The feeling is of abandonment, an eerie sense of euphoria surrounding the whole place, like a house abandoned in some long-forgotten hurry, with dinner laid out on the table and a sheet of dust over it. Or a schoolroom evacuated during the war, with the textbooks open and cursive print on prim little ruled notebooks and a nasty little rattan cane by the schoolmaster's desk, a relic trickling over from the past. You can smell everything slowly growing old, jaded and decaying. And that's this blog for you!
So this blog from so-long-ago came to my mind some time ago and I thought of how it was collecting dust at the back of my bookmark list and waiting for the Blogger Cyberpolice to make it vanish under the pretence of severe neglect. And today, in the little sliver of time I managed to squeeze out of nowhere (no actually, I need to be doing Moot Parliament research =) I typed in its now-unfamiliar URL and came to that really really dead page.
I clicked through to the archives and went to my very first post and started reading, and pretty soon I couldn't help it; Vico had to wait, sorry Tien Pan (: I realised how much this whole blog contained. Maybe not for you, my dear reader, but for me, as Arfan our awesome OBS instructor said of journals, as a powerful medium for reflection.
The beginnings of the blog smells of a little boy trying to fit in, starting the blog because all his friends were blogging, and blogging about the things that happened at school, and perking up the blog with all the awesomest skins and gadgets and widgets, and filling each post with the coolest smilies and SMS language.
There were the happy things and the difficult things.
Then the blog gets some semblance of depth and I began to reflect a little bit, once touching on how this whole blogging business could be just a facade, quoting from one SZ's blog on how because of you, my dear reader, the blogger needs to put on this facade, trying to put up a show in conforming to what everyone was doing instead of really trying to sort out our thoughts.
Now I realise how so many things would be better if I could look at them through time, and honestly look at myself through these times.
I really want to start blogging again because, doubtless, it is a amazing and natural way to look at ourselves as we go through time. But I want it to acquire some sort of purpose. Even now, as I write this, I need to choose my words carefully, because there are so many things you, my dear reader, can see differently.
I don't want to blog for the fact that everyone is doing it (not that anyone is nowadays) and that it is a cool thing. I want it to, as SZ said, be a way to sort out my thoughts, that is, ALL my thoughts, not the ones about school or whatever that would portray me as having a cool public life. I want to be able to think honestly and candidly about anything, and not feel choked by the restraint that such a public affair affords.
At the bottom of the matter, I want to be able to have a mature reflection of myself and be able to think through my life freely. This kind of journal is incredibly priceless in that matter, but not in its current form. It crucially needs to be private; or at least private whenever I need it to.
So firstly, I am moving this blog over to Wordpress, where you can password-protect posts whenever you want to. But do not think this is the major revolutionary modification being led up to. The shift in blogging platform is perhaps the most minor, insignificant change that is going to take place from today.
I am going to really put everything out into this blog, and make private whatever is so. It is going to be candid, honest, perhaps disturbing, but complete, with no necessity for restrain. It will not remotely be for any sort of conformity, and will not need to have an audience whatsoever, because it is candid reflection.
So it is a change that is more than necessary. I will import the previous posts into the new Wordpress blog, but just for keeping the past there. The importance is to make it different, and apart, from what I have done before. It is, as such, a good thing that the last post was a heavily disjointed five months ago.
And in the irony of ironies, I just realized that the previous post has just turned exactly five months old!

It’s been TWO MONTHS since I last posted. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

I doubt anyone reads my blog anyway.

Not that there’s anything (new) to read.

Ok so what has happened to me in the last two months?

My, that’s a long time.

• Far back in the echelons of history, I fell sick and missed school for an entire week!
• Lots of tests and CCTs
• The blasted H1N1 Outbreak
• LITERATURE SEMINAR =D=D=D=D=D
• And my subsequent foray into the awesome world of writing xD
• Teachers’ Day
• HPPS Reunion!
• Super-short T4 Week 10!
• IVP Show!
• INVESTITURE!

Hmm okay lemme start.

Far back in the echelons of history (to be precise, term 4 week 3), I fell sick. It started on a Saturday when I came back from violin lesson and felt unwell. Then Sunday not well. Monday fever. Tuesday high fever. Wednesday horribly high fever. Thursday fever and mysterious muscle ache. Friday mysterious muscle ache persists. Saturday mysterious muscle ache stands down. Sunday alright.

And a whole week of school missed –> English ERP and Comprehension Summative (?) to take after school.

Odds are that it was H1N1. According to studies, 70% of flu cases in Singapore then were H1N1.

Alright.

So I fell sick for a week in term 4 week 4 with what might have been H1N1. Then there was an assortment of tests and CCTs here and there, through all of which CCA was cancelled because of the outbreak of the aforementioned flu ><

Because CCAs were cancelled, I had some free time on my hands, which I think I regrettably wasted ><

So from Week 3 all the way to Week 9 I somehow survived.

