Okay, listen really carefully. You hear that??

That's right. There's nothing. It's absolutely quiet.

Because my sisters are both in school at their respective CCA camps!! And I'm the only one home!! Woohoo!! Well, 'cept for my parents, of course. :P

Yay... Taufik won Singapore Idol. Really, it makes sense. All the Olinda fans are most like extremely incensed after she was voted out, so they'll definitely be voting for Taufik. Not to mention those who quietly supported Olinda (or who were at least anti-Sylvester) but never voted; they'd probably be motivated enough to vote for Taufik. So even if Sylvester did have unspeakably large numbers of rabid, extremely rich fans, they'd still never be able to beat the large number that they're up against.

Yesterday's shopping proved fruitful. :D And my goodness.. I never knew that Ben's fashion and dress sense was so... WHOA. Your friend's right, Ben. You are a closet metrosexual. I mean that in the most complimentary way possible, because I have zero fashion/ dress sense.

And "The Incredibles" was really funny!! I especially loved the character, that woman- what was her name... Edna, that's it. I loved her, man. She was just so funny, what with her extremely short stature and her conversely high opinions and almost-French accent and behaviour and the frequent "dah-ling" in her vocabulary.

But Dash was so.... ngh. Quicksilver ripoff, much??

I may not be an avid fan of the entire comic/ cartoon series, but if anyone so much as belittles the Maximoff twins, they usually end up suffering my wrath. Which is that they usually end up facing a complete rundown of the history of the Maximoff/Lehnsherr twins, replete with reasons as to why they rock and why other characters just can't compare.

Dash was a Quicksilver ripoff, right down to his "permanently-wind-blown-hair" haristyle. Come to think of it, you could add his fast-talking, obnoxious attitude to that too.

One of my pet peeves is when some people say that Quicksilver's just someone who has an attitude problem and who talks and runs fast; so compared to his sister, the Scarlet Witch, he's just useless.

Think about this: he talks and most probably thinks faster than the average human, given the speed that his body functions at. Given that, his intelligence is also most probably exponentially higher than that of a normal human being. Thirdly, because of all that, he has plenty of reason to mock "slower" folks because a) they just can't keep up with his speed of thinking/ talking and b) he literally leaves them in the dust.

And last but not least: don't bullshit me. You'd probably behave in much the same way if you could do all that.

And now, I shall proceed to flood all of you with completely brainless yet highly amusing things which I found in Ivan's archives early this morning. :D

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(Note the underlined bits here; they're freakily accurate, I think.)

20 Questions to a Better Personality

Wackiness: 56/100
Rationality: 40/100
Constructiveness: 50/100
Leadership: 48/100


You are a WEDF--Wacky Emotional Destructive Follower. This makes you a Menace to Society.

Well, whether you're actually a menace depends on how you choose to channel your energies. You chew your fingers and have an addictive personality. Properly guided, you can be enormously productive--otherwise you run amok, stir up trouble, and generally have a hell of a good time.

To your friends, you are a source of relentless entertainment. You often get into trouble, but you almost always find a way out. You are strangely popular and feed off others' energy. You live hard, seize the day, and although your more sober friends would like to see you settled down, you generally have fewer regrets and better memories than they do. Your tenet is that, at the end of the day, one regrets only what one didn't try. You are right.

You could benefit from outside help in balancing your highs and lows. Or perhaps cutting back on the caffeine.

Of the 62705 people who have taken this quiz since tracking began (8/17/2004), 4.8 % are this type.

(THOSE LAST TWO UNDERLINED SENTENCES ARE *ESPECIALLY* TRUE. :D :D :D)

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20 Questions to having a Better Family

Your score as a human being is 60.

This makes you like The Simpsons.

This score isn't so bad. There's hugs and kisses at the end of the day, no matter if they're cynical or sandwiched between comments about how wide your ass is getting. You haven't beat your parents -- you joined them.

