Back to school indeed. All the readings and projects are just starting to pile up.

Aside from American Law (which has the most readings, and that's probably the reason why I'm trying so desperately to keep up with it, even at the expense of my other modules), I'm about six readings behind for each of my remaining four modules. Something tells me that I'm awfully screwed. Unless I manage to do a helluva lot of catching up during the mid-sem break.

So why am I here blogging when I could be doing more productive things with my time? Such as coming up with those questions that I'm supposed to submit for next Monday's American Law discussion, but we won't go into that...

Well, I don't know. But I can tell you though, that I was kinda bored, so I surfed through some of my older posts, read all the memories and some of my friends' memories of the same times, and while I was doing that, I came upon this quiz that I saw on Ivan's blog a long time ago. And so I thought, well, while we're in the business of wasting time, why not?

So here; I did it, and this is the result.

Congratulations Gerri, you are...

Scarlett Ting of joewei.blogspot.com


You are independent, smart and beautiful. Its too bad you don't see that yourself because life's little difficulties brought down a lot of your self confidence. As a result, you talk cryptic and you don't trust people easily. You care a lot for your friends and your loved ones, sometimes even more than you care for yourself, although they don't always seem to appreciate it. Don't let that affect you. As the saying goes, you don't miss the water till the well runs dry. So hang in there, you're a star in the making.

Which Singaporean Blogger Are You?

Hm. I don't read blogs very much so I don't know much about the person... but the description sounds rather accurate to me. :)

Completely random post. Just blogging coz I feel like it.

Going to help prepare cheese prawns for dinner later. My aunties are here, visiting, from Malaysia. The prawns are huge, by the way; they're tiger prawns, not the smaller grey prawns that we usually use at barbecues. Gonna be hard to wrap, especially since I only have one packet of cheese.

Walked down the road just now to pick up the cake that my mum ordered from the lady who lives at house no. 70. She makes lovely mango cakes, but her durian cakes are much better, in my opinion.

Was walking there, dressed in my bright green Arts Camp tee, a pair of bright pink shorts and my bright blue Havaianas slippers.

Felt bright and happy, a bit like Sunday morning instead of evening. :)

My American Law module continues to, in equal parts, fascinate and depress me.

Before I go any further with this post however, I should warn you that if the subject of abortion causes you discomfort, DO NOT read this post.

We're on the topic of abortion rights in American Law, as it were, so for the whole day today, I've been reading this case which happened in 2000, Stenberg vs. Carhart; a case in which Leroy Carhart, a Nebraska physician who performs abortions, filed a suit claiming that the Nebraska law which banned partial birth abortion was unconstitutional because it infringed on a woman's freedom and right to choose to have an abortion.

So in the laying out of some of the basic facts, you get some squeamish stuff, such as the definition of a partial birth abortion, and then some descriptions of the procedure itself, which is also called "dilation and evacuation" (D&E) or "dilation and extraction" (D&X); the latter is the name for the D&E procedure when the foetus is removed feet first. Although I really don't see a difference.

And here's how the procedure's described:

"...intact D&E proceeds in one of two ways, depending on the presentation of the fetus. If the fetus presents head first (a vertex presentation), the doctor collapses the skull; and the doctor then extracts the entire fetus through the cervix. If the fetus presents feet first (a breech presentation), the doctor pulls the fetal body through the cervix, collapses the skull, and extracts the fetus through the cervix."

My toes were squirming a little unhappily by the end of that paragraph.

And then the next one went into even further detail.


"...American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists describes the D&X procedure in a manner corresponding to a breech-conversion intact D&E, including the following steps:

'1. deliberate dilatation of the cervix, usually over a sequence of days;

'2. instrumental conversion of the fetus to a footling breech;

'3. breech extraction of the body excepting the head; and

'4. partial evacuation of the intracranial contents of a living fetus to effect vaginal delivery of a dead but otherwise intact fetus.'"


It reminds me most unpleasantly of a talk which the Secondary 4s were given in my time, during one of our pastoral care lessons; an abortion talk, of course, during which we were shown a video on abortion (and the gruesome results of it) and some diagrams of how abortions were carried out.

Other than the method which removes the less-than-3-month-old foetuses by vacuuming them out of the uterus, the one other method which I distinctly remember is the partial-birth one. Basically, in a diagram, we were shown the above procedure which I just copied and pasted above. The abortionist manipulates the foetus into a feet-first presentation (if that isn't already the case), delivers the foetus up till only its head is still inside the mother's body, then uses something to puncture the base of the foetus' skull and drain some of the contents before delivering the rest of the foetus, intact but dead.