Then came LIT SEM xD

Which I will blog about later.

Our History travel as is a Google-Docs-advertisement-like video complete with stickman Raffles and A3-size background images of the Singapore River area. It looks damn cool! Just that filming it is astonishingly tedious, then there were technical difficulties and then, worst of all, I very cleverly overwrote the first scene. So have to refilm. I want to kick myself. Very hard. Somewhere that hurts.

Before meeting up yesterday, Calvin and I went ahead of the others to get some Firewire cable for his video camera from Lot 1, so we dropped by his house on the way. He has this bloody cute dog!

It likes to lick; when I left Calvin’s house I was covered in canine slobber. When you stand up it gets on its feet and paws you to make you get down for it to lick you, all the time licking your feet xO

Then when you sit down, it starts going ecstatic and climbs all over you, licking away all the time. So the dog licks me (starting from the bottom) under the soles of my feet, on my feet, over my legs, over my hands,  my arms, then on to my face, ears, even inside my earholes and finally, it climbs on top of me to lick my hair!  Then it gets down and starts going round and round me. Then finally it gets tired and lies down on me.

I want a dog! =D

I found this speculative MRT map: (Click on the map to get a larger view)

 

Scary! There are dono-how-many new lines and the map is the extent of messy. Even got extension to Johor Bahru xO

Here’s a more believable one: (Click for larger version)

Whatever it is, MRT is a very useful thing. Unaffected by traffic jams of whatever kind and very, very frequent, it is the most reliable public transport system, so if it is extended to cover more of Singapore then it’s much more convenient.

Farrer Road Circle Line station opens next year =D With that, I have an MRT station at my doorstep and the Red and Green lines within 3-4 stops each! Will taking MRT or taking bus to school be faster? o.O

Imagine going on a vacation.

You’re happy. You’re excited. The only thing between you and your much-awaited sandy beach is a long flight. And that will be over soon.

You queue up to board and, being the perfect tourist, take pictures of everything you see.

You enter the plane and sit down, planning to have a short nap before you start your vacation for real.

And that’s pretty much the last thing you do.

Or say your friends, family, loved ones, anyone is going overseas. You drop them off at the airport. They tell you they will call when they get there. You wave, they wave, you peer through the glass, they wave some more.

In the end, you don’t get any call.

Maybe someone is coming from overseas. You wait earnestly for them. Their flight should land any minute now. Then it says there it is ‘Delayed’. Oh well, it won’t be long.

But an hour later it still says ‘delayed’. You go to the information counter and ask, annoyed, why the delay is so long. And then the staff nervously usher you to a small side office.

Terrifying?

It’s certainly like that if you try to imagine these things. When a plane just gets ‘lost’ above an ocean of immeasurable scales, think of the anguish of the ‘next-of-kin’.

o.O

It’s ironic that I didn’t post at all during the holidays and now I post during term time.

Well not exactly term time. Because of H1N1, all CCAs are cancelled, everyone has to go home by 1.35pm xO This leaves me feeling like a primary school kid – come back home, finish what little homework there is, slack the rest of the day, watch TV at night.

But no that’s not my schedule now; I don’t slack so much! =D

Okie let’s see, the holidays. There was band thrice a week and many other things in between, but believe it or not, these holidays were surprisingly relaxing. But I was slacking a bit too much. You know, the usual – chionging things last-minute. Then you realise the immense absurdity of the situation as well as your immense stupidity. Much of what I could have done leisurely in an entire month, I concentrated into a mere day.

So this is what I want my next June holidays to be like:

• Slack for the first weekend
• Work for the first week and FINISH all the individual work by then. (How cool would it be to go around suanning people about how you finished all your work before the first week of hols ended xD)
• Spread projects out evenly!
• Don’t get addicted to random games and software – they are useless I tell you, a gigantic waste of your time.
• Read?

Bleargh. I live by weeks. It is like my life is compartmentalized into weeks. If my life were an Alice animation, you would programme it to run in loops forever.

Tomorrow is open house! I’ll be there for the whole day; there’s our band performance in the morning. We’ll be playing Samba for Flutes and Serenade, 2 somewhat manageable songs. We were supposed to play another one called Pops March (super jazz-intensive!) but we messed that one up. Never mind, let’s not get there..

I signed up to be an usher, so in the afternoon I’ll be showing people the way from the Hall to the Auditorium o.O And there’s this bandanna thing everyone everyone except most of the Sec 2s got; the printers hadn’t finished printing them or something -_- Ushers got it =D but I have no clue how I’m going to make it look vaguely decent on me.

And then in the night there is the English play. That makes the whole day spent outside tomorrow. And the two English Essay-Writing Competitions’ deadlines are this week.

And if not for the damn swine flu, I would have started packing for Malaysian Montage!

My laptop had to go through the installation of a new Operating System, so I had backed up all my documents and it was sent for the installation. Then a mere 3 days after the new OS was installed, it CRASHED. First it decided to switch itself off at random points in time, and then it switched off once and could never turned on again.

