Decided to shoot for a while today after my Gender Studies paper.

My back muscles now hurt like crap.

Which is a good thing, coz it means at least the muscle memory is still there; I still remember which muscles I'm supposed to use. I've come to realise that sport is a semi-masochistic thing, haha. If the right set of muscles doesn't hurt, then you're doing it wrong. :P Although, overdoing it could also make it hurt, of course.

Zhan Tao, Cheow Hui and I were hanging out in the lounge this morning, talking before our papers, mostly about shooting and how we were damn out of practice and all the SEA Games stuff going on; if they actually televise the archery matches, Zhan Tao's suggesting we all watch together in the lounge, haha.

Although I don't think our lounge can fit *all* of us... -_-

Cheow Hui mentioned that Benson was featured in Thursday's newspaper, in the Urban section that came with the paper; said that Benson was the oldest of the six athletes who were featured-- scary stuff; the guy's only 25!

So I came home and rooted around in the pile of past days' newspapers, found it and saw that the youngest of the six is 15. Playing golf. The rest are 18 and 19, and only one other guy is in his 20s-- he's a cyclist, and he's 23.

It's like we're turning out prodigies left, right and center. Soon the prodigies won't be so special anymore, I think.

Last paper on Monday! Then AAS Shoot sighting on 9 Dec, and competition proper from 10 to 11 Dec. SEA Games starts tomorrow and Archery is on from the 29th of Nov to Dec 4th.

I can almost touch freedom.

Now I just need a wide open field to dance and jump and run around and scream in when it does arrive, but this being Singapore, with very little open space, I'll settle for watching Harry Potter instead. Haha.

2 papers down and 3 to go.

Methods was quite okay, and while I wish that I'd looked at the Soci of Food past exam papers earlier, I'm still quite happy that at least I did look at it. Because as of this sem, the Soci of Food exam paper questions have been the same for three semesters in a row now. Haha. :D

Maybe I'll start studying SC2216 tomorrow. And tonight, maybe I'll play NavyField tonight. Yippee. :D Tomorrow morning, training. Wake up at 7 am.

And I think I shall go home and write a bit. Have an idea for a Harry Potter fic and I need to put that last haiku that I wrote down in digital print. :)

Setting goals for AAS Shoot-- should try to get a personal best of at least... 500? 0_0 Good Lord, that sounds daunting. Oh well.

19th of November... during which day Gerri was rather unproductive.

Couldn't really get into the studying mood today; studying in clubroom again might have had something to do with it. Or maybe not, considering that half the time, it actually was quite empty. Maybe my brain's just refusing to cooperate after the gruelling reading marathon that I subjected it to the whole of Thursday. Sigh.

Tired. I want this all to end.

Saw that music video for the SEA Games athletes on the bus again. And thought for the twentieth-plus time how unrepresentative of our atheletes the sample shown in the video is. (Haha... I'm talking in technical terms now.. the leftovers of my Methods module :P)

I've seen that excerpt that they keep showing on TV Mobile at least thirty times, and each time, I can't help but notice a few things:

1) Only the "popular" sports like track and field, wushu, waterpolo, swimming, badminton and table tennis are featured in the video; there're about 30-plus sports whose athletes aren't represented.
(*cough*archery,shooting,fencing*cough*)

2) In one of the opening shots, there is a shot of runners nearing the finishing line. The runner in the lead is wearing red, but his number tag says in LARGE letters: THA-- ergo, he's from Thailand, not Singapore.

3) In one of the closing scenes, there is a freeze-frame shot of two female athletes (table-tennis or badminton players, I think) kissing their gold medals