At Last!!!

It’s been awhile since I last blogged. What exactly is holding me back?

Before my first semester in Drake ended, I had to attend to the siren songs of my life. Kind of corny for an excuse, but I really was struggling to keep myself afloat when those assignments and studies came crushing down on me like those lethal waves of tsunami. I swam, swam with all my might to the surface and gasped for air only to find more coming at me, which crushed me deeper into the sea. I was on the brink of giving up when the thought of getting into the President’s list was thrown to me like a huge life-saving float. I was finally, at the very least, afloat, despite having most of my energy drained. And that’s all that matters. I pushed on to sustain those grades and I’m glad to say that my efforts bore fruits, in fact, the sweetest fruits on earth I have to say. I got into the President’s list with a CGPA of 4.0. That wasn’t very hard, was it? Screw you. People get slashed along the way, bleed profusely, and were half dead when they got there. Some were long dead before they were even close enough to have a glimpse of the President’s list. It’s easier said than done.

When the semester ended, Whoosh. It’s like having tons of burden taken off your shoulders. The craziness unleashed, and all you can think of was to soar high up into that vast blue sky like a freed bird, gasping for fresh air like it were to be your last breath. At least that was how I felt. Most of my time were spent with my friends. We cooked dinner together, cramped up in a small room watching “Diary of A Sex Addict”, went shopping, gathered around a small dining table playing Dota. It was so much fun! I PPS-ed when I had nothing on my to-do list, and I was and am really into PPS. I’m watching so many movies, tons of it in fact, to compensate for those movie time my studies took up during the semester. Besides that, I drowned myself in activities and recreations. I say yes to all the activities Amy and Dan organized, activities I would talk about later on. Went to Bell Center with Ryan when he wanted to get some time off his FM preparation. I just did not want to get involved in words, as it would bring up those stressful moments I had a few weeks ago. Hence, I had to put blogging aside for a moment. Sorry I was on such a long hiatus. Bad habit for a blogger.

There goes my second reason for not blogging for such a long time. And here’s the third. Hey! I’m trying to give you reasonable and elaborated reasons instead of saying “I was busy, period”, which is so rude and short when I had you guys waited for so long! I’m being considerate here, so please bear with me. Here goes. When the time came to start blogging again, I hid and avoided. The thought of having to fill up such a huge blank in the story of my life scares me to hell. I didn’t know where to start and I didn’t want to leave my readers uninformed of those interesting days that I enjoyed so much either. It would be very unfair of me to blast your mind off with all the ramblings I had to make and not share with you even an ounce of sweetness I tasted in life. Being selfish defies the whole purpose of blogging and that’s just not what I’m going to do. So readers, you are now staring at the blog where pain and happiness are equally shared. Be loyal to it and regret you shall not.

So it’s time to put my fears and phobias behind me and embark on this adventurous journey of blogging, starting off from where I abandoned you, shall we? …

…Spring break finally came and my plans did go smoothly. Tuesday morning, Fang Kai, Chew, Ryan, and I were waiting eagerly at the GreyHound bus stop in downtown Des Moines for the very bus that will bring us to a place where all the fun begins… CHICAGO…    

I Love My Friends!

Yesterday, I had dinner with some of my high school ex-classmates at Wang Chiew restaurant.

The name of the restaurant is real stupid. The Mandarin version of it - 黄记 - is pronounced as Huang Ji; Cantonese version - 黄记 - is pronounced as Wong Kei; and the English version reads Wang Chiew. What the heck? So I got into a slight trouble when telling my friends about the restaurant we’re going to dine at. (I used the Canto version when they are more familiar with the English version)

Anyways, I was really delighted when most of them turned up, which proved that I am not really a bad organizer! In fact, one of them  actually brought someone along*coughjaspercough*.

To satiate your curiosity, those who went were Michelle, Wei Guan, Li Foong, Wei Hoong, Jon, Jasper & GF, Jordan *LF’s Neighbour and I just knew about it*, Say Keong, Yung Xiang, KyeLing *Back from Aus!!*, and Huey Ee. So happy to see KyeLing after so many years.

My greatest achievement of the night – ordering food for everyone (13 of them) and it wasn’t easy. 6 dishes weren’t enough, sorry. But hey, we did have a balanced diet dinner. We had chicken, pork, fish, green vegetables, and tofu! Carbo, Fats, Protein, Fibre, etc. all there! =) My tummy wasn’t really satisfied, though, but it’s the atmosphere that counts.

Without further ado, let’s get on with the pictures. 

Ah~ What a wonderful family portrait!

Awww~ Me and 3 Angels. Charlie’s Angels? =)

From right: 1 serious, 1 suffocating, 1 AB-normal.

Ze good boys..

Jasper the friendly guy. Finally got yourself a companion eh?

KyeLing and Little Miss Sunshine! Yes, that shirt suits you a lot Huey Ee.

*********************

Second Round, People. Went to Swensens in Ss2 for some delectable desserts! Whee~

Ss2 is always so jam-packed! I wonder why people flock to MURNI every night without FAIL when the place is not very hygienic *sorry but true* and the food is not really that Gooooood, plus the food is expensive. Can someone kindly explain to me, please? It made finding a parking space around that area almost impossible.