It is strange how my laptop decided to crash immediately after I backed up all my things.

So for the past few weeks, I had been using my father’s computer. Of course, at first, I had to install all those programmes I deemed vital for my online life – Mozilla Firefox, Windows Live Messenger and the like with all the preferences and password-remembering features set. So this took a long time to get done as I had to download everything, set each preference and so on.

And today my laptop finally got repaired! =D So I need to repeat the whole process again with the born-again computer.

It’s surprising how much of these small things I take for granted; middle-clicking on a link will make something open in a new tab, I can go on Gmail or Facebook by just typing those words in the URL box, a double tab from there will lead me to the Google Toolbar search box where I can google any random thing I want to. Any URL – that of my blog, AskNLearn, Yahoo Groups, Dictionary.com, will be saved in the browser’s history and the moment I start typing the URL, I can select it from the drop-down list that inconspicuously drops down.

This Tuesday at House Meeting, Mr Jai Singh was telling us about the importance of participating in the inter-house competitions and he told us about how a few years ago, not enough people turned up to form a team for Morrison during Interhouse Maths and they could not call up anyone because no one had phones then. Now, don’t we take it for granted that when there is a need for communication, everyone can be contacted through phones? At least I do xD

When I have a project to do, the mode of communication between the people in my group automatically becomes MSN. For more urgent matters, there is SMS. Ever considered a world where such conveniences don’t exist?

Ah well I think I am rambling away randomly haha. Well, my point is, we take lots of things for granted. I guess we can’t do that. It feels really awesome to know that you live in a time which allows you to exploit technology to no extent, in sharp contrast to my parent’s generations!

Wah this makes me look like I have nothing to do. Totally not true! I should go and sleep now. Been surviving on 6 hours of sleep a day. This seems enough, but it is not o.o

I mean, RI(JC).

RJ SYF was on Learning Journey day, so a motley bunch of RIMB people decided to go watch them play.

My Learning Journey Day was at the Building and Construction Authority (BCA) Academy. It was interesting, yes, the gallery about Universal Design features and energy-independent buildings and all, but I thought the talks were dry.

So after Learning Journey, Haocheng, Kelvin and I waited for Arjun to finish his Tamil compo at the Prefect Room –_- and then went for lunch at J8. After that, we went to the MRT station when I remembered that I had to activate my CEPAS-compliant card thing in place of my old GIRO card. To cut a long story short, I had to take the next train which incidentally was “terminating at Ang Mo Kio” as announced by the cool, happy voice hidden in the depths of your average MRT station. Ang Mo Kio is the very next station after Bishan o.o

But I got the train from Ang Mo Kio almost immediately and reached Woodlands soon. Haocheng and Daryl were waiting for me – thanks guys =D We were walking so fast and Arjun/Kelvin/Irvin/Philemon/Wei Jie were walking so damn slowly that we caught up with them despite starting like 10 minutes after them.

We reached the Republic Poly Cultural Centre place and found some of the Sec 4s already waiting there. Apparently you had to have an admission pass to get in and watch the performances!

The company that had been outsourced to do ushering had apparently decided to start this admission pass system that you could get from any of the performing bands to ensure that the concert hall would net become overcrowded. I don’t violently object to this measure, but it was just absolutely unexpected. In all previous SYFs, you could just walk in without tickets or anything. This was so even for our secondary school SYF.

We came all the way to Republic Poly to watch and support our friends in RJCSB. We were looking forward to hearing them play and they would have been looking forward to seeing us in the audience. We asked the ushers from Extreme Productions, the company outsourced to carry out the whole show, nicely whether we could go in but they flatly denied us entry. Imagine our anguish when we heard that! Some of the RGSSB people who had come were in tears!

After lots of arguing, pleading, trying to talk nicely and agonizing over what would happen if we didn’t watch RJ, the ushers said they could let 6 people in. We decided to have 2 from each of the 3 batches that turned up go in at first, then Johnson found out that the RGSSB people were unhappy about this, so he called Josiah and got him to get Arjun, Kelvin and Wei Jie out. Haha their faces were a tad crestfallen just then.

So 3 of us had come out and it seemed that the ushers were on the brink of giving to all the people bugging them to be allowed to go in. In the end, 5 from RGSSB and 4 other RJ people went in. Wah exchange rate not fair leh xD

So the rest of us stoned outside there until RJ came out after their performance. We helped them take a few photos and then the RIMB seniors crashed in..

Then later was the results where, ironically, anyone could go in. So we all went in and waited for the results. The emcee read out the same list of people to thank and introduced an almost identical panel of judges as our own SYF. Deja vu. Then he started announcing the results. Catholic JC got Gold With Honours and were screaming in jubilation to the extent that the emcee couldn’t continue, just like St Margaret’s did on our SYF day. More deja vu. Then.. “Raffles – Gold”.