The bright side is you have a lot of stories to share, and living through all this malfunction means you're perfectly equipped for dealing with all the asshats in the real world. After your experience with your family, you'll be starved for a new one. Thus you'll love your in-laws, who'll love you back.

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All right, that wasn't really flooding, but well. It's my blog. Nyah.

"You haven't beat your parents -- you joined them."

Now that is an abhorrent thought.

I do not wish to turn out anything remotely like my father. Taking on some of my mum's personality traits is all right, I think, but for the love of all things sacred in this world, please; not my father.

"feed off others' energy"

Yeah. I get high just by being around people whose company I enjoy. I get high on a lot of strange things that people wouldn't get high on, I think. Good company being one of them. Friendly atmosphere is another; laughter as well.

But, feeding off others' energy... if you look at it another way, once the people are gone, that leaves me pretty much nothing. It's something that I've always found laughable, in a very cynical kind of way. I have a love-hate relationship with my ability to maintain a variety of "faces" for different groups of people, depending on how well I know them or how close I feel to them.

People like me are commonly called "hypocrites".

I prefer to call myself (and my compatriots) "cynical and very wary of the deep-seated instincts of human nature".

For one thing, I love (yes, you read that right, I love it) the fact that I can lie to anyone's face and they wouldn't be the wiser for it. I love the fact that my face can convey an entirely different emotion (even the extreme polar opposite) from what I'm really feeling. I love the fact that most people can't tell what I'm thinking or feeling. I love the fact that the face which I present to most of you is probably a significant barrier against the likes of the less-desirable ways of the world.

On the flip side, I hate it because it reminds me that I cannot ever seem to be one person. I hate it because it scares me sometimes, just how many people I can be and actually keep track of all of them, because then I wonder if I'm going to spend the rest of my life doing this. And then I wonder what it'd be like if I didn't do this, which only scares me even more; I can't see a life without the other "faces" that I can slip into-- and that scares me all over again.

By now, you probably think that I'm a severely maladjusted, insecure individual.

You're most probably absolutely correct.

One bad thing about holidays means that it gives me more time than usual to think. I think too much, and half the time, about things that people don't usually ponder in their free time. Come to think of it, I even think about this stuff when I am supposed to be busy.

It's a sad way to live your life, second-guessing everything and looking for something that you fear may be present in everything, but it's the way that I live mine, and I've got used to it. On the bright side, however, I'm probably the kind of person who wouldn't take friends for granted, given that I spend a large part of my "thinking" time worrying about keeping them. It isn't that I have little faith in them; it's more like I'm afraid of doing something irrevocably wrong that will drive them away.

This semester, given that Pam and I only take one module together, you have no idea how much time I spent quietly obsessing over my worry that we were going to drift apart because she seemed to be so much closer to this new group of friends that she'd found in her OG and I couldn't seem to make any time for us to just hang around together.

Sometimes I worry that my silly behaviour will just put some acquaintances off; acquaintances which I would very much like to keep as friends. Sometimes I worry that, being decidedly more "out of the loop" and "blur" than most people, I'll lose touch with the people around me.

But most of the time, I worry that the people that I'm close to will start to dislike the way that I am. It takes a lot (I feel) to put up with my silly behaviour, frequent bouts of spasticity, and the violent mood swings that are supposedly common in someone of the Cancerian zodiac.

I worry that people like Denise and Xinyan may find me tiresome after a while; I worry that many people might find me too "loud"; I worry that some of the girls may find me too "un-girly"; I worry that Ben and John and Ivan and all the rest of my guy friends may one day just grow entirely sick and tired of indulging my idiotic behaviour-- Ivan especially, given how so far, he's the most indulgent of all my friends with my aforementioned idiocy (to the point of even playing along at times), and how it probably takes a lot to tolerate me.

Like I said, it's a sick way to live your life like this, but hell. You get used to it after while. This way of treating worrying almost like a hobby will most likely also result in me living about 30 years less than everyone my age, but what the hell.

