Casa De Shao

Category: General

  • clean slates

    the area slowly empties of people, like how smoke dissipates at the introduction of a light breeze. I tap my feet impatiently, arms folded, scanning the compound for any sight of her. To my dismay, it looks like she‘s already went home. I shrug mentally; it was 9:30, probably long past her curfew.

    Seeing that I had nothing to lose (or better to do), I decide to step forward to move the boxloads of food off the table.

    Prawn shells, cockle shells, egg shells all go into the styrofoam containers; the tablewrap is folded onto itself to form a makeshift garbage bag. Grimy muck comprising of prawn foam, egg yolk and various forms of half-eaten food drip onto my hands. I grimace at the foul sea-foody stench.

    The seemingly herculean task (there were a good 10 tables in the area itself) was finished in a matter of minutes. Chairs, stacked haphazardly along the side, tables lay slimy and half-dismantled with bottles and plastic bags strewn about. The people who were cleaning were starting to leave. As I had passed my Threshold some time ago, I figure, why not stay and help even more?

    Let me explain a bit. The Threshold is a certain limit where the feeling one feels increases exponentially as he approaches this limit. In this case, the limit was 10pm and I did not feel like staying back in school. However, once this limit is passed, this feeling vanishes completely.

    Probably just me, I’m weird and I like it.

    I mop the floor, pick up sodden ice-cream wrappers, rearrange class benches,  pass balloons to Ms Tan to pop (she thinks they’re really therapeutic and it’s her birthday too), break ice and scatter them across the Central Plaza, all while shooting my mouth. I can’t explain why but I had a lot of fun, expending my energy on these so-called chores.

    It was as if something had been taken off my chest and that I could breathe and laugh freely again.

    Months back, I committed an extreme folly during the other Fac Outing. Was this some form of atonement? Was this random act of cleaning in place of not entering Faccomm?

    Whichever the case, I had a lot of fun with my class.

    The first time in a very, very long while.

  • it’s all downhill from here

    Today I asked Derek if we could go to Bukit Timah Hill for HnF. He said yes, and we managed to form a party of 6 to clamber our way up the hill.

    Despite the fact that it was drizzling (very so slightly), that it was already rather late (about 4.30) and that the hill had no lights or lamps on the way up (meaning we had to scamper quickly or we’d be screwed over by bears), we chose to take the “Cave Path” up, which was some muddy, rocky, bumpy off-road path.

    To pass the time while climbing up, Yirui and I discussed about various deeply interesting stuff. For example, if every being is depicted as a quantum object (which they can be), they could technically be teleported. But to do so requires the destruction on the original copy; will a copied version of you be exactly the same as the original? Will you see out of the same eyes? Or will you cease to exist? Deep.

    Strahan had some difficulty keeping up with Yirui and I, and I was being a prick by constantly reminding him that he was slow.

    We screwed around the summit for a bit, taking photos and being afraid of bees before going back down.

    Along the way down, this Indian guy suddenly jogged alongside Strahan and was telling him to jog with him and in the end we were all jogging together with this man. He was from Bombay (and works as a jeweller which is frankly awesome as nuts) , and said that Singapore was wonderful (he went to Tokyo and Berlin but didn’t like them), so quiet and full of trees that you can’t do anything but relax and also had wonderful people who listened to him. It was really great.

    Rachel suddenly contacted me via Facebook and talked a bit about how grateful she is to be with our class. I was rather heartened by this.

    I don’t feel completely the same way as she does. Yeah, it’s fun with all these people, but I don’t seem to love them with a terrible fervour. Same goes for 4S2 as well. Colour me ungrateful, but I can’t force myself to love 11S6A unconditionally. I don’t hate them, so that’s a start. I like them. Somewhat.

    Health and Fitness is facing a huge huge huge makeover thanks to Derek and I; we’re planning a lot of activities and I do hope that we’ll end up with tons of people signing up. I still can’t believe we recruited Lixian hahaha. Wonderful wonderful girl, she is.

    Well, J1’s officially over. There’s a gaping hole in this end that desperately needs to be filled, but I don’t know exactly with what; it’s like a shitty ending to a movie.

    Time to go to bed.

  • dependence

    All of our unhappiness comes from our inability to be alone. 

    Jean de la Bruyere

  • like a crippled limb

    It was 2AM, on Friday. I opened a new tab and started up Gmail. Or rather, tried to.

    Nothing came up. I tried again. Zero, nada, zilch.

    Normally when this happens, I’d just shrug and go to sleep immediately and return the next day; this was different. This time, well, instead of staying up to surf da internetz or game all night I was trying to send my part of the WR to Malcolm.