I was relieved. For Mr Oura’s sake.

Crap so long never blog.

On most days, all I do is go to school, go for band (or debates), go home, eat dinner and shower, do homework sleepily and go to bed, only to wake up the next morning to repeat the cycle. It wears you off after a while. I seriously should get a life. Just that I can't.

But the truth is, with everything I get from my school I don't really mind it the way it is now.

o.o

Aargh another long posting hiatus as many would call it.

WE FINALLY FINISHED CLASS DECORATION TODAY!

=D

Heh class decoration is a horrible job with a class like 2M to do it with. With people like Chiraag experiencing an inability to make a noise without yelling, it is impossible to even ask the class to stay back to decorate or discuss the theme or whatever. So last Thursday I asked people to stay back if they could to start something on class deco. This is what we came up with.

E=2Mc2/2

You know the E=Mc2 formula for energy… And so the deco theme became

2M energy!

But we did an awesome job lah. It wasn’t a solo-ed thing or done by a small group of people but almost the whole class did it. When it came to today’s last-minute chionging of decoration, really a lot of people came. All the spray-painting and cutting and randoming around was fun.

Damn it my laptop’s Bluetooth is not working and it’s not sensing my handphone’s memory card either, so no pics D:

Tomorrow is judging; I hope we do well :D

This time yesterday, I was feeling a mixture of excitement couples with anxiety, anticipation coupled with nervousness and so on. I had two different images that kept on recurring in my mind:

- It is announced the we have won Gold With Honours and we leap up from our seats, yelling in joy.

- We get Silver and our heads hang down in disappointment.

Ah well.

Today morning we wore our shirt and black pants to school and came to the band room after the first 1 and a half periods. (In fact most of us tried to pon a bit of the 2nd Lesson xD) I had English and Geog, so all of us left halfway through Geog. There are 7 RIMB members in my class, and Jin Kiat was absent today, so there were 24 people in the class after we left o.O

We went in, warmed up and had concert for a while, then went for lunch and concert again. Then we left for Singapore Conference Hall, blazers and all.

At SCH, each school was given a mere 10 minutes to warm up and tune. I think this was seriously not enough time; my tuning randomly decided to go off just then, so I was desperately trying figure out how to get it right. At the same time, Kei Jun’s baritone saxophone grandly messed up by giving out strange pulsating noises when he tried to blow into it xD

Fortunately Joseph did something to the sax and the problem got solved. But then I realized my tuning was still quite bad and my reed was not vibrating!!! Loosen ligature!

So like that we went upstairs to the stage door and waited for our turn. There was a TV there for us to listen the school currently playing inside – so nicely builds up the pressure haha. Then it was our turn. At this point I was nervous, yes, (and worried about my tuning!) and also really excited because we had been practising for so, so, so damn long for the next 15 minutes we were about to have 0n stage. 239 hours over 6 months. Overture No 1 and Die Fledermaus have been the only songs I’ve practised since Investiture! (Except for the REACT song – small thing lah xD)

So we went on stage and started. Overture No 1 went okay. I thought we had done parts of it better in concert prac, but never all at once. We weren’t exactly ‘together’ for this song. And I squeaked – twice..

Then came Fledermaus. I thought our Fledermaus was seriously awesome and later it looked like everyone shared this sentiment. My reed was screwing up! I managed to not squeak and then adjust my reed later lah o.o Oh and I didn’t squeak at all for Fledermaus! =D

Yes Irvin, I only squeaked twice, during Overture, and not 6 times! xD

After the performance Kirk was giving everyone the thumbs-up sign lol. Most people thought it went well. We all went outside and took a band picture plus the J1s and J2s. We slacked around there for a bit, then went inside to watch the other bands perform. Since we were the 5th last school to perform (yes in the whole week-long central judging series!) there was not much time left till the results were released..

We waited “while the judges deliberated the results” and randomed around making racist jokes *coughbrandom* =D Then the judges came back in and the announcer read out the results (at this point I was freaking nervous!).

Ping Yi….. Silver

*applause*

Temasek…… Silver

*applause*

..

 

Raffles Institution…

…

 

 

Silver

Of course there was applause, but we were deflated. Upset. Disappointed.

RIMB had a ‘gold streak’ – 34 years, 17 Golds in SYF and we had just broken that gold streak.

And even then, after all this practice.. 239 hours what not… silver.

Silver. No more Gold.

Everyone was telling us not to be emo and disappointed, but feeling depressed was inevitable. Reading Alastair’s blog, I realised even the J1s were shocked by our result. On the bus back there was just silence. No one wanted to talk. At school we packed up; all of us were moody. Then Kirk cheered us up by making this very important point: the medal we get isn’t what matters the most, it’s the fact that we 1) entertained and 2) did our very best. The J1s were telling how awesome our Fledermaus was, especially the polka parts. Definitely, everyone enjoyed playing the polka parts! =D

As Mr Oura said later, what has been done has already been done. Let’s start working to make ourselves better. And then of course SYF 2011 – Gold With Honours!