I wasn’t taken aback that I was the last to get my car parked. Haha.

So it was my second time at Swensens. The first time was at Changi! The steak I had was really really great. I missed it so much. Coming back, I fell in love with the Banana Split Ice Cream thingy when I flipped open the menu. Ordered it and it was great but I have to admit that I regretted a little. Should have ordered something extraordinary. Never mind, there’s always a 3rd time! 

Li Foong had a slight dilemma back then choosing between soup and ice-cream. She chose ice-cream in the end. Wei Hoong was relishing his Chocolate something ice-cream to every drop of it, Michelle thought that the mango ice-cream tasted a little bitter, and Jonathan, who was sitting on the other end of the table, was trying so hard to seduce someone with his seductive ice-cream eating technique when he was surrounded by guys, weirdo. But overall, ice-cream made everyone happy! Yay to ice-cream.

On the unhappy note, half the group just sat and had ice water as dessert. So potong steam!

Halfway through, Huey Ee and Kyeling went out to buy a pen. Weird. I thought so too at first. Why do you need a pen in a restaurant at 10pm? Little did I know that they needed the pen to write me a goodbye card, but instead, they wrote on Swensens’ quality serviette. Let me show you how sweet they are.

It’s the sincerity that counts. You guys made my day.

Not forgetting Kyeling’s special present for me…

The silver lining – She didn’t get to eat Mango in Australia for a very long time and she’s afraid that my fate will be similar to hers. So she bought this so that I could bring it over to the states and eat 2 sweets each year on my own self-declared Mango Day. Unfortunately, the expiry date falls on March 2010, 3 months after I arrived at Des Moines. Sorry Kyeling! *finishes the sweet*

I feel like a bright, shiny lamp post.

Another lovely family portrait! =)

Glad you guys had fun!

 

When can we meet up again? I couldn’t stop pondering…

“Sailing” Difficulties

Disclaimer: What I’m about to write is all based on personal opinions and perceptions. It may not be necessarily true and it may offend some of you. The good news is you’re free to leave a comment(s) if you agree/disagree with what’s said. But I don’t think there’ll be any feedbacks because my readers are not used to communicating with me.

I have a lot in mind to brag about right now but definitely am not in the perfect mood, plus I have no idea how to get it started.

However, one thing’s for sure and obvious – I don’t update my blog that often as compared to the previous month where I went on a blogging berserk. The urge of blogging just died down for me. Besides that, I have something of utmost importance in hand and in mind to catch up with, to get busy with, and to kill time with. So I suppose that accounts to all the slack-blogging.

Forgiveness shall be given to me I guess, but is that a necessity? Don’t think so. I have the blog-whatever-and-whenever-I-want badge, so you got it whenever I update. No bugging!

***

The problem with friendships nowadays is that it wouldn’t last as long as those forged during ancient times. Back then, once a friend, always a friend, even though it’s an LDF a.k.a Long Distant Friendship, which means you don’t often meet your friend. You’ll definitely agree with me if you start reversing the time machine and go back into the past right now. Of course, there might be exclusive cases in which are not of my best concern right now.

Think. How close are you now with all your best friends in pre-school, primary school, or even secondary school? You might already have lost contact with them and have not seen them in ages. Which is quite a common thing because people go separate ways eventually as they graduate and don’t intend to meet up again. Even if you stumbled on them in supermarkets or in shopping centers, there’s a great possibility that you wouldn’t recognize them.

Even if you do recognize them, a little avoidance – hiding behind pillars and covering of face with an upside-down gossip magazine would do just fine. You think it’s bad? I see people doing that often. Firstly, he/she might pop all the bubbles in your face by not being able to recognize you. Secondly, there’s nothing to talk about in that supremely awkward situation aside from all the Ws and H questions you could think of because the fact is, both of you aren’t as close as you once were.

However, you could strike secondary school out because based on my experience, high school’s where you find your Paradise of True Friendships. There’s where you find a friend(s) who you could trust, share your deepest and darkest secrets with, and hang out comfortably with although you’ve not seen them for quite some time. At least it works for me that way. People begin to mature at this stage of life, the adolescent stage. Your personality, behavior or whatsoever begin to surface and people judge you by first impressions. What about college?

Unfortunately, nothing beats friendships forged in college. Not that college friends are more awesome than high school friends, no. And not that all college friends are not awesome, I meant some. Because of past experiences, people begin to understand the importance of first impressions. Everyday, before they step into the grounds of college, they put on a decent mask as if they were about to attend a masquerade or act in a soap opera. So much of that just to gain a large network of friends. It’s not surprising that friendships last the shortest in college. You may have someone as your best buddy this semester, but only to find out that someone is ignoring your every HIs and BYEs after only a month of miscommunication. Why are true friendships hard to come by?