    I ended up staying up till 4, plugging and unplugging the router before giving up and telling Malcolm the changes.

    –

    On Saturday, I woke up at 11am. Groggy from 14 hours of sleep, I mimed brushing my teeth, only to realise that my mouth didn’t feel minty fresh. I got up to see the Internet work for 2 hours before inexplicably shutting down. Luckily I’d gotten the hats and stuff in TF2 already.

    I subconsciously sat at my laptop and fired up chrome. I slapped my forehead twice and closed it. Opened up “How I Met Your Mother Seasons 1-5” and realized that I needed VLC to run the files. Damn.

    As a last ditch resort to make use of my computer, I fired up Auslogics Disk Defrag and… defragmented my computer.

    At about 5 I got fed up of being useless and went for a run. The auntie who sold the root beer (Bundaberg, pretty expensive but well worth the price) recognized me, which was pleasantly surprising.

    After going back home, I played music on my now-useless laptop, while attempting to crochet. After some practice, I managed to do it quickly (albeit unevenly) and finished about 90 loops after a few hours. Faced with nothing to do and no one to talk to, I turned over and fell asleep, the earliest I ever had on my own.

    I woke up at 0730. It was refreshingly early.

    The internet came back on when I came home from a PW meeting at Malcolm’s house.

    I guess this goes to show how dependent I am to the net. Without the web, I couldn’t entertain myself, talk to anyone or even research anything for PW. The computer had become an extension of my mind, and without it I am completely helpless and vulnerable.

    Like a being stranded in a wasteland.

    Reminds me of a few months ago when I used to go out a lot. Was rather dependent on my friends’ existence then. Now… Not so much. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, if we’re slightly more distant or we’ve grown closer. But what I do know is that I’m even more attached to my computer.

    I’m such a dependent person.

    OpenNet can go sod itself.

    Chinese tomorrow. Feeling helpless again.

  • woohoo

    It was especially boring today because I woke up at 9:40am.

    Of course it became the usual Saturday where I stoned in front of the computer being extremely freaking useless. Then I decided that I had to go out to buy something. So I went out with my parents to my grandparents’.

    Long story short, it was so boring I forced myself to listen to the same song over and over so that I could zone out or something. I wound up being extremely irritable at the end of the day. I went running out of sheer boredom. I managed to run 2.4 at 13.5 mins without walking at all! Oh man I was so proud of myself. But the timing might be a fatally small exaggeration because I counted it based on the length of the songs I was listening to while running.

    I weighed myself and I’m now at 89.5kg and this is making me very very happy. I’m on my way to reaching 85 (or 80) by the end of the year aww yeah. Although it could be a misreading by my weighing scale. I hope not!

    I WILL BE BUFF ONE DAY JUST YOU WEIGHT I MEAN WAIT

    But I’m slightly happier now I guess.

    And I’ve been thinking about that SNAAP (SNNAP? I don’t know) relationship talk we had lately. They said something about girls being empathetic and guys being methodical when doing stuff. But I noticed that my way of doing things lean more towards the opposite gender. I don’t mind it but being the nice guy makes me an absolutely sad sod sometimes.

    Maybe that could explain all the guys spilling their hearts out at me. I’m sure I’m straight too. I’m goddamn serious, I don’t wear a suit of onions but men are just coming up to me and breaking down.

    Anyway. I was browsing through all the J2’s graduation photos (actually only 1 album) and I was pondering about what it would feel like to be wearing a smart uniform and hold a bear and take as many photos as a puny memory card can allow. It looks memorable, and I have a feeling it’ll be extremely fun and I’ll grin all night with a tension in my heart reminding me SHITALEVELSSHITALEVELSSHITALEVELSSHITALEVELSSHITALEVELS. Maybe not so fun. But hey, I’m a sucker for new experiences, and there’s only so many times you can wear a tie.

    Then it extended to wondering what it’s like to do a lot of silly stuff.

    • Getting drunk
      • Having the time of my life
      • Having a hangover
      • Not remembering anything
    • Making silly music videos
      • In China
    • Making H&F a runaway success
    • Making announcements on the bridge
      • I don’t know why
    Well, you only live once.

    Considering entering SUTD!

  • such a bad day

    I feel so incredibly terrible that I can’t even gather the will to do anything remotely productive.

    There was something in the afternoon that was an absolute goddamn shock. A complete punch to the gut. I get absolutely terrified when confronted by anyone even if I’m not guilty. I can’t tell you anything more (I was ordered not to) but I damn near shattered today.