Of course there still lies this tinge of regret that we got Silver. I keep thinking how great it would have been if we had gotten Gold With Honours – what we would be feeling now and how we would be celebrating now. Even a Gold would be great. But silver..

Of course, all of us agreed that we deserved more than a silver and compared ourselves to other schools. But we can’t change the fact that we got silver, so I guess no point being a sore loser.

But anyway thank you to all these people for helping us along the way:

-MR OURA!

-Mr Jee, Mrs Tan, Ms Kek

-Mr Oura’s friends for coming down to help us

-All the J1s and J2s who came to supports us! =D

-2M for giving us a round of applause before we left today xD

And go for GWH in 2011! And everything else before that!

Choice Piece – Die Fledermaus Selections (based on the operetta Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss II, arranged by Eiji Suzuki). Conducted by Mr Takehiro Oura

Set Piece – Overture Number 1 for Wind Band (Kelly Tang). Conducted by Mr Takehiro Oura

Benjamin from batch of ‘08 recorded our Arts@The Atrium performance. Hey it doesn’t sound bad.. at least from my untrained, amateur point of view.

THREE DAYS LEFT!!! PANIC AND RUN IN CIRCLES AIMLESSLY!!!

My tuning still horrible; I tried playing the songs and recording at home and I realised at some parts it sounded like #$%^ because of tuning. RGS got silver, Nanyang (who owned up-side-down at the exchange) also got silver. Um let’s hope we can pull through lah. Come to think of it, we probably practised for over a hundred hours! Let’s estimate..

Nov/Dec Holidays: 11 5-hour pracs if I’m not wrong? That is 55 hours.

Saturdays: From 28th February I think – which is 5 Saturdays (that’s it?!). Multiplied by 4 hours each plus 3 hours yesterday = total of 23 hours.

Normal Prac: 12 weeks so far this year. 3 times a week, about 3 hours each. Total 36 times = 108 hours

Extra Prac: I’ve been coming dutifully on most Tuesdays and Thursdays xD Say I came for 20 extra pracs and stayed for an average of 2 hours each. That makes 40 hours.

March Hols: My estimate is that we practised for 9 hours (?) during band camp plus 5 hours on Friday of the March holidays. That makes 13 hours.

55 + 23 + 108 + 40 + 13 = 239 hours of practice!!

Whoa that is a lot. This is the first time I have bothered to calculate this figure, and I’m pretty much dumbfounded. It may be an estimation but it is not a rough one; I can assure you that it that this figure is quite accurate! We have spent 239 hours of blood, sweat and tears (yes, all three of them xD) in preparation for the 8th of April, Singapore Conference Hall, 2.30pm!

Muz make it pay off! =D

Thank you to all those who wished me happy birthday =D!

In chronological order:

• Wan Qian (Facebook)
• Heng Kee (Facebook)
• Alaric (Facebook)
• Rachel (SMS)
• Arunima (SMS)
• Tharun (Facebook)
• Naman (Class)
• Damn it lots of other people at school, cant remember
• Jin Kiat (Class)
• Zachary (Class)
• Ravin (School)
• Hui Fen (SMS)
• Justin (Facebook)
• Shaun Sia (Facebook)
• Keith (Facebook)
• Elias (Facebook)
• Gary (Facebook)
• Ernest Tan (Facebook)
• Glen (Facebook)
• Han Jie (Facebook)
• Bumsoo (Facebook)
• Matt Tjoeng (Facebook)
• Keng Chee (Facebook)
• Lionel Deng (Facebook)
• Arjun (Facebook)
• Gerald Tan (Facebook)
• Basil (Facebook)
• Sean Tan (Facebook)

Please tag if you are not in this list but are supposed to be in it.

Heh looks like Facebook is the new medium of mainstream communication.

My parents got this awesome cake:

This post is 3 days late o.o I should wish myself happy birthday..

Yes, I am born on April Fools Day, and I’m proud of it! And I’m not joking! Haha even my aunt thought she was being the victim of an April Fool’s Day prank when she was told of my birth.

The good thing about having your birthday on April Fool’s Day is that people remember it xD but there are also people who don’t believe it’s your birthday.

PIECE OF ADVICE: Use Microsoft Publisher for the English To Kill A Mockingbird freesheet assignment! All the formatting work is already done on templates in Publisher, so all I need to do is copy and paste the content into the Publisher document. It’s awesome, go try it!

