A Better Title

Dear Diary,

Perhaps one of the things that I don’t understand about English language in relation to my own country and culture is the colloquial use of the word ‘Bahasa’ to refer to the Indonesian/Malay language. This may only be confined to Singapore/Malaysia as I haven’t really checked other sources yet…

Strictly speaking, the word ‘Bahasa’ means language. The phrase ‘Bahasa Indonesia’ is the one that refers to the Indonesian language.

So when someone asks “Do you speak Bahasa?” my mind automatically translates the word Bahasa and comprehends the sentence as “Do you speak Language?” which doesn’t make much sense.

Why not ask “Do you speak Language?” and “Do you speak wen?” to ask an English- and Chinese-speaker respectively?

Is this because saying the word ‘Indonesian’ is too hard for some?

The correct sentence would be either “Do you speak Indonesian?”, the more-complete “Do you speak Indonesian language?”, or the semi-localised “Do you speak Bahasa Indonesia?”.

Just some random thought of the day…

Bisa ngomong Bahasa Indonesia*,

bcc

*: Can speak Indonesian

Dear Diary,

I’ve been wondering whether I should blog within this period. It’s only a week to exams in NTU, with my first paper on 2 November…

Last week I went to ACJC Open House with Eddy. It was a trip down the memory lane as I walked through the corridors of the college, meeting teachers and friends and re-living the past two years of my life. With Eddy being introduced to how junior college life in Singapore is like.

Come to think of it, the time I was in ACJC is the best two years in my entire life so far.

I had good friends.

I had (rather) good teachers.

I had a good life.

I mean, it isn’t everyday that I actually enjoy going to school.

To me then, especially the period closer towards exams like the Promotional Exams, Preliminary Exams, and the ‘A’ Levels, the school was my life. Not just the studies. But also the school environment itself, together with the people inside.

I still remember how I, together with a lot of others, stayed back till the security guards chased us out, in the process bonding new or strengthening existing friendships. Together we sort of informally formed the “Void Deck Muggers”, so called because we ‘mugged’ (worked extra hard) in the void deck of ACJC, only going home to sleep and come back to school the following day.

I still remember how my class went through tutorials and lectures together. Probably the thing that I’d miss most is the fact that the classes (groups in university term) are fixed from the start of JC till the end. This thing doesn’t happen in university, with probably groups changing every semester. This fixed class concept allows the members to be closer together, as I obviously miss right now. So far I haven’t felt the closeness with anyone that I felt in JC.

Another thing about ACJC is that most of the people speak English when they’re with foreigners. No offense is meant to the Singaporean Chinese; it’s not that we don’t appreciate your culture. It’s just that some of us foreigners would really love to go together with the group. And it’s pretty hard to actually click in the group if we don’t speak the same language. Oh and no, I don’t mean that we foreigners always speak English either; we do speak in our languages too. I was just thinking that it would be great if all of us can be together at times.

Another difference between JC and university life is that you actually know your tutors (and your tutors know you) much much much better in JC. With more contact time, this is expected. Which is why I can come back to ACJC, and actually feel as if I’m home. I haven’t experienced such thing yet in university…

And of course, Co-Curricular Activities (CCAs) is probably a completely different thing here in university. We call it Extra-Curricular Activities (ECAs) here by the way. In JC, you can actually form a good friendship when your in a CCA, especially if you’re in a small CCA like I was last time. Some of my best friends actually come from Spectra, a CCA I was a member of in JC. In university, some time we don’t even know the other members of the committee we work with! Some of us only join the ECA for the sake of points, which is used to determine whether you can get a place in the hostel in the following year. Which is not a very good thing in my opinion. It’s pretty stupid pursuing something that you don’t really enjoy!

I can go on and on with the list of why I still prefer JC life compared to university. But I also realise that it’s useless if I’m stuck in JC forever. Life must go on. So in my case, it shall.

Hmm… I still have a few issues I’d like to type here, but my eyes are barely open now. So see ya later!

Can’t get enough of JC life,

bcc

PS: Keep on forgetting… The Stuff bar (a.k.a. the sidebar) is now back up, including a new feature called ‘Now Playing’ which contains the latest song currently playing in my Winamp (updated real-time except when Winamp is stopped, in which case it will only show “Not Playing Right Now” an hour after the last song is played). [Technical stuff: The loading time of the main page may be a little bit slower at times since this feature requires me to use PHP. Contact me if you want the code.]