    And my results aren’t CCCCUE, but BBCDDU which is appearing to be rather damnedly worse than the one before it although it is actually much better than expected. Must be my mood.

    Shit damn why is it so damn hard to gather the will to live anymore.

    But I think I know what to get…

  • 111

    I originally wanted to make this post a little more exciting because 111 is a really interesting number, but I’m just too lazy to lift way more than a finger so too bad.

    So a few updates.

    Promos

    My results were way better than I had expected. I passed everything so far, nothing too terrible, but I haven’t received my GP or Econs yet.

    Pissyness

    So after being pissed off with two people in the past two days, I now know that I am in a terrible, terrible mood.  Just absolutely goddamn awful. Super annoyed at everything irksome other people do.

    Of course, I have to hold my stand or else I’ll appear weak-willed, a yes-man, a complete pushover. Which is bad, supposedly.

    If you’re pissed, you’ll obviously regard everything you say as the ultimate truth. But even after sobering up I think I’m not in the wrong. So I’m not sorry for what I’ve said. I’m not gonna apologise and I am going to stick my man-chest out with pride.

    Plonkers.

    Pounds

    Oh I’m packing on a few pounds and that is awful. But I’m back in the mood to exercise. BLAH

    P-Heart attacks

    Okay so you know I was walking through the Right Wing and there were these two people on the bench and suddenly the guy turned around and the girl opposite him looked at me and I saw her and I realised who she was and the sparks from her eyes acted like goddamn defilibrators and and I had a mini heart attack and I had to say this because not many things give you a heart attack especially eyes

    And I updated the about me.

    PW

    Can’t be bothered. This is bad.

  • that’s a fiesty one

    Post #110! I have no idea why I’m keeping track of these.

    Anyway.

    Archery was blastedly cool except for the fact that the only way to reach the roof terraces at the third floor was to use the lift as there was only 1 staircase and it was locked. Then we went up and we got 6 people to 1 bow and surprisingly we didn’t get a lot of instruction since it was easy to pick up and learn.

    The dislikable part about archery is that it falls under the category of things that you’ve always wanted to do, but quickly turns tedious/unexciting after one or two tries. Yeah, the middle 3 fingers on my right hand are rather sore now. Looks like I can’t engage in my favourite activity any more. WRITING.

    We had a mini-competition where we had to shoot targets at about 18m. They were probably the size of your monitor. Hitting anywhere on the target itself gave you 2 points, hitting the paper gave you 1 and hitting the board gave you none. We lost in the semis blargh.

    In the semi-finals and finals the teams had to race to see who could pop all 5 balloons tacked onto the board first. They weren’t allowed to shoot more than one arrow per person until the whole team was done. I distinctly remember rooting for the girl team who managed to win although they were at 1 to 4. One of them (Adelyn I think?) did very well haha. They got second place in the end though.

    Wang Ce, Boon Yu and I were mimicking Steve Irwin at the back and going “G’day mate!” “That’s a fiesty (FOIS-TEE) one!” “This is the venomous King Cobra. It has enough venom to kill twenty men. I’m going to touch it!” whenever anyone shot an arrow IT WAS HILARIOUS

    Music video sabs tomorrow! Can’t imagine how it’ll be like.

  • The Bet, Day III

    I can’t believe I asked my junior for relationship advice LOL

    He advised me to be more outgoing with the opposite gender rather than being a damn pussy all the time. I complained that my looks weren’t great and he told me that one of his friends also had the same bet, except that he must “get laid” or receive 10 slaps or something.

    He showed me his friend’s FB profile to show me that I had a better chance than his friend ever would, and it turns out that his friend is that retard from BSC who a) got drunk b) put only a single scarf in an entire washing machine and set it to run for 45 mins and c) has silly hair. No that’s not a multiple-choice question.

    But he’s kinda right because I shouldn’t really be such a chickenshit in front of the opposite gender and man up and talk to them without sounding like my voice is running through a strainer.

    Okay I will talk to girls more because they are nice people.

    I am so pumped for archery sabbaticals tomorrow woohoo!

  • what

    okay you see
    if you got your arm burnt by mistake because the gas was leaking when you manhandled the knobs and you lit a match to check
    and you decide to, you know, sue the gas company for it
    but you have a friend in the company and you keep blaming him
    and you talk to him because you want him to help you talk to the company for you but you’re too goddamn chickenshit or lazy to sue them yourself
    but your arm is like screwing up already and stuff, and you get increasingly desperate to seek payment and not medical attention and stuff
    whose fault is it that you got your arm burnt?
    –
    okay shit analogy.