SYF IS IN 9 DAYS!!!! xO xO

We’re doing cutting already – that is, if you spoil the music at certain parts, you don’t play those parts. I got cut for a few run-ups and the ending of Overture. Those were more or less expected lah, I can’t get fingering evenly. But everyone except for Brandon/Andy/Ying Cheng/Irvin got cut for the whole of parts D and E in Overture – didn’t see that coming. xD

Anyway, I think if I get cut then I can concentrate more on the parts not cut lah. And try to get ‘uncut’ for the cut parts =D

Tomorrow is STAFF TRAINING DAY! =D

We had batch CIP today – doing a flag day for Viriya Community Services. To say the truth, it was damn fun! =D

I signed up for the morning shift (since I had band in the afternoon) at Ang Mo Kio. There were people from Viriya who were giving out the donation bags (yeah, not tins, bags. They’re much easier to carry around anyway). After a long queue to get the bags, Ming Jin, Liang Pu and I decided to go around together.

Ming Jin had the bright idea of going to the bus stop opposite AMK MRT station, well away from all the guys crowding around the MRT station seeking donations. Well this was a good idea since we could ambush the hordes getting off the buses. Um, thanks Ming Jin!

So whenever a bus came, this was the conversation that followed:

Me yelling at random people with a bigbig smile: Good morning sir, would you like to help Viriya Community Services?

And this always had three outcomes:

Number 1: The person digs in his/her wallet as he approaches you and takes out a few coins. While this takes place, this person may ask you about the VWO or what cause this donation supports. The person then puts the money in, takes his sticker and walks away with a smile.

Number 2: The person smiles sparsely and indicating that he doesn’t want to donate, walks past you.

Number 3: The person dao-es you, pretends you never said anything to him, or even worse, looks away.

I think the way some people just blatantly ignored you was disgusting. And the thing is, 80% of the people I asked for donations did this ignoring. At least 15% declined while 5% donated which is, of course, great. But absolutely ignoring someone is just wrong! It just feels extremely irritating when someone pretends you don’t exist.

It was damn fun competing with each other for donations xD Like a bus comes, then all 3 of us rush to stand at the door and start yelling out pleas for donations. Many little kids were going “Mummy, I want sticker” at their parents. It’s amusing to see their joy on getting what may seem to us such a random, trivial thing.

Most of the donations were in coins – 50c to $1. A really generous soul cared enough to donate $10! xD And when we walked by the MRT station, we kept asking people ho had already donated. Then they showed their stickers: Amulets of Protection from the Flag Day lol.

It was interesting to see human nature alive in people – how they react to a request for donating to the needy really shows you what kind of person they are. And the really random thing was that it was quite easy to tell someone’s reaction to a request for donation just by taking a look at them.

Ah well it was a good experience lah.  

(Nothing better to do..)

 

I should go to sleep soon..

Yesterday it was swimming/water polo for PE. 500m endurance swimming was okay but I was dying during water polo! How do you tread water properly??

Then later assembly; it was a talk by Mrs Lim. She started off with a message on seizing opportunities – she gave out Popular bookshop vouchers for no reason. People just ran up to the stage and snatched the vouchers from her!

And I missed a line in RPOH…

SYF Soundtest!

After school I did homework in the library till around 5 and then went for dinner with Chiraag and Jie Qi. Then we went to the band room and moved stuff down to the buses and then to Singapore Conference Hall.

The concert hall is quite a large one and I realised how crazy the acoustics in such places are; any sound you make is amplified by hundreds of times! As a band, our playing was bad today. Lots of tuning, rhythm blah blah problems. Essentially we didn’t sound ‘together’. D:

But I guess on an individual level I was decent. I think I have improved by leaps and bounds in the past couple of weeks. My squeaking rate has plummeted! =D My rhythm is a bit better, tuning not sure, tone is still screwed.

So March Holidays Term 1 Week 11 ends and Term 1 starts.

I remember my March holidays last year – the first school holiday I had after joining RI. I can remember emoing over how packed the holidays were and how I got absolutely no rest; some big science project, tonnes of other homework, RE, band camp, lots of other things.

I guess these March holidays weren’t much different, if not much more packed.

Friday (Holiday for RJC’s good A-Level results! xD)	Band (8-1)
Saturday	Band (1-5)
Sunday	(Went out in the morning, skatezone reunion in afternoon)
Monday	Band Camp!
Tuesday	Band Camp! =D
Wednesday	Violin lesson –_- (Entire Morning)
Thursday	Violin lesson again (Entire Morning)
Friday	Band (8-1) CEC Training (8-12), Debates (1-3)
Saturday	Band (1-5)
Sunday	HOMEWORK

To all those #$%^&* who didn’t have to go back to school even once during the holidays…

Lots of band lah, but SYF is in 16 days!!! D:

And violin lesson…  -.-  Sigh

You’ll be able to see that I had not a single absolutely free day like one you would expect of a holiday. Thus I rename this week T1 Wk11 =D  (The T1Wk11 thing is courtesy of Kirk BTW xD)

Lol tomorrow is the Uniform check – Over my big heavy bag containing lots of homework, I need to carry my clarinet, and in a big plastic bag, my blazer, long-sleeved white shirt, long black pants, belt, black shoes and black socks ----> LOTS of things to carry to school.