I'm not sure what kind of effect reading stuff like this might have on most people, but I imagine that it should be quite disturbing. Probably more so for girls, considering that the cervix, uterus, etc. which is mentioned so often in the text I'm reading is the equipment which we all have, and the thought of someone or some foreign object messing around in it is just... very unsettling.

If there are women out there who specialise in abortion law (if there's such a thing, specialising in a particular kind of law), I have no idea how you read stuff like this on a daily basis.

I'm not even halfway through the case reading yet.

Well, here's to new school semesters and all that jazz.

It turns out that in my American Law class, there're a dozen Law students. A dozen. And there're only 39 people in the module, mind you. It's a seminar-style module with no tutorials, so there's a lot of discussion involved during "lectures".

When A/P Chng mentioned at the end of the class that there were a dozen Law students, I thought, well, that's wonderful, I have a feeling my grade's pretty much screwed, but I decided to stay on in the module anyway. Firstly coz dropping the module and adding another at this stage in the bidding would be really troublesome, and secondly because.. well, the module's interesting enough, so why not? :P

And immediately after my American Law lecture, my first SC2101: Research Methods lecture. This is pretty much how my Mondays are going to be: 5 straight hours of lecture first thing in the morning. Actually not as bad as I thought it'd be.

Anyway, I had this sudden.. epiphany in 2101 lecture, if you can call it that.

In JC, I used to write my name, class and the date on any new lecture handouts that I received; it was reflex, y'know: I get a clean handout, and the first thing I do is write my name, class and the date at the top-left corner.

When I came to uni, I didn't have a class, so I'd just write my faculty and year, like so: "FASS/1". Today, while I was writing that, I stopped after the slash and realised that I'd have to write a "2" now.

"FASS/2".

And it kinda made me smile. Huh. Look at that. I survived my first year. :)

The thank-you messages are flowing in from quite a few people on my phone. I suspect that it's only now that they're coming in coz all of us would have been flat-out concussed after Rag yesterday, and after sleeping for about the whole of today, have finally got sufficient rest to construct a complete sentence, and can muster up the extra brain cells to compose a short thank-you message.

This year's Rag has been really different from last year's for me: there're more people, firstly; then there's the house, which has just really facilitated a lot of bonding; and last, but most important of all, there're the freshies, who've been really enthusiastic--I'd say maybe they're even more so then we freshie raggers were last year.

And I suppose there's the fact that I'm now a senior.

It's odd, somehow, to think that a year ago I was just like the freshies who came to join us, and when I looked at all of them cheering away yesterday both before and after we presented, it was even harder to imagine that just two months ago, they'd just been sitting in the house, watching a laptop presentation and Jianwu talking, wondering what Rag was all about.

And from there, they've become techies, dancers, costumes people; everyone likes to say that we shouldn't have divisions, but I feel that with the divisions, at least you know what you're best at; and apart from having a sense of belonging to Rag itself, you have a smaller group to belong to as well.

We had such high hopes when we started out, but the long stretch of this year's O Week and the hype over it, and the lack of publicity for Rag really drained our manpower; the freshies still came back of their own accord to Rag after O Week activities in the daytime though; that was the period of time when morale had to have been the lowest, when only about five of the seniors were working everyday and falling sick because all the freshies were doubling up as freshie councillors and away at O Week in the day, and those seniors who weren't around were involved in O Week as well. So to see freshies coming back even after the day's events were over was a heartening sight indeed.

Even when everyone was despairing that maybe we wouldn't be able to finish the float, and Lionel and Reuben were joking about a "back-up plan", we just kept working anyway, and I was so thankful that the freshies had taken up that attitude as well; the whole idea of how it isn't over till it's over.

Float construction really picked up in the last few days before the 6th; and morale had to be at an all time on the night of the 4th, I think, when we finally had our dry run. The dance was beautiful, synchronised, the music was good, and our main float made it all the down the slope and back up; even our steps worked. :) It was great to see all the dancers coming back and staying over; admittedly, given how late it was even after O Night, staying over wasn't really an option anymore, but I was so happy that no one was complaining.

At least, not until the dancers who weren't bunking in in friends' halls took up all the sleeping space upstairs and the techies had no place to sleep. :P

But we thought, what the heck, let them sleep, they're probably tired after O Night; most of the techies had come down to the house before O Night ended, so we didn't sit through the whole thing.

All that was left to do then was work till the sun came up (and hopefully the dancers would wake up with it).

