tell me about it

I’m so terribly bored of local weddings that have such insipid color schemes. It’s always the same - pale pink, pastels, baby shades that are so leached of color and life it’s a wonder the bride isn’t carried, listless and fainting, down the aisle.

I want a wedding that’s full of rich, deep color - or at least a color palette that’s radically different.

Like these:

Deep summer tones. The red is so vibrant and happy!

Green, black and white wedding. Great for Raffles kids. :D But really lovely and done to perfection.

A Beatles inspired wedding, with a black-and-white color theme. Even black can be nice at a wedding.

And my favorite, classy blue and brown.

See? A wedding doesn’t have to be all pale and pasty. :)

-pictures taken from Style Me Pretty

HE USED to hate Apple products. But over time, 27-year-old Joel Pan was won over by the sleek designs and functionality, and he has since bought an iMac desktop and three iPod music players.

At the stroke of midnight, Mr Pan, who calls himself ‘kinda’ an Apple fan, will also be Singapore’s first ‘official’ iPhone user, having queued nearly a whole day for the privilege.

Mr Pan, who works for an American technology firm, had taken half-day leave, arriving at SingTel’s Comcentre building at about 12.30pm in hopes of being the first in the queue.

He decided to hit the queue early ‘for fun … while I’m still young and have that geek passion,’ he said.

Mr Pan had previously queued up early for Microsoft’s Windows XP and Windows 98 launches, although he was not the first in line at those events.

Besides Mr Pan, there are four others in the earlybird queue, although SingTel expects more to join the line in the evening, after office hours.

To ensure ‘a good customer experience’, said a SingTel spokesman, all collections are by prior appointment. It expects ’several’ thousand collections from midnight till Friday morning at its Comcentre headquarters.

-taken from Straits Times online

Links:
938live
Reuters
AsiaOne （我报）
CNet Asia

The ‘p’ key on my keyboard isn’t working. I’ve had to keep the letter on my clipboard and press Ctrl-V every time I want to use it :(

I think it’s because I used a damp cloth to wipe my keyboard with. But it shouldn’t have shorted the key like that? It was a damp cloth not a dripping wet one. Bleh.

Will be bringing my Macbook in for repair then. I only hope they’re nice enough to do it for free as it’s still under warranty.

Now it’s so difficult for me to type things like poop, and happy, and preppy and preposterous and popcorn, although this is probably one of the few times you’ll see all those words in the same sentence. And my all-time favorite word, puppy, is a foregone conclusion.

Bah.

It is driving me absolutely NUTS. Up. The. Wall.

Lots of nuts up the freaking wall!

Renovations are taking place to build the new library - which happens to be situated right under the staff room.

I thought I could escape the construction at home that’s right outside my window - but now I come to work and they are drilling right beneath me.

DRILLING ALL DAY LOOOOONG. And I go home to escape the noise BUT THEY BE DRILLING AND POUNDING RIGHT OUTSIDE MY BEDROOM WINDOW TOO.

*clutches ears and screams but cannot be heard above the drilling*

I shall teach my students about irony. Case in point: the TV messaging system in school has only one important message flashed for the day. It reads: SILENCE. EXAMINATIONS IN PROGRESS.

Ayup.

For the first time I was dangerously close to tears in a classroom.

I was that close.

Monday is Sports Day. He plays tennis and I go swimming. I’m alarmingly out of shape; last week after swimming laps (and resting in intervals that might or might not have been longer than the laps) I spent a week unable to fully lift my arms above my head. I tried to erase the whiteboard and ended up letting out a little whimper that, unfortunately, did not go unnoticed by my students. The rest of the lesson, I had to endure cheeky little jibes at my lack of fitness, requests to write higher on the whiteboard, and innocent ponderings on just how much ‘cher weighs.

So I gave them extra homework.

Tuesday, Tuesday is Date Night. If there aren’t any good movies to watch, we go walking, or nuahing, or searching out good food for eatin’. I do so love my Tuesdays.

Wednesday is a free-for-all day, and also the infamous Hump Day. Despite the questionable nature of its name, I assure you that Hump Day merely refers to the middle of the week. Two work days before it and two work days after it, so you start out Wednesday having gone through less than half the week and end it with more than half the week gone. Thus, Hump Day. Once you get over the hump, the rest is easy. It also helps (or doesn’t help) that Wednesday is my longest, most exhausting day with the most tiring lessons. Just. Need. To. Get. Over. Hump Day.

Thursday is Nap Day and Choir Night. If I possibly can, I grab a much-needed snooze before leaving for church choir practice. As my students put it: “What? You’re in choir? You? Cher? You can sing? AHAHAA!! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! HAHAAAAHAHAHAHAHAA AARRRGHH more homework.”

