This night is Very Quiet; through the whirr of the ceiling fan I hear only the occasional cricket whose song pierces the night air, clear, sharp, clean. The susurrus of laughter breaks the silence—someone sings a happy birthday, someone claps, someone else cheers. I cannot see them through the mosquito gauze in this room I have been in for only hours but which feels comfortable and familiar already.
Being amongst friends does that, of course :) or a friend. Or whatever.
I like ntu a lot! I will always wonder what life would have been like if I’d accepted the wkwsci offer instead of law. Granted people always complain that it’s like a little china or something, but it’s so—peaceable. Peaceful. Of course it surely has its little and not-so-little dramas that I know nothing about, visitor as I am—but I really like this place. Even surrounded by mosquitoes as it seems to be. It’s the sense of history and age and—sheer legacy, imbued in every atom of its hallowed halls. Even the newer hostels.
I have no internet connection unfortunately, or else I would be broadcasting my ntu-based status because HI this is almost in Malaysia (one of the wireless networks that I tried and failed to connect to said yahoo.com.my. HURHUR)
I am happy because I know good people who care and who listen; they sense when I’m upset and can cheer me up (chirrup! heh) yet don’t probe when I need to have people not-probe. They just know when I need to talk, to take my mind off me and chide away from me the thoughts of day, away from me my worried ways. They make me happy and they make the world a better, slightly-less sterile and cold realm. I am glad for friends :)
Right. Now I need a really rich friend who can toss me six hundred big ones to settle the repairs to my dad’s car. PLEASE don’t let the other guy screw me over or something (he WAS very nice and he msged me after the whole thing to ask if I was ok, but EURGH I guess against human nature I will always have my guard up. Esp after all my parents’ horror stories).
I have updates to do but I also have about 50 more slides, 2 chapters and 1 tutorial to do by tomorrow (or by the time ning comes back to the room anyway what’s the point of meeting one of your bestest friends if all you do is mug).
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(typed later, still)
Suffice it perhaps to say: dance uncensored was on Sunday, and despite all the last-minute logistical insanities (like mistakenly thinking we had 4 tix for the night show or thinking that there was only one show or suddenly realizing we had NO tickets at all) I am unspeakably glad that we went, after all. Admittedly queuing at 12 was frankly a little bit nuts (I was REALLY afraid we wouldn’t get tickets! Especially after what Thomas said hurhur) but the time was well-spent in good company and REALLY time just flew past:)
So fast, in fact, that all our plans to study became utterly and completely moot. Bleh.
Eeps. But the mix-up was quite a bother cos in the end we had to split up from krystal and collen who went for the night show instead, and I bugged pretty much everyone because I switched timings about three or four times. And guess what I felt even worse after I reached ucc and yvonne heng told us that it was fred’s birthday! And I was like “omg so I basically messed with his plans for the whole day”. Hurhur. And obviously we didn’t get him a present (I plead ignorance of material facts, so no unconscionability [ARGH I AM BEING HAUNTED BY EQUITY SHUDDUP LAW TEXTBOOK]) so I wound up buying cookies and dinner-ing.
hazel was right, anyhow-- it REALLY was an enjoyable show. we'd worried that 21 items was a heckuva lot to sit through (who was the one who said no intermission?? hurhur) but in fact time passed very quickly. most of the items were fairly short i guess. ARGH okay everyone who has anything better to do-- like breathe-- can switch off at this point because from here on forth i'm entering fangirl mode.
waiting for performance to start!
damnit blur :( haha but i was laughing too hard at how ellen and xuzi were trying to squeeze into the pic too!even typing at so many days' remove i can still recall a fair number of the items. i rmb alvan's as being very happy/stuntish-- and VERY reminsicent of rag!; liren's as really funny (hey you might have a fangirl somewhere! cos one of my friends was gushing about some guy who held up a teddy bear, but i couldn't figure out if she meant the fairground shooting one or the mr bean one) haha i heart mr boombastic it's damn cute! and suspenders! the handkerchief kissing thing also!; the chinese dance thingy as being a little bit out of place but technically sound-- and typically chinese dance of course. the girls are all skinny and elegant looking :(; then of course there was the fairground one, which was EURGH so cliched for a while i wanted to scream-- THEN the dominatrix gf came out. HEH. and of course the contemp-ish dance-- to mika's grace kelly! the moment i heard that song i thought: "DANCEFLOOR. PLATINUM. WOOTS". and i liked it :D
there were particularly memorable items/bits of choreo as well: i liked the one with the light-bars, although i was horribly afraid that one would malfunction or something. eurgh i obviously cannot find my programme booklet and have resorted to general name-giving. clarissa's choreo for boys meet girls i mean boys or girls or EURGH i have confused them was good: it was very obvious that she was meant to catch the eye, but i think her girls matched up well. and wilkson did not flub his steps! haha. he'd been so sian the day before when he said he messed them up. and of course there was the "he had it coming" item-- chicago ftw! "he ran into my knife... he ran into it ten times!"
