhere along the way we realised that we needed helpers so we recruited a few of our female friends and told them we were hired by a 'Boss' to avoid having to share too much of our profit with them. the money was really getting to our heads.
so the next day at school we were all excited of what's to come, and once lessons were over we headed down to collect our roses and carried on with our cover story to hide the truth from the girls. cabbed down to city hall because we couldn't wait, and once there we realised that many others have also thought of the same brilliant idea as us, and had even nicer roses. fuck.
i tried to worm my way out of doing the actual selling because i hate doing such shit, and so paired up with my friend and allowed him to work his magic. his magic brought in a total of ZERO sales and after a few hours we gathered to discuss our fate and compare magic skillz.
from what i remember, i think the whole lot of us only managed to sell maybe 2 or 3 roses. and that's fucking miserable if you haven't realised. almost all the time the guy (dumb) would want to buy, and ask his girlyfriend to choose, but the girl (smart) would say NO NO NO it's a waste of money. fuck them.
after that it was all downhill. it was getting late and we started selling at $5 and then $2 and finally $1 just to get rid of all the damn flowers. even at $1, no one really wanted to buy. and we were still left with a shitload of them. luckily at the end of the night one of the girls managed to find a guy friend (dumb) who happily forked out $10 each for a whole bunch, which then allowed us to break even.
at the end of our ordeal, the only people who came out victorious were the girls because they earned commission from their sales, while the masterminds had exactly $0 profit or loss. from then on i learned that theories of making money do not always materialise in the real world, which was perhaps something that our young minds couldn't grasp in the beginning.
but at least it made quite an interesting experience, and yet another random story to tell.
"see the months they don't matter, it's the days i can't take when the hours move to minutes and i'm seconds away." new american classic - taking back sunday
and waiting is really one of the shittiest things to be involved in, because there is simply no way to speed things up. the clock just goes tick-tock, the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks and months pass. tick-tock, always at the same excruciatingly slow pace.
this gets me more irritated than anything because i feel so helpless, nothing else i can do but to wait while the clock goes tick-tock at it's own fucking leisurely pace, seeking pleasure in torturing me.
one day i will die, and i can say without a doubt that Time killed me.
i ran away from camp to get my wisdoms extracted. both on the left side are gone, 2 more on the right are waiting.
i think it was quite a disgusting experience although i couldn't really feel anything other than the injections (ouch!) and the pressure of him trying to saw and yank my tooth out.
disgusting because i knew he was cutting and digging my mouth and yet couldn't feel anything.
that was wednesday and today the left side of me face was swollen like there was a big-ass sweet in my cheek. doesn't hurt much but i'm afraid i'll accidentally chew my cheek and burst the stitches.
at least i've got MC and get to enjoy my days out of camp, like a [somewhat] free man.
'are you in or are you out? you can't win either way,' he said, 'but the fall will be fantastic and what's left is nothing less than perfection.' - from decemberunderground
"live through this, and you won't look back" calendar girl - stars
i wrote this quote big and bold in marker on the first page of my army notebook, to sort of motivate myself in my shitty moments, because let's face it: i was a noob back then and army was just about the worst shit i've been in.
as it promised, i'm out of there alive and i now speak of tekong like sort of a fun place, not the shitty hell that i thought it was back then. it's like i've leveled up and the evils of tekong no longer faze me.
and the same can be said about many other things in life, which is why i still hold this quote close until this day. when i think that things cannot get any worse, i remind myself to enjoy the pain because the more i feel, the more immune to it i will be in the future.
perhaps this is why i've felt so numb for so long because i've been numbed by the pain that i made myself enjoy. i guess it's quite comforting knowing that at your shittiest of times, things can't possibly get any worse than they are (only to later realise that YES, THEY CAN!).
but that's really how it works. as long as you come out alive, everything will fall back into place.