***

Yesterday, I went out with a buddy from high school whom I’ve not seen in a year. It was an awesome outing because we had so much catching up to do. We chatted time away. An outing would be considered incomplete without hitting the cinemas, so we decided to catch a movie.  

I should be buying tickets for Transformers 2 already but since he’d watched it, we queued up for ‘State of Play’ instead and not ‘Ice Age 3’, ‘Drag me to Hell’ or whatsoever because I heard it’s a good movie and indeed it was. The intro was a tad too slow and boring I must say but as the story builds up, it makes the intro looks good because everything is interrelated and I find that very cool. But I still think it’s a risky act to bore your audience first before giving them the adrenaline rush. If it’s a must to have a self-explanatory intro, I suggest, do it like what Gavin Hood did in X-men origins.

Anyway, there we were queuing up before the counter when I stumbled upon this primary school friend of mine who was about to swift past my shoulders as he zig-zagged his way to the end of the short queue. Although I’ve lost communication with him for years, I somewhat called out for his name. Eventually, both of us reached out for each other’s hand naturally for a handshake and said our heys but his face had that blank or was it a shocked and blank look? All that happened in a split second.

You might have already noticed the contradiction made here but this one’s a different story. Because this old friend of mine is actually a friend of one of my closest friends as well and I see his pictures every now and then in her blog. So I felt like I’m still close to him even though I obviously am not anymore. Which explains why I didn’t do that little Indian dance/hide-and-seek around some coconut trees with him. I’m glad I made that move because it gave me a good laugh when he showed me that “what just happened/Hey but who are you” kinda expression.

After the movies, we had batting in mind and so we paid the Batting Cage a visit at Upper Roof. Sadly, it was drizzling and the cage was undergoing some form of construction. Bah … We crave batting! Maybe we should pay En. Zol a visit one day and ask for a fair game of softball instead. I would definitely be the pitcher again. *Missing those proud moments*

Till we meet again. =)

- Sean.

A Token Of Appreciation

Before I start on my life “dissertation,” I would like to first apologize for the short hiatus. I had only stopped blogging for 4 days and many were bugging me for updates! From Nuffnang, I found out that regular readers start turning their shoulders on me when I went inactive for only a few days. It’s actually hard to maintain a certain traffic to your blog unless you are a truly insane blogger-holic, just as what Edwin was few months ago. I’ll try to update as often as possible but no guarantees are to be made here.

What’s the occasion for the hiatus? I was so desperate to blog about my Saturday outing a few days ago but the tremendous fatigue I was suffering from, hampered my desire. And at that moment, it was almost reaching the end of the month. Seeing that I already have 20 posts for May itself, I decided to save this post for JUNE! =) On top of that, I was also busy preparing for the first Linear Algebra quiz of the Summer semester, which was held today. In short, the hiatus was actually intended.

**********************

Last night, I had this pre-conceived notion that this day would be a fine one. 5 hours before the breaking of dawn, I received an unpredictable message from a friend. It really made my day. The message says, “Yi Hui? Thanks for everything. You’ll always be my best friend whom I can tell anything and everything :)”

People make friends throughout their life. Some value friends as gold, some put friends on hold when they are out of troubles. Some make throngs of friends while others only have a few. However, I always believe that quality would always win over quantity. You might be surrounded by people of whom you suppose to be your friends, but in fact, you’ll be surprise for they might be mingling around with you for personal gains or some other reasons that are hidden from your very eyes. What you really need is true friends who are willing to share laughter and sorrow with you, accompany you through thick and thin, and  friends that could be trusted in and relied upon.

It’s undoubtedly hard to find friends like that nowadays but it’s not a totally impossible thing to do. Once you have found yourself one, please be sure that you appreciate it very well because these friendships are hard to come by.

Linear Algebra was giving me a heavy migraine while I was revising away. Just as my eyelid was starting to fail on me, I received this unexpected message that kept me wide awake for the next 3 hours. Upon reading it, I paused all the Matrix-Solving thingy and reminisced about our 3 and a half years of friendship.

I got all nostalgic thinking back the days when I first met her. It was during Form 3 when we happened to be in the same class but weren’t close, in fact, I didn’t really want to be her friend because of some *cough cough* incidents. Her “obscenity” acts with her friends, vulgarities that must not be mentioned, and her rebellious attitude were turn-offs for me. But who would have expected that we would be close friends now?

As though fate had decided upon us, we were once again in the same class for the last 2 years of our secondary schooling life. We got off the wrong foot as expected. She’s a critical person that would go all out to mark her standpoint in people’s mind, forcefully or otherwise. I, on the other hand, just loved to travel in the opposite direction and argue my way out of hers. Cold war, cold war. I actually find it fun to see her anger flaring up, while obviously that pissed her off alright. Our arguments often reached a state where the both of us were literally trembling with anger.

Judging from a positive perspective, it’s actually a good idea to have some altercations to brighten up the mundane  school life. Anyway, our friendship grew from the debates we had between us. Ahh~ How much I missed the days. I’m glad to have such friends like you too and I hope this friendship would last till forever. I’m never good at expressing my thoughts, but I know you get what I mean. =)