Friday is WHEE WORK WEEK IS OVER day. Because of the Muslim students we end early on Fridays; what’s more there’s Assembly period on Fridays so less lessons for us to prepare. It’s an easy day and a good way to end off the week. Friday I like to run off almost immediately after we’re finished, so as to add an entire half day onto my weekend.

Saturday, I sleep in, as much as I can before I leap out of bed roaring with inarticulate rage at the construction site downstairs that insists on doing the heavy, noisy labor at 8am in the morning. CCA hasn’t picked up yet so I guard my weekends jealously from school - for now. And on Saturdays I also have to mark all the bloody homework I set for my students. What goes around. The rest of Saturday is spent with him and/or friends, doing the things that take an entire afternoon to do.

Sunday I get a bit more shut-eye. Sometimes there’s morning service; then I teach tuition in the afternoon and go straight off for evening service. Sometimes we eat at home, sometimes we eat out, but Sunday night is also often spent desperately wondering what I’m going to be doing for lessons the next week and feeling sad that the weekend’s already gone.

And then it begins again.

They lay quiet, legs wound carelessly around and between; arms slung over waists and shoulders, fingers smoothing and caressing and reveling in the simplicity of touch. That’s me, that’s you, that’s us. Nothing needed to be said, only the deep pleasure of soaking each other in. Eyes heavy-lidded, breathing slow and content. Lazy kisses. Sunlight and shadow dappling over their skin in bars of dusk and gold through wooden-slatted windows and afternoon light.

But afternoons like that don’t ever last.

Is it not possible for all religions to practice socially responsible religious rites that do not pollute the air or cause severe inconvenience to other people?

:(

I don’t know if the Chinese are really lying about their gymnasts’ ages, but I do think it’s unfair for people to judge these girls on the basis of how old they look.

Asian teens have always looked much younger than their Western counterparts, especially girls. Asian girls aren’t usually as booby as Western girls. We tend to have smaller, slenderer, more petite frames with less curves, and our faces also tend to be less lined, with more delicate features. Some Asian girls haven’t even hit puberty by 16. I have 15 - 16 year old students who can pass for 12, because they’re short, they’ve got cherubic baby faces, and they haven’t really grown up yet.

I have 25-year-old guy friends who went to the USA for holiday, and were repeatedly stopped by policemen on the roads for age checks. They were TWENTY-FIVE years old. The age limit for driving is SIXTEEN in America. Are you saying that they should have been immediately arrested for underage driving, because to the policemen they just didn’t look like they could even have been sixteen years old?

I’m not saying that China is definitely not lying. For all I know, they really could have fielded underage gymnasts and are covering their real ages up. Actually, it’s entirely possible. They’ve done it before, and the evidence against He Kexin is really quite overwhelming, with multiple sources independently citing her age as 13 and 14 in the run-up before the Olympics.

All I say is, others shouldn’t base their judgments on how old the girls LOOK. That’s just not fair.

Whether she’s underage or not, she’s really a very, very impressive gymnast.

I’m vacillating between agreeable-affectionate and exhausted-irritable. Held the Literature common test today, leaving me with 220 script to mark. I’ve looked through the scripts and suffice it to say that I am not a happy camper. After so much effort put in teaching the kids how to write Lit essays, some of them still give me complete crap. Obviously these are the kids who don’t listen in class despite repeated exhortation and remonstration. Urgh.

Of course, on the flip side, there’s that one class that produced literary gold for me. Mostly because they’ve been privileged enough not to have lost a single lesson this semester to common test or holiday, so I’ve had the most time with them and had the most comprehensive essay-writing lesson with them. Also because they are my best-behaved class, which means the majority of them were listening to me attentively when I explained how to do essays. Says a lot, doesn’t it?

In other news, congratulations us! We’ve got our second medal :) and are guaranteed either a silver or a gold at the Olympics this year for the first time since Tan Howe Liang. Kudos - though it’s a tad hard to feel completely thrilled when recalling that our entire team is made up of ex-PRCs. Still, I tell myself, all of us Chinese Singaporeans came from China at some point in our ancestry, so why is it any different that they are first-gen immigrants? I only hope that Singapore is truly their country in their hearts. The match was brilliant though. Hats off to Feng Tian Wei for an inspiring win.

And because I am soppy and a hopeless romantic and am currently in agreeable-affectionate mode, I just wanted to tell the world how blessed and contented and madly in love I am, just because sometimes you can’t keep these things to yourself.

<3