Dear Diary,

Today (= Friday) I went to Muhibbah with Leroy, Eddy, Handy, and Herry to get our haircut air tickets. FYI, I’ll be going back on flight Emirates EK 348 on 26 November at 1805 hours (anyone wanna send me off? :-P)

After that, we went on a quest to find Seoul Garden. Off we scoured Suntec City, Millenia Walk to no avail. Then we tried to go to Marina Square, getting ourselves lost at least twice in the process. That bloody construction site was blocking our way, forcing us to go one big round to find the entrance to the shopping centre!

Anyway, after a heavy dinner (being Indonesians, we stayed until the staff announced that the shop was closing in 5 minutes) we went to HMV, where Leroy bought some Hillary Duff CD, while I (finally) bought the Love Actually DVD and The Corrs’s Borrowed Heaven CD.

After this we took the MRT back to our breeding ground NTU.

Love Actually is a sweet movie. Some parts are quite funny as well, being a comedy. I like almost every single part of the story (except maybe obviously the bloke who went to America in search of ‘passion’). The rest of the movie is really good (and sweet) in my opinion, and it was worth all my SGD 19.50. In fact, I spent the next few hours back in the room going through some of my favourite scenes from the movie.

Probably my favourite scenes would be the one where Juliet (Keira Knightley) found out that Mark (Andrew Lincoln) had actually liked her, but kept himself away from her because his best friend Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor had already fallen for her. And of course, the flashcards scene. Keira Knightley is an eye candy by itself, but probably the reason why I really liked the two scenes was because they were really… touching. How a person can sacrifice his heart for his best friend.

And speaking about Love Actually, some people may wonder about my own love life. Which is currently still non-existent. Which, additionally, I don’t really care about at the moment. So my love life is currently out of the scope of this blog, which is why chances are you won’t hear much about it from me in this blog.

Oh well anyway… It’s pretty late now. I’m supposed to be sleeping soon after I came back, but I didn’t. I’m supposed to go to ACJC’s Open House tomorrow (Saturday). Let’s see if I can wake up early enough…

Actually,

bcc

Dear Diary,

Yes, I really do. Especially just after I shampoo. The hair will be so soft that, being long, it falls over my forehead and touches my eyes. Especially after I’m looking down. It’s so damn irritating… (Yeah I know some of you will leave comments that goes something like “go get a haircut lah”. I will soon, but in the meantime, please bear with my rant.) Today was especially irritating, because I was trying to study in the canteen (exam is coming in less than two weeks). Half of the time my hand was trying to hold my hair up. It was really distracting!

Hmmm… Anyway, time to get a very very late supper and my last shot of codeine…

Long-haired,

bcc

Dear Diary,

Some of you who were bored enough to actually take a look at my MSN nickname the past few days would have noticed that it once read like the title of this post. Oh yeah, for those who don’t know, I’ve been down with pneumonia SARS Tuberculosis flu since last Thursday.

I went to the medical centre on Saturday morning, and was prescribed a few medicines. One of those looks like this picture below:

Dhasedyl syrup is the name of the cough mixture. What made me interested in this particular cough mixture was that the first time I took it, I felt as if I was high on drugs. OK, at least I thought it felt as if I was high on drugs.

I made a search on the Internet and found this blog entry, which apparently is a copy of an article I read long long time ago in The Straits Times.

This particular cough mixture apparently contains codeine. Yet another search on the Internet yielded Codeine Drug Information. To quote from the website:

Other, less serious side effects may be more likely to occur. Continue to take codeine and talk to your doctor if you experience

• constipation;
• dry mouth, nausea, vomiting, or decreased appetite;
• dizziness, tiredness, or lightheadedness;
• muscle twitches;
• sweating;
• itching;
• decreased urination; or
• decreased sex drive.

Great.

Other than the scary side effects, The Straits Times article also says that “Codeine contains opiates which give a ‘high’ similar to that of heroin.” No wonder I’ve been feeling so high the past few days!

The second day I took the cough mixture, I happened to take coffee as well, and for the rest of the day I was high on both codeine and caffeine!

Oh by the way, it does help me in resting. In fact, it is so good that after taking it, I kept on dozing off during lectures! I had to stop taking it today, lest I sleep during Chemistry quiz in the afternoon. On a lighter note, it does help me in sleeping.

If only it’s not an addictive drug… Sigh…

Before I finish this entry, I’d like to share the lyrics to this song called God Only Knows, taken from Love Actually OST, which I happen to like to listen the past few days too.

Now would you excuse me as I retire to bed. I need to sleep before the effects of codeine wears off.

Codeine-laden,

bcc

Update: The main stylesheet was destroyed during the process of rebuilding of this blog. As such, the Stuff bar cannot be displayed without messing up the page. Please bear with me as I try to recover what I can among the remains of Mayan civilisation my horrendous multiple versions backup of the blog.