Yingchao, Terence and Shu Ning were outside papering over the exterior of the back of the float; Wenhui was moving around, cutting styrofoam and sticking it wherever the design called for it, and I came out at about 7 am, after sitting inside the house for an hour or so, talking with Rachel and Ian. Settled myself in the front of the float to continue with touching up the white paper for the interior, and at about 9 am, a car pulled up at the main road, a guy got out of the car, came up the grassy slope next to the house and asked if we were Arts Club people. Turned out that he was a fresh freshie named Ian; a *really* "fresh" one: he hadn't gone for Arts Camp, hadn't gone for O Week, and he'd just called Xinyan up to ask about Rag; he'd been told that he could come down to help, and so he had. :D So touched, haha... :D

Managed to squeeze in next to Ivan at about 9-plus am, only to wake up at about 12-plus, when the remaining dancers in the room woke up and about 5 of them (Don, Xiaofen and some others) were sitting around and talking softly. Apparently, they thought I was Charlotte. Or Fiona. And then when they realised that it was me, Xiaofen said, "You all think just anybody can sleep so close to Ivan, meh?" -_-... Right. Okay. :P

The most stupid thing happened though; I talked myself awake. :P Let me explain what I mean: I was actually quite tired, and having not slept the whole night and my nose being a little blocked from sleeping right under the air-conditioning, I was a little... er, out of it. :P There I was, rambling silly nonsense with my eyes only half-open and in a funny voice thanks to my blocked nose; I think I probably made for some light mindless entertainment though, in both senses of the phrase. :P

So, yeah, I talked myself awake, then walked around the house a bit, found the rest of the techies who'd been awake with me previously, asleep in the meeting room, so decided to go back to sleep; this time, succeeded in about 2 hours of uninterrupted rest, I think. I can't remember. :P

Seniors and "super-seniors" started coming back in the late afternoon; float and side-prop construction and touching up took on a feverish pace after 7 pm, considering that all work was to stop at 2 am. Wan-Tsin and I, being validators, had to leave the house at about 12.45 am to report to the NUSSU Secretariat. Wan-Tsin was one of the validators for the Medicine float and I was one of the validators for the Dentistry float.

I thought that maybe I'd see Yonghe, seeing as he's a Dentistry student, but sadly, when I asked the Dentistry validators if Yonghe was doing Rag, they said that the Year 3s usually don't do Rag. Oh well. Dentistry's Rag site also turned out to be the most unusual Rag site of all: it was very quiet; only about 6 people were awake when James (my co-validator from SDE) arrived; the rest, according to their Rag Head, Daniel, were asleep in the SoC building (they were building their float at the carpark just next to the SRC field). They even offered us some of the extra food that was leftover from their dinner, some chicken wings and other stuff; later on, my breakfast was courtesy of the Dentistry Club as well: a muffin. They're quite nice, I find, and they also didn't give us any trouble concerning the touching of the float and the "hands-off after 2 am" rule. So I like Dentistry people. Haha. :D

James and I accompanied their float the short distance onto the SRC track when it was time and we sat there next to it, talking for a while and watching the other faculties' and halls' floats come in. Saw our lovely (not so) little treasure box come in and wandered over to talk to Aaron for a while, after which I came back to Dentistry's float, only to find that James wasn't around and the Dentistry people were all either stretched out or curled up on the track, asleep. Looked comfortable enough, so I did the same, curling up a little on my side, trying to use the document bag that NUSSU had given the validators to do their job as a makeshift pillow.

Reminded me of last year when myself and a few others were on "guard duty" to watch the float at SRC in the wee hours of the morning; we ended up lying in front of the float and watching the stars, eyeballing the occasional passerby who dared loiter around our beloved float for too long, heehee. It was much colder last year though; there was a constant breeze blowing, making the temperature of the cool night air drop even lower; I was wearing two shirts then and I was still shivering.

This year, I think the cold woke me up after about an hour or so; I saw James asleep not far from where I was, and when I happened to glance at the tentage for the faculty clubs' dancers, I saw a lone group of dancers already there. On closer observation (and putting on my glasses), I recognised one of the guys as Ivan by his way of walking, and realised that they were our dancers. :D

Talked to them for a bit before coming back and hanging around the Dentistry float (as a side note, Ivan looked quite fetching in his makeup :P); lots more mundane, trivial stuff happened which I won't bore you with, but when our turn finally came to present, I noticed that despite the fact that our float was less impressive than other faculty clubs', it didn't make us any less proud of it.

Somewhere along the way, winning the Vice-Chancellor's Shield had come to mean less and less; I mean, we'd like to win, who wouldn't? But it had shifted to be more about the people and the friendships over time; don't know when it happened, but it sure felt like it. I'm not sure about other faculties, but I'm pretty sure that this is what makes an Arts Rag different from a Science Rag or an Engin Rag or whatever else have you.