we'd thought the asian house of beauty item might be sleazy or mostly posturing or something (EURGH i rmb watching a girls' hiphop item a looong time ago where the only things the girls did were walk and pose and slide into splits and then do some mass dancey actions together. not. not. not. good) but it was not! i liked the fans; they made very good use of them and HEH guess who i spotted and started screaming for (although she did not hear me. POK.). shitty damn hot k cannot play play-- she'd flick her fan a little bit more and pose a little bit more and her yan-shen was so different from the usual ditzy shitty! haha. PLUS she had a tatt on her belly. HA whatever happened to demure hc councillor who always tucked in her shirt eh. (of course the usual ditz re-appeared later when she said "oh my i want to take a picture with that girl in red i think she's a very good dancer!". FANGIRL... of yuko! hahaha)
fangirl pretending to be demure when she's really squealing inside
smokkkkkin'
unglam pic she'd KILL me. haha. which is why this is not on facebook. heh!!there was something about Bleeders too-- a vampiric saga? i think that was the group that used the world is not enough, which i'd never known was sung by garbage! i liked that one quite a lot-- but hey, it's vampires, i'd like it anyway.
and raffles museum of danceversity was damn funny :D i LIKE. the mummies were v cool i think the lone girl dancer in that group is v pretty! it was so mu nai yi :D heh yes rampant jj-fanaticism. spice girls v cuteeee
ARGH i cannot do this i need to blog in bullet points or sth. i'm gg to type random things!
- zhiwen's solo in the nerd-geek-cool-kids item
- amy's smouldering gaze!
- chii tarng's expression in the eusoff item-- he really seems so very different when he dances
- dismas and his torso pops
- yuko was extremely cute in about a bean! her smile was so infectious :):)
and the items i liked the best: hoo boy. v hard to decide. i'll go with the ones that made the biggest impressions on me-- of course the combined item was good, since it had so many blast members (ok i'm biased. sue me). i thought my throat would tear open when the blue spotlight came on and suddenly it was just chii tarng and weina dancing-- oh darn i forgot the song. ARGH. i remember thinking that it was such a sly and yet ABSOLUTELY brilliant tactic to get them to dance it together.
and then there was vincent, which looked rather familiar (very where-did-my-baby-go), but the song is lovely and thomas' emoting was heartfelt to say the least. i gasped when he smashed the painting.
and weijie and mel in treasure-- that performance was sobering. i won't say more, but it's amazing what the scattering of a handful of silver glitter and the idea conveyed through a dance can achieve. i was a whole lot more civil to my parents this entire week.
jubilant dementia-- i've been saving this one heh. i still cannot believe that they used within temptation! i think i basically liked and felt all the songs that they were using, but the sanctus inspiritus one really came as a surprise. and the staging and colours, formation-- everything. it kind of elevated the usual boys-fight-over-a-girl trope into something more-- ethereal? not exactly. i can't find the word-- maybe the sheer viscerality of the costume colours or the amalgamation of all the different dance styles-- breaking, a bit of contemp, hip hop, -- some pas de deux?-- were the clinching factors? anyway i likeeee.
phototaking and congratulations thereafter :)
fritzie the soccer girl: "she's like a STAR, like a STAR"
erhem. less said about this the better. HAHA.
pop-leg happy!
mel! the friendly one who always saved my butt in property or contract, i forget which. obviously i';m not usually awake during lessons.
mr boombastic himself! :):)
colours and inversion. i pride myself on having noticed!
lots of pic takinggg
happy people :):) ellen looks GORGEOUS.
my fellow lawyer/senior-for-two-schools-who-is-now-my-junior.
aisha, who comes without fail to support us all the time. this girl is a joy to dance with! and she brought chocs for alvan heh obviously she remembered this:
HAHA.
BLAST. <3_____________________________________________
(typed LATEST)
dinner after we inveigled ellen not to go to tanah merah whoops. haha i think YY and XZ are unbearably cute hehehe the process of deciding to go for dinner was protracted but highly amusing. (note to self: remember ellen's recommendation for morally upright vegetarian stall along the way to holland v). ellen hugs hugs :)
so! spontaneous let's-celebrate-fred's-birthday dinner at holland v, before which we got distracted by guinea pig hunts, mournful mops and perky pompoms and squashed-face felines nestling in a cage under a radio which miaowed. really. and we also saw a television set for hamsters! unfortunately ellen's chubbs requires a 42 inch lcd, not this normal-sized CRT set heheh. maybe smaller baby hamsters could fit into it or sth. eventually we ended up at essential brew (we passed foster's, xf! scones!) where apparently everything is tea infused-- drinks, salmon, honey mustard chicken, rice, spaghetti. okay maybe not xuzi's spaghetti i don't think it was green tea mushroom or something hurhur. the food was damn good! although fred kept getting leg cramps.