Um let’s see what has happened since I last posted on March 6th:

- CEC Investiture!

- March Hols Term 1 Week 11

- Band camp

- Lots of band practices

- CEC training

- My boring life

- Lots of incomplete homework

I’ll post details and pics and all after I’m done with the CS project for Alice and English TKAM freesheet.. Looks like I have a great day ahead.

Hey I’m using Windows Live Writer to write this post. Try it; it seems somewhat more convenient than Blogger.

Don't know why, I've been lazy to start/procrastinating over/putting off posting for a long time.

1 month..

And I was sick for almost a week and a half!

19th Feb, Thursday:
Feel damn sick at school, came back home immediately after lessons. Turns out I had a 39 degree fever.

20th Feb, Friday:
Still sick, can't come to school, misses IVP launch, CECC intro (postponed) band and lots of other things!

21st Feb to 25th, Saturday to Wednesday:
Sick throughout the weekend, staff training days on Monday and Tuesday, then got an MC for Wednesday as well!

And all the band practices I missed:
Thursday (extra), Friday, Monday (super-long), Wednesday, Friday, Saturday (super-long)

And our SYF performance has been confirmed for 8th April, Wednesday (a week after my birthday!). 2.30pm, Singapore Conference Hall. And last day of SYF, i.e. seven bands would have played Fledermaus before us.

And my playing still stinks grandly.

We got our blazers today - they are downright misshapen! Somewhat like the Bibi and Baba school uniforms, these blazers have ultra-short arms and flowing torsos like tuxedoes or something.

And yes all the PTs/random assignments/tests to attend to over the weekend:
-Alice assignments for CS
-Alice project for CS
-English TKAM Poetry collation
-English TKAM quiz
-English TKAM theme handout
-Science Performance Task on Acids & Bases
-Science (Chemistry) Practical Test

I'm overjoyed!

I really should go to sleep now.

I'm falling up stairs. Literally. I tripped over the stairs around the Raffles bust at the Admin block and fell on to the next step. Falling up stairs heheheh. I hit my knee and it hurts like crap now. I won't be able to fall in tomorrow!

I'm falling up stairs. Figuratively..

Today I felt strangely motivated to do lots of work. Yesterday night too. Very weird. But I'll stick with it.

Went to Aidan's house today to random around.I vaguely learnt some guitar chords. Taboo was random! Lunch was awesome.

Aidan's dad has archer fish - they shoot prey that are on leaves above the surface of the water by spitting water at them. So suddenly you can see a burst of water from the tank and a worm put on a leaf falls into the tank. Then.. Feeding Frenzy!

I'm 2nd from left. Zack looks dumb in this xD. Aidan looks evil in this xD. Jkn lah.

Anty uploaded this pic onto Facebook 3 hours after he reached home from Aidan's house...

Yesterday was Friday! =D

Yesterday was spent rushing to different things without going for anything completely. First came the Writer's Programme launch (Farren dragged me along but I found it quite interesting..) Then I had to rush off to the watch the MOF Budget Debates. After the secondary school debate, I went to band before the JC debates started.

Too many things on my plate? That thought has never crossed my mind before, and now that it has, it frightens.

Well I just hope such clashes, especially between band and debates, don't keep happening.

50+ more days to SYF!!! xO xO xO

My timetable every Thursday is intimidating.
English, Maths, Science, Mother Tongue and History (on odd weeks) or Geog (on even weeks) - all the content-based subjects lined up together.

But thankfully the next day is Friday: 4 periods only, 1 period RE, 2 periods CS/Philo (odd weeks) or PE/Philo (even weeks. The other period is English or Science. And of course the best thing about Friday is that the weekend follows it..

I've spoken a lot today.

By spoken I mean like presenting!

We had our English presentations on the Scottsborough Trials trials today. I think we did much better than what I expected! I got through my prejudice & discrimination more or less with ease. I guess in terms of speaking style and confidence and stuff, this presentation would be among my best. Looks like going note-less works.

Band extra prac after school was.. productive! I managed to to roughly learn the first page of Overture Number 1. But I'm still lagging way behind everyone else. Taking forever to read notes isn't helping.

Had debates after band - Anty the pro debator and the seniors were sparring the team for tomorrow's MOF BP Competition thing, so Aidan made me and the other 3 juniors who turned up (on time) today prep a crazy motion:

This House Would mandate participation in HOTA mandatory.
(Thanks to Aidan for the big words xD)

Nothing wrong with the motion if you're proposing. But I was opposing...

I just found out how to create a Facebook badge! =D

I went to Sentosa with my family for the Sentosa Flowers thing today. It's quite nice. Got some pics.









Yeah that's a turtle!