To illustrate my point: after all the presentations were over and we were waiting for the awards to be presented, the small crowd of FASS supporters (we probably numbered about 70 in total, including the raggers) were just going crazy dancing to the music that they were playing over the sound system; I remember seeing the Dentistry people, who were sitting not far from us, laughing as they watched us having fun. When they played Bon Jovi's "It's My Life", Bobby and some of the rest even got Ivan to lead them in an impromptu Mambo dance (I still don't understand what's so great about Mambo; my personal opinion is that it seems like it's a dance for deaf people, since the whole point of it seems to be acting out the words of the song), and I saw Daniel in the stands with his faculty mates, laughing with his friends at what we were doing. Not laughing as in making fun of us, mind you; laughing in that way which says you can appreciate the fun that others are having.

And it didn't really matter that we didn't win anything (aside from a Bronze award for Flag collections and later, a Silver Colours Award for our Rag float which didn't really involve giving out an award proper); we could care less that SDE won everything; and we couldn't be bothered that while SDE won everything, Science still won the Shield. I think that at that point, looking at everyone's faces, all that really mattered was that it was over and we'd actually made it all this way together; that all of us there at that point in time had not given up when morale was at its lowest and that even when it seemed like it would be too late too finish the float, we refused to give up.

The best moments of the whole day had to be when I saw a video of the first half of our presentation while we were all having lunch at the new University Hall and I saw how beautiful it looked when the doors of our float opened; and when Hock told me that he finally understood what Rag was all about-- I came to understand that as a freshie and found that it was something that I'd wanted to experience all my life without actually knowing it, that feeling of building something from nothing, being part of a group of people who can see the same dream taking shape before their eyes, and seeing the final product being presented on the day itself.

It's a different feeling altogether, leading others to find that same experience, to find the same goal, and to find the same purpose in being a ragger, but when they find it, hold on to it and tell you that they'll be back next year for more, you can't help but suddenly feel like the world is different and everything's come full circle. And you know that because they're a part of this, their lives in University will be so much different from everyone else's.

There's this one super-senior named Jasper, who's well-known among the raggers; if he were still schooling, he'd be in his eighth year now. He's well-known for saying that "Rag is blood and sweat and tears", blood and sweat during the building process and tears during the presentation maybe, but tears definitely during the time when it's all over and you tear down what took two months to build. Last year, when I talked to some of the graduated seniors who came back to help on the day before Rag Day, they told me that Jasper had "conned" many of them into helping for Rag, in a joking kinda way. That opinion is still widely held, but we realise one other thing.

Every year, we "con" ourselves into coming back. I guess there must be a reason. I don't think any of us will ever be able to pinpoint exactly what this feeling is and why it feels so good despite the fact that we receive no material reward for our efforts, but I do know that for the rest of my undergraduate life, as long as I can help it, I never want to be in the audience, watching on Rag Day.

Adrenaline is a wonderful thing. If there's one thing that FOP has taught me about myself, it's that I can run on adrenaline alone for quite a long time.

Yesterday, on Flag Day, the adrenaline kicked in the minute I left school to start flagging, and it lasted all the way till later that evening when I was back in school, helping to move the cans to YIH, and while doing a bit of Rag tech as well.

I wonder if it's possible for your body to become immune to adrenaline though, coz it doesn't really seem to be working anymore.

Woke up this morning, tired as usual; joining my O week OG at school still didn't perk me up much, and while they were playing Rush Hour, the most I could do was run around with them and offer them suggestions and such-- the fresh freshies have reached the point where the councillors have become semi-redundant: they can strategise on their own, they more or less know each other reasonably well (apparently they *should*, after playing Truth or Dare when they stayed over in school last night; I heard some crazy stuff happened), and all they really need us councillors for is just to keep the morale up and to start cheers.

I'll be so glad when O Week is over tomorrow. But that's not the end of it yet.

My blog is becoming semi-organiser-ish, I think; lately, I just keep wanting to post all the things which I have to do to remind myself or something.

Have to do coin-counting for Flag tomorrow, will be staying over to help with Rag tech, will have to work the whole day on the 5th for Rag, obviously; and there's a Bash 2 meeting in the evening on the 5th as well; 6th will be Rag Day-- and maybe after that I can go home and sleep like the dead.

Haven't had proper regular sleep ever since FOP started; all the days have just kept blurring into each other, and the only thing that matters is deadlines deadlines and more deadlines and all the miscellaneous things to do and sort out and think about. Yuimin suggested that it's probably coz of the irregular sleep that I've been getting that I've had this recurring headache for the past month or so. And right now, like almost everyone else actively involved in multiple FOP projects, I think I'm walking that really fine line between being somewhat-well and being horribly sick.

Oh well. It just needs to last till the 6th of August. I just need to last till the 6th.