In the last few months, I've started talking to some of my JC friends on MSN again; the guys that is-- I haven't seen them around or heard from them very much since they all enlisted.

But something that I noticed is that, for those who know, they still think that I'm hung up over a certain someone. In actual fact, I've moved on. I think I used to feel something for him, but that seems like too long ago and I don't remember anymore.

And now that we're all out of CJ and he's in NS and we don't even see each other that often anymore, aside from the occasional get-together, well, I suppose distance makes a good dulling factor, with good ol' Time itself being complicit. Right now, I don't look at him the same way that I used to; he's just a friend now, one that I probably get along with better than most, given that there are some personality traits that we share, but that's all he is at the moment, and I can say quite confidently, that it's likely that's all he'll ever be in my life.

One thing that's been a constant in this arena of my life is that any guy whom I've ever taken a liking to is always either already attached or already has his sights on someone else.

I suppose, with my kind of horrible luck, that isn't going to change any time soon.

There's an odd little something which I puzzle over every now and then, however.

There was a period of time last year during which my J2 class thought that I'd gotten attached because I seemed "happier". (This seems to be happening all over again right now..) At least, that's what Meiji told me when I asked her how the rest of our class had come to that conclusion.

And at the same time, I decided to test out some of the perceptions which I think people have of me. When I told her that I know I don't seem like the type who'd have a boyfriend, she agreed. So I asked her why.

And she replied that I seem too independent to ever look like I want or need a boyfriend.

Strangely enough, "independent" isn't a word that I would use to describe myself, but when I told Denise about this once, she agreed: I put forward a very independent image.

It's enough to make to make me wonder.

Am I too "different"? Or are you the one who's looking for too much of the "same"? Am I the one who's lacking or are you looking for too much?

I talk and I wonder if you listen. I know you hear me, but I wonder if you listen to what I'm saying. And I know I make my friends laugh, that's something I take pride in if nothing else, but when you laugh it means much more. It means you understand, it means you get the joke, but I still wonder if you heard me right.

And when we sit together, it isn't comfortable, but it isn't completely unbearable either. We could sit for hours and not say a word, and it would stay that way: not comfortable and not really unbearable. Because there's a funny sort of space between you and me; even if we sat with our shoulders and legs and feet touching, there'd still be a funny sort of gap between us, like you were keeping space warm for someone else.

Someone whom we both don't know yet, but you're keeping their space warm for them anyway. And I wonder sometimes if perhaps I'm standing right between your eyes and so you just can't see me.

And all your friends give us meaningful looks and talk about how you're a really nice guy and how they can't understand just why you're not attached yet. And then they tell me when you're not there, that they think that we look good together. And I laugh and joke, but never tell them that it doesn't seem like you think so.

When you say "hi" to me, there's a strange flicker in your eyes; you definitely can't see it and I'm not even sure if you know if it's there, but I notice it, I do, and it seems to me like I'm only the yardstick of your dreams. It seems that you look at me and see someone else like me, only better; the someone whose warm space remains nameless and who is me and everything more.

I wonder sometimes if you think or dream about that someone better and I wonder what you see. Do you see someone prettier? Do you see someone more demure? Do you see me, but with a different face and a different body? Do you see an image of something genteel and appealing to the eye, of something that will smile at you and make you feel as one so fortunate as to have stumbled upon a treasure that you do not deserve?

Do you dream and wish for someone with whom to share every quiet moment, to share a backwards sort of hug, where someone leans back against the other and their arms are linked somewhere around their middles; to share the sort of comfort and freedom where you could lie down in their lap and no one would pay too much mind; where you could fall asleep on their shoulder and anyone who saw would smile and simply move on; where you could speak of them every second of the day and everyone else would smile and nod understandingly, indulgently, and be happy for you; where you could sit with them for hours, shoulders, elbows and hands touching, with your fingers intertwined and your legs dangling and crossing over the other's at the calves?

I do.

No one sees this, of course. Least of all you.

J'aime et j'espère.

I love and I hope. Because perhaps that's all it ever will be.