Dear Diary,

Oh boy, I love this advertisement. Update: Link fixed. Thanks to et for pointing this out. No wonder that it won the Best of Film award in the Asia Pacific Advertising Festival 2003.

By the way, Albino Blacksheep is one of my top-visited sites. The others are gprime.net and StupidVideos. They have a lot of funny (and stupid) videos, Flash clips, games, and others! Check those out if you have time!

Suddenly,

bcc

Dear Diary,

I feel very cheated. After so much hard work mugging till 5.30 A.M., sleeping barely 3 hours, Economics quiz was a little on the easy side. (By saying easy, I mean that I should be able to pass pretty easily–unless I had overestimated my performance). Update: I checked my answers with my roommate after the test and found out that I made some stupid silly mistakes. The quiz was not easy after all.

There were very few questions from the later parts of the lectures–the so-called difficult ones. In fact, the last few lectures only had like two or three questions being thrown in. And I could answer these two or three questions because I happened to skim through the notes and the words somehow got stuck in my mind. Update: Damn. I got some of them wrong.

The bulk of the questions came from the first lectures, those which I more or less am quite comfortable with. (Although it doesn’t mean that I like them)

Sigh…

BTW thanks to hp… for being the self-declared reigning queen of commenting. I really appreciate your effort… =P Where are the other commenters of this blog? Anybody wants to try to overthrow her? =P

Maybe next time I’ll only put the one top commenter in this blog without the number of comments. So it’s an incentive to leave even more comments. Haha…

Heartbroken,

bcc

PS: My desktop colour scheme is back to the default Windows gray because my laptop was used for Effective Communication presentation today. Didn’t want those people in the group to think that I was a girl.

Dear Diary,

Here’s a quote from the announcement board in edveNTUre (NTU’s electronic learning centre):

Let’s analyse this… The quiz is tomorrow. I’m still reading lecture 5 notes, barely understanding what is going on. The quiz is up to lecture 9.

So there goes 30% of my total exam marks.

My class participation consists of copying whatever was on the board during tutorial, not preparing beforehand.

So there goes 10% of my total exam marks.

So what do I have left? 100% - 30% - 10% = 60%.

Which means that even though suddenly a miracle happens and a voice from heavens bellows the answers during exams and I score 100% for the exams, my total exam score will still be quite low.

Time to start panicking?

Argh,

bcc

Dear Diary,

It’s 3.40 now and I’m supposed to be sleeping. Especially because I’ve got lab at 8.30 in the morning. But I did it on Monday. I slept around this time and still managed to reach school one hour early. So why won’t it be the case this time?

Take a look at this picture. And this. This too. Also this, this, this, and this last one.

Amazed yet?

You’d be if I told you that those are not photos.

They were done using computer by this smart guy.

I wish I could be like him. This is my page in case you’re wondering. Really nothing compared to his.

I won’t be eloquent this time since I need to sleep as soon as possible. Of course, you may ask why I don’t just blog tomorrow. And that’s because from experience, I know that if I delay talking about a certain subject, chances are I won’t talk about it at all.

So here goes… First: short reviews on two games. Full review can be seen at the respective websites.

Feeding Frenzy is a cute, addictive little game where you are a fish in the deep seas trying to climb the food chain. Eat smaller fish–or risk being eaten by bigger ones. Can you survive till you beat the Shark King? Cute graphics and gameplay make this game worth all its 60-minute trial.

Warning Forever is another addictive, Asteroid-style game. Basically you shoot bosses (I wonder why they’re called bosses if there are no smaller enemies around) to proceed to the next stage. You are armed with cannon, while the bosses with lasers and missiles, among others. These bosses are made up of many small parts, including weapons, which you may choose to annihilate all at once, or one at a time. Graphics are simple and gameplay is really short–up to the shortest of 8 seconds a stage–yet these are what make the game addictive. Check it out now!

Lastly, some of you might have heard of Yatta, the happy-go-lucky song by a Japanese group Happatai–whose members are clad only in underwears attached with leaves. Well, this music video used to be quite famous among me and my friends back in JC.

So I did a search on the net and found this page. Those who know this and have lost the video, go and download a new copy of it. Just to note that the working address for the video would be http://yatta.punk.net/~duncan/media/yatta/yatta(41.9M)_real.mpeg–the rest are not, probably due to bandwidth reasons.

Also check out the video where Happatai performed in a live show from LA. Or get the lyrics and the instrumental version of the song to sing during those light-hearted occasions. Or even better, learn the dance and make one of those underwears!

Ok, time to sleep. Nites.

Yatta,

bcc

PS: Reminder to self: School starts at 9.30 A.M. on Mondays. Repeat 50x.