very pretty!--- the phone la. HAHA ;P
the mushroom and cheese lover who refuses to eat vegetables rarr
birthday boy who cannot stop singing bottle pop
food glorious food and i spy a very sweet background
left to right: oomph! (what kind of drink name is it haha you try and order a drink called oomph and still sound dignified), temptation island, jasmine rice balls and fred. with another kooky expression. COOKIE expression
ellen teaching me how to use the macro function on my very old camera!
obviously i still need practice. a lot of it. eurgh.eh random realisation our initials are all at the tail-end of the alphabet.
lurked there for ages; helped ellen do work regarding internet advertisement; pondered why parliamentarians "beg to move"; considered in passing natural law truisms; talked about work, and pay, and selling of vouchers to glamourplace.blogspot.com and novena square; tried to decipher a silver card that ellen had; read suad card i'd given to her (touched!!); was mercilessly laughed at for having written "dance models" instead of "dance uncensored" on the feedback form; watched ellen's v dope vid of this 14 (15?) y/o girl who is apparently swedish (old video. maybe she teaches. YAY can dance in uppsala. i HOPE); had very nice drinks-- one filled with sawdust apparently since everyone coughed when they drank it (mine) and one that everyone liked (fred's temptation island) and one very prettily presented (ellen's berry dreams? garden of berries?) and one which er somehow evolved into whether-honey-would-dissolve-in-it-water (HAHA).
yay i've missed emcc. :):) this was a GOOD revisitation.
apart from that deliciously delightful sunday... monday i self-vee-ed the law dinner outing (eurgh too tired for some reason) and spent the time instead feeding krys my yogurt and muesli mixture (which she liked!); tuesday instead of properly studying we devoted the afternoon to dissections and confessions-- girltalk, in short, which proves my point that probably every girl needs a reformed (semi, at least) bitchy screwball of a girl pal (yours truly) who can interpret reactions because she, or at least her bitchy confederates, manipulated those reactions into being in the first place; we then drove home to (GOOD GOD) got introduced to you by a fri-end, you were cute and all that, baby you set the trend, yes you did oh, which i had discovered languishing in a cupboard earlier that day and had resolved to bring to school because HEY. it was CLASSIC. i mean who doesn't want to choke on her own laughter and struggle to stay upright and drive-worthy while the passenger seat occupant warbles oh my preetty preettty boyy i love you like i never ever loved no oneee before youuu. and pretty good warbling it was, too-- if ever there's an m2m special on don't forget the lyrics you know who to send.
on wednesday as karma for being ex/present-bitchy i crashed the car on the way to fetch my sister, but found that my dad took the tidings in a strangely jolly manner (errrr chicken wings and fries to celebrate? hur?); he wasn't quite so happy the following morning when he took it to the workshop and realised it was more damaged than we'd thought (SIX HUNDRED. CRIES.). refusing to get behind the wheel at all anymore-- and not likely to be allowed behind the wheel anymore, really-- i got a lift from dad to school and thereafter to ntu, where i spent a very jolly thursday night at ning's humble but very pleasant abode (where we did not run, having been limited by my dad [DARK! DANGEROUS! STRANGERS! MURDERERS!] and ning [MYSTERIOUS THINGS HAPPENING IN NTU! NOT CLEAN!]. of course we mutually regretted it-- what a beautiful night it would have been to hit the hills :( ). we woke to scrumptious breakfast on friday morning and she walked me out to the bus stop where i had an all too short ride (no, it was NOT 75 minutes as promised by iris. i want my long bus ride!) back to bukit timah for an equity tutorial i had not prepared for.
unfortunately the tutor eyed me so often that i felt obliged to say a number of completely inane things, including "yes... he was in a position of trust and dependence with his employer because he was allowed to handle the money and... er... mix the jealously-guarded rojak recipe..."
*faints*
ARGH. that reminds me. SOMEONE suggested that this blog be renamed ditzydamsel.blogspot.com. i'm not ditzy!! ok damn the rojak example didn't help. ok i'm not a damsel. that is teri cheng's purview. :P
and now on saturday morning i type this, ready to finish, happy because i watched the sunrise from my window with sarah mclachlan's ordinary miracle in my ears.
and, since we did not take photos for sleepover, and in tribute to the stars of the night (if not present you were at least much missed and talked about), i present the pics of long and long ago. novotel nights ftw! :)
where, however, is abby chan?!(okay great after three days this post is done. good GRIEF.)