Wang's Kitchen

more old fashioned hawker center swarming yesterday. descended upon Adam Rd (old haunt back in JC), got temporary confused by the circular layout, but proceeded to gobble down 3-4 courses. looked down after the meal and discovered my paunch is back.
met up with The Geleng, after the bugger had graduated and gone off traipsing in India for a while. Of course, being my best brlader he is, he gave me a souvenir from Darjeeling. No it wasn't their famed tea. It was a box of Kama Sutra brand condoms, free with a tiny bottle of cologne ("practice safe sex dey.. and ribbed for comfort ley" he said).
....
not that i have prior experience with those things. and in his bag, he had a small box of the famed Darjeeling tea i would have killed for. He wanted to give it to his scholarship officerc/zampolit ("never hurts to carry the balls of my breadmasters") , but after she chewed his ass upside down over the F-1/J-1 visa screw up Purdue somehow pulled off, I think the tea leaves are going down his own cup in the near future. *shrug*
bugger is in love though, i can tell. but he's balless, so i spent the whole afternoon/evening convincing him to do something about it.
it was nice and rainy too, so i also spent the whole afternoon telling him why the tropical drizzle (not the full fledged pail of water splashing down on you type that leaves you totally drenched within 3-seconds of exposure) was and still is my favorite weather back home.
it aint hot, and it aint wet. sure it might be gloomy, but you can't be completely happy init?
and maybe thats my state of mind now.
i might be enjoying life here with no looming lab matters nor the ceaseless midterms threatening to chew me up, but even so, i sorta miss people and places back in Madison.
but then again, we all make tradeoffs don't we. its good and bad. and well, my life (so far) has been a bloody patchwork of good and bad.
but still i miss somebody.

what makes a meal good- half of it depends on the food alone, and half of it depends on the company. and today, i had a shitty meal, because the company was utter bullshit.
perhaps its because i've yet to learn the art of small talk- on the other hand, this skill was elevated to an art form judging from the conversation (or lack thereof) throughout the three hours of repartee purgatory.
the weather seemed to be a favorite subject.
you're from wisconsin? brrr it's cold there. then the buggers from california will chime in and say 5 degrees is cold already, what more -20. this theme was repeated in various variations througout the goddamn 3 hour long tea session.
other favorite topics include : how's your GPA and is it holding up? when am I graduating?
and the grand old game of who's who: oh do you know X in your school? how is he/she? (de rigeur exclamation follows) i heard he's doing _______ (fill in the blanks yourself). not bad huh. yes i know Y too, yes hes/shes ____________ and the cycle repeats.
not a single word about what am i doing in the lab. not a single spit about happenings in science. not even a single whisper about research in singapore.
in short, what a boring collection of farts. of course, i lost my appetite and never really regained it until 4 hours later even though the fare was more than half decent.
you idiots
do you know why i sit silent looking at all of you speak like a bunch of synchopant-fools?
because i've got nothing to prove to you
nothing at all.

yesterday wasn't in vain though.
went out with Wind and Whitemoon. ate our way through downtown. and realised that there are no NYDC-s in NYC ,(and only in Singapore), no Seoul Garden-s in Seoul (will they be able to stand the travesty to their culture?). Portions are pathetique. 11 bux for 3 scoops of ice cream with sprinklings of barely edible shit i myself can add if i just make the trip down to the local Copps. hell, Babcock serves bigger scoops than that. maybe i'm too accustomed to american portions, but even so people standing around pretending to be wait staff isnt what u exactly call service init?
and so we bitched.
recced the stuff we wanted to give to the people back in madison. i know wot i'm going to get now. i hope she likes it :)
(rambling like Ram on pot. sorry folks. speaking of which, where the hell is Ram. i haven't said my goodbyes yet.)
(oooff. goddamn. i havent said my goodbyes.)

erm, while it is apparent that my purpose in life for 3 weeks here, is to meet up with friends, catch up, and eat/ravage all the hawker centers here, implicit in my presence here, was also to find good books and classical CDs at prices considerably lower than what i might get in amazon and/or the bookshops in madison.
while the former purpose has already been, or rather, in the proces of being fulfilled, the second aim has, disappointly fallen flat on its freakin face.
for the past two days is've been browsing at all the chain stores for books and CDs. history of sovs might be a pain in the arse, but i was all ready to continue my love affair by trying to read stuff by Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Pasternak et al, but wtbmf, there was freaking jackshit at all the stores i tried. ditto for the classical CDs i was looking for. Tower's collection was truncated to say the least, while HMV collection could merely be considered classical-lite only. and what the hell happened even to the duke ellington compilations?
........
chillingly, is it me, or is this place overrun by chain stores? what happened to the mom and pop usedbookshops? even in a small place like madtown, there are at least 6 at last count, each catering to a genre. i could easily find the stuff i want there, albeit at slightly higher prices (blame it on the exchange rate). but here....
what the bloody hell is happening here?

touched down. back home! :)
the flight was excruciating. I think, if I ever get sent down to hell (And it existed), my personal hell would be a never ending flight I'm stuck on, with really bad airplane food and the drone of aircraft engines playing in the background.
as usual, I'm jetlagged.
er, i really need to make up a list of places to go eat. i think i still have alot of places unvisited.
..
too tired to type anything meaninful at all.
so shall end here :)

quite an anticlimax.
ended after an hour; fretted for the rest of the day about the exam.
supervisor made an old joke about not bringing any gum "that has sugar in it" .
the other boss misheard, and said "oh you mean you can buy guns in singapore?"
everyone laughed.
and just like that.
my semeseter is over
i'm flying in 4 hours.
and i'd be home.
home.
home.
:)

4 down two to go.
Classes have ended, and I'm in the midst of climbing this energy hill before i can completely slide down back to home. Specifically, this should be my hardest obstacle yet, for it is the history of sov course that still never fails to give me nightmares. Still, while I will never ever again touch another upper level history course, what I've learnt, I hope, will never be forgotten. Sigh, if I had 4 years to spare and no sponsor watching over me, I'd have gladly double majored in history and go on another roller coaster ride through time.
I'd miss the Cell bio prof too. True to form, he brought in cookies and a gigantic blower for the final exams "for his conditioning experiments" I guess it was too out of his image to encourage us. While his papers were a killer, the jokes in them were original and were obviously the product of an evil twisted genius. .
made new friends and lost some (as usual). This semester i guess cannot be characterized neatly into either good or bad or anything in between. This semester, like history or cell signalling pathways, or even the nature of human nature (and even more so, the inner world of Stalin), is complex, to say the least. It is not just a "a", perhaps its just is.
I will be glad that this semester is over, but never will I look back with regret. It will remain as it is , as it were: a snapshot of emotion in time.

perhaps the coffee stained state of my jeans best reflects the state of my existence right now. hrm. so does my mug i guess. Ever since it dropped on the carpet and the handle broke off, its been very weird drinking coffee like that. That sez it all about my mind too. An essential part has been burnt away through the cumulation of sheer stress and perhaps the inevitable one-meal-a-day routine. The rest works fine, albeit at a lower efficiency. I go about the start of each day wishing that I'd never get up from my bed and jump straight into the fire, but yet the neverending march of time somehow propels me from the morning inertia to being dead tired every night and the cycle repeats itself, albeit with coffee induced shitty sleep cycles. The thoughts of home, now merely 2 weeks away are far from my mind. I'm more concerned about how the hell am i going to get through this shit and why did i take so much credits in the first goddamned place.
....
don't even talk about my jaw. it's throbbing from my wisdom teeth and its mocking me everyday.

take me somewhere where i belong. take me home.