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Saturday, April 15, 2006

MirrorMask Opens!

Finally, months after the most esteemed Neil Gaiman hit our shores, his movie Mirrormask is opening this week, 20th April at GV Plaza and Tampines.


Order tickets. LIKE NOW.

Friday, April 14, 2006

After reading Yenn's blog, hey it looks like both of us are going through a wallowing phase in our work. Kampai, fren, time to hit the bottle.......

Yes, I hit some pretty big rocks at work this week. As in, ship-almost-capsizing kind of rocks. I had some pretty bad observations and took a plummet in the self-confidence, and for a while there, I was severely regretting a signature on a certain piece of paper.

The one thing that saved my ship was my Lindy class at the end of the workweek. Kudos to Lindy. It's pretty hard to feel depressed about work, when you're too busy trying to remember something like "fall off the log, 8, 1,2, step, down, jump! Back! 8, 1, 2, step, down, kick! 8..." and so on for an hour, and then trying the same moves without crashing into your dance partner in the meantime -_-!!!!!

Suddenly it hit me how important an after-work life was. We keep thinking about how little time we have to finish the work in our lives, and we spend so much time on it, that it becomes so hard to get it out of our minds. It haunts us after work, it haunts as when we eat, and it haunts us when we sleep. You become so tied to your work, that your confidence, your self-image and the rest of your life gets tied up in it as well. And when something happens to affect it, it affects everything about you badly.

If I had no Lindy class that night, I might have gone home totally depressed about the observations and my teaching ability as a whole. Instead, I rushed [almost late] to Lindy, worked my way through the Chase sequence, stayed back an extra hour for the Charleston stroll sequence, [a highly aerobic dance sequence that left me sweating and panting] and by the end of the night left the studio on a high.

Granted my mood didn't stay so high for long, but at least it wasn't as low as it was in the afternoon.

Can I keep this up as I take on the full workload? I honestly don't know. There may come more than one time when I would have to sacrifice my Lindy or even my weekend Jap for my work. But at least I know now that for the sake of my mental sanity, I can never fully give them up. They are too important to me now, and their importance lies beyond the simple acquisition of a new skill.

And thanks to all who've expressed concern over my face and outrage at the facial place. Thankfully the scabs are healing, and some of them have dried and falled off, leaving smoother skin in their wake.

THANK. GOD. ALMIGHTY.

Monday, April 10, 2006

Welcome to the blogosphere, NudeFish. Though I donno whether there's any significance to your nick, [???] welcome anyway. :)

Sunday, April 09, 2006

I'm a Lifer!

To you, a job is what pays the bills. You put in your hours, follow the rules, and then go home. Occasionally, you consider quitting, but then you think of how bad the job market is and you reconsider. Whatever happiness you get, you get from your life outside the workplace. Relationships, family, hobbies, and outside creative pursuits are what really matter to you. You're probably taking this test at work because you don't have anything better to do.

Talent: 36%
Lifer: 62%
Mandarin: 49%

Take the Talent, Lifer, or Mandarin quiz.



This quiz actually hit it quite on the dot for me. Except for the part about taking the test at work.

525,600 Minutes...

It has been since we've been together. So long already huh? One year...

And in case you're wondering, he didn't remember till I hinted at him that night. -_-!!! But then again, I too nearly forgot about it till it was nearing the date itself... hahaha... I guess at my age, it's more a day to be quietly thankful for, rather than to be spent in raucous celebration.

How has the relationship changed? I think by this time we're closer to each other than before. We've also become more sensitive to each other in the sense that we think more often of the other party's needs now. He knows that ignoring me for a month or so is liable to result in paranoid frenzy on my part. I know that his ignorance doesn't imply a lack of affection. His job means that I'm literally an NS girlfriend but I've learnt to be ok with that.

Slowly we're finding that balance to learn how to be with each other without driving each other insane.

We know more about each other's lives. Our families know about each other. Heck, my dad even suspects that my grandmother is flying all the way from Australia just to meet with him. -_-!!! His mother has dragged me into facial packages that I never would have signed up for on my own.

And about that damn facial package...........

Ok his mother, thinking that at my age my skin could be a whole lot damn better than it is, [an opinion shared by my own mother] decided what I could use was a facial package, where you pay $XX for XX no of facials at that place. So she happily signed up for one near my house, then told him about it so that I could share the package with her and do facials as well.

So since she already got it and all, we went down to the place where the ladies set to work on my face.

After the last time he brought me to one, I expected the usual pain of the pore extraction, so that was no surprise. What was a surprise was the laser treatment after that.

Essentially what they do is to aim a fine laser at your face, and literally burn the spots off your face. The lady gave me a mirror to hold so that I could see the process in action, and OMG OMG OMG I saw sparks fly and actually smelt burning skin while it was going on. The laser went zap at my face, and the offending spots were burnt away and shriveled into little black ashes on my skin, which were wiped away.

That was already bad enough. THEN I realised that right after that, the burnt off spots turned to CRATERS on my face.

Imagine the surface of the moon. Then imagine each of those craters spouted lava and turned glowing red. THAT was my face after that. F**K!!!

As if that wasn't bad enough, LATER, as in after they had already zapped something like 37 spots off my face, they told me that the cost of this wasn't included in the package. And that each spot zapped cost $8. Calculate total cost of my face then. it's not a pretty amount.

I was aghast. I chided the lady for not informing the customer of all this in advance and expecting me to pay only after they had done the service and rant rant rant.

Then they checked and it turned out his mother knew, but had somehow either assumed I knew, or that they told me.-_-!!!!! Oh win liao........................ So now it turns out that my face costs an extra $296 more because of the spots.

So now after all that pain and fire I went through my face now has fiery craters all over it, n I owe his family an extra $296 for it. -_-!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Somemore I didn't bring cash to the place, so his mother had to pay for it. And his mother will probably ask him to pay for it.

A simple facial turned out to be such a tangled web.

Anyway this is a sample of what my face looked like right after that laser treatment



f**kers!!!! and that's just one side can???

The lady assures me that the scars will go down after 6 days. Which means that I have to live with this for a week. While going to teach. My crazy kids.

I'm so screwed.

So after I left his mother at the clinic, I made my furious way down to orchard to meet him. Worse of all, I could feel my face burning with the sting of the marks the entire night in Orchard, and I had to put on my hairband because it stung even when my hair brushed past the spots. Later on, I even noticed to my horror that some of them were starting to resemble little pockmarks, and I thought, what if they burned off too much and now I've got these permanent pockmarks on my face???

Man even with all the spots, blackheads, oil pockets on my face, I never felt as moody as I did after that facial session. Anyone who ever tells me again that a facial is supposed to be relaxing is gonna get shot by me yar hear?? My blackheads never gave me as much stress as this...........

We watched V for Vendetta that night too. A somewhat good movie, though I feel that the movie version of V tended to be more campy than the comic book version. Once again, the usual book-to-movie gripes apply, but I think the best part was when the police chief was describing how he suddenly understood the chain of events that had brought them there, while in another scene, V was meticulously laying out a set of dominoes to be knocked down. That was the most titillating part of the movie, I think.

A good movie, but it would serve you well to read the comic book before that. I think the themes of totalitarianism, dystopia and Big Brother are explored so much more in there.

After that, that was that. It's been a year for us, with its ups and downs, blissful ignorance, and paranoid frenzy. And here's kampai to the next year ahead of us.