We went to the beach after that and my sis buried me in sand! Not the whole me at least; we didn't have time to do that. Thank goodness. Me buried in sand:

I've been actively facebooking for some reason these days, and in the process I made 16 'new friends', bringing my total 'friend' count to 121. Quite pathetic, I know, but I'm still on my way to Facebook stardom!! =D

Just like Google (and everything owned by it), Facebook is one interesting thing. It totally turns the consumer's role around in its business model. It's sole source of income is not from its millions of users, but those who put up those little advertisements on the right side of some pages. And with these tiny ads, Facebook Inc is now estimated to be worth anywhere from US$1 billion to US$15billion.

Facebook is even referred to very commonly during Mr Mag's speeches! (He's on Facebook, so is Mr Kwok)

Anyway, I found this on Arjun's profile:

Arjun and Billabong are raising money for Music for Relief using SocialVibe.
7:38pm - Comment

Was curious, so I went to the SocialVibe link and found that with the simple ad (now on your right), a sponsor (in my blog's case, Nike) would pay to a cause I selected (in my case, the World Food Programme) for every visit I get to my blog.

One in every 7 humans cannot get three guaranteed meals a day. That makes nearly a billion people in hunger. If I could give a few of them guaranted meals for a couple of days it would be great..

So:

Hey guys, happy chinese new year!

We had a half-day at school today even though today is not CNY eve; CNY only starts on Monday. How awesome of the RI administration. RGS had regular school until 1.30 today! CNY celebrations consisted of a drum performance by Chinese Orchestra (I'm guessing that there has been a performance by the Chinese Orchestra in every single school in Singapore today). Stephen was on the drums along with his entire section. Damn imba!

Then there was a damn cool erhu performance about a horse race - another damn imba thing. After that I had to go for band. I really had an overwhelming urge to pon this band session to go to Henry Park but in the end, I didn't. We could go off by 12-odd, straight to Jurong Point.

After the agonizingly long trip from Bishan to Boon Lay via Jurong East, I arrived at JP to find that everyone had yet to reach there. I waited for a while for Naman, etc. They came and they headed straight to Subway.

Apparently Shaowu told Kuan Hian about the results of the debates tryouts (see previous post). Obviously current debates members aren't allowed to tell people about the results until they are officially released. Then Shaowu realised that I would probably tell Aidan on him and started begging me - yeah pleading - asking me to not tell Aidan about Shao leaking the results =D

Sigh..

It turns out that at Henry Park, everyone broke into their little groups and went to Jurong Point and for lunch there seperately. The cliques never cease do they?

After lunch, we somehow managed to get together and take a look at the cinema and arcade. Some people didn't want to watch a movie and most of us thought the arcade wasn't great. So we stood at the wooden bridge-like structure on the 3rd floor of JP deliberating on what to do next.

Very randomly, we ended up deciding to go to Hui Fen's house to play soccer/cards/whatever else we wanted. We occupied all the seats of the lower deck of a bus from the interchange to her house.

HK and a number of others were walking behind us and missed the bus by mere seconds. This ended up in them getting messed up directions from HF and Elim xD and getting off a bus stop early. Which resulted in them walking almost a kilometre to HF's house only to discover that we were walking to the bus stop they got off (wrongly) at. This because we had decided to play soccer at the field there.

But come to think about it, most of the NTU I've seen is just forest and fields and this pic seems to be the perfect epitomy of that..

We played soccer for a bit at this place you see above and then started playing tai-ti during "half-time" that eventually became game over.

Then HF went and got the baseball things, so we played baseball for a while as well. Then we started playing tai-ti again.

Some time later, HF's mum kindly offered us a lift to the Boon Lay MRT station, so we went off and randomed around in the MRT (Boon Lay - unidirectional MRT line!! -> all of us on the same train).

Wth the picture quality is so crap.

I guess this reunion was pretty ok, but everyone split up according to what they wanted to do. Next time, we must not try to make 40 kids hang out at a boring mall!!!
=D


Really great pic:
Blue

We had tryouts for the debates club today, and unlike last year when I tried for the debates club, it wasn't just a speech we were supposed to make. The new sec ones had to do general knowledge quizzes as well! And some of their answers were just so comical:

Name the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council.

Steven, John, Thomas

Uncle Bobo

Yes, sec ones wrote all this. If they at least named countries wrongly, the mistake is entirely forgivable, but Uncle Bobo??

Then the most amusing one of all:

What can you bring to the Raffles Debaters?

Of course this question talked about achievements and your good qualities and stuff. But...

Notes, cue cards, pens

I'm now officially emo. I need to get my mind cleared before it explodes.

We filmed our drills video for SYF today at band. I tell you, marching and playing the clarinet at the same time - not easy. Everyone made lots of screwups, but apparently, by sheer luck none of the screwups were caught on camera. But a marching band is an interesting thing, so yeah.

There's going to be band until 12.30 after CNY celeb on Friday!! Ah well, to look on the bright side, RGS has a normal day on Friday and some people have CCA till 6+ so I'll just count myself fortunate =D

So I won't be able to go to Henry Park Primary on Friday D: but I'll still make it for lunch/movie, etc after that.

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