Wang's Kitchen

Before I leave:
Thank you for the lunches everyday. Thanks for the dirty jokes every Saturday. Thanks you for cursing with me in Simei every EPL weekend. Thank you for climbing up that mountain with me - and getting a hell of a time getting down from it. Thanks for the drinks at Introbar, and the wine at Kampong Glam. Thanks for games at your place, and bonus fireworks thrown in. Thank you for trying to shut down my project because of a crappy antibody, you noober. Thanks for believing. Thanks for the presents - the thong especially. Thank you for insinuating that CSHL is crappy. Thank you for breaking my heart, asshole. Thanks for repairing my heart - and giving me yours my love. Thanks for leasing us the treehouse at tioman- we'd be back. Thanks for the movies. Thank you for the treat at Infuzi- i might really join your lab when i get back. Thanks for having my back- i will get yours when the occasion demands. Thanks for giving me advice, even you are thousands of miles away (and i will see you all very soon). Thank you for teaching me to drive. Thank you for sideswiping my car on my first licensed drive. Thank you for letting me drive your car again. Thank you for letting me help you with interviews and GREs- i now know what's patience and what's the malleability of the human spirit. Thanks for going to the gym with me. Thanks for all the jokes and laughter in the lab. Thanks for going with me to the performances. Thanks for introducing me to good food. Thank you for helping me with the symposium - my hands shook but my speech didn't. Thank you for doubting. Thank you for making me pseudo-best man at your engagement- and congratulations with the baby.

Thank you - for this year-long interlude.

you know when you're having a bad day when you get the sequencing results of your constructs that you made after a mighty struggle, only to find that you designed the primer wrongly because you took the antisense sequence of the epitope tag in question.

DAMN!

while staring at the cells i've been culturing (and killing and harvesting) for quite a while, i realized how beautiful they looked. Especially when you've just plated them and they're all fat and sticking nicely to the culture surface. Nice big round nucleus with two or three dark nucleoli in them, surrounded by a sprinkling of shiny vesicles carelessly rimming the nucleus and fluffy lammellopodia spreading out in all directions. order in chaos. ok fine, the bastards are cancer cells. but dang! i think i'm spending too much time in here.

"eh your driving is terrible la!"
*wince slightly*
(basket. my instructor is not of the opinion ley)
"how come during pay-lalel parking dat time you have to turn your wheel when you're stationary har?"
*surprised look*
(har? wth? my instructor didn't say anything about this. and i see everyone doing it all the time dammit)
"also hor, when you're moving off that time, can you change gear faster or noh har? very slow ley. its very dangerous to the other drivers you know.)
i look at the paper; he marked me on that on 4 occasions.
(like wtf! its LUNCH TIME bumper-to-bumper traffic dawg! you want me to shift to third in a jiffy and end up in someone's rear end?)
"then hor i know you want to be very safe la, but when you check your blind spots can you don't also veer your car? I saw you veer out of the lane three times ley."
(okay la i give it to you. i was very kan cheong)
*nod*
"and i gave you 12 points for changing lane in to the same lane as the taxi was changing to. how come you never see the taxi change lane har? very dangerous ley, if the guy doesn't give way, accident liao lo."
(basket the taxi driver was being a bastard can? he swerved into the lane at the same time i thought it was clear. what the hell was i supposed to be. a driver or a fortune teller?)
"and your instructor never teach you when you turn right you turn into the rightmost lane, not the center lane mey?"
(okay la i was being a retard here. that my fault)
"next time i see you, must improve har."
(sure. and i hope the next candidate makes a right turn at rush hour traffic and then stalls his vehicle as a car is approaching the junction. that will teach you a lesson prick. hell i might try the same stunt myself. i love to cut off my nose to spite the face u know.)

yesterday was a special day- not because my cloning worked or that i was ready for my driving test tomorrow - trifles such as these are not worth even thinking about here. (not that I could write much now- i'm still suffering from a block).

yesterday my bestest brlader in the world - ej-de-the Geleng- got engaged . and i had the honor of being there watching it all and taking it all down. it was the absolute minimum- no extravagant boquets, no welcoming gaggles of friends and all the embellishments ; seven minutes in the ceremony room was all it took and tomorrow - and many, more more tomorrows- they spend their lives together as an unbroken whole.

sometimes you just know and yesterday was just this time- i know, i can tell, and i can sense - that they truly loved each other; and thus for them the absolute minimum was more than enough because the point of this engagement has been made - no need for any restatements of any kind.

so congratulations again mr and mrs toh. good things happen to good people and i'm sure you'd will do more than just fine, you bastards :D (and i will get you drunk next year when i'm back for your actual wedding, you chao gelengkia. haha)

while i was digging myself out of that hole a few weeks ago, i kept asking myself why i felt so irrationally betrayed even as i got over the-really-fucked-up-and-much-ado-about-nothing rejection.

and i keep wondering why nowadays, everytime i saw you, i felt a strangely familiar stench of anger that never failed to spoil my entire day.

then i remembered it was the exact same way i felt when i found out my first supervisor in my first lab "engineered" my "transfer" to the mertz lab and i left the ahlquist lab in tears that autumnal day. only a thousand times worse.

then i realized that while i might be stupid and easily manipulated, my heart always feels the truth. it always knows.

and what its telling me, and what's making me so hung up is not because of the rejection, but because by selfishly and thoughtlessly hurting me, you exposed your whole approach to people around you. that was the heartbreaking part, because i cared about you before. because i've always thought i saw something good in you. guess i was wrong. stupid, stupid me.

usually i don't give a shit about these things but, you'll never ever take me for granted again; you will never ever treat me as your punching bag again; you can never ever take me as your personal storage box again;you will never treat me as your errand boy again; and you for sure can never hurt me ever again. this is the last time i'm wasting this space about you.

because you're out of my life, asshole. motherfucking out.

"Your voice it is so soothing
The cunning mantra of killing
I need you my witness
To dress this up so bloodless
To numb me and purge me now
Of thoughts of blaming you"

- Testify , Rage Against the Machine

there was this experiment that was described in neuroscience class two years ago, where cruel bastards hooked electrodes to a rat's ventral tegmental area, and the rat kept pressing the button - to its decline, for the current all because it felt good.

i think it feels even better to have the fucking electrodes out now. it hurt like shit for a while. but hell yeah, sometimes, getting shit thrown at you is the fucking best thing in the world. because it lets you know where exactly you stand and who's worth standing by and who's worth for naught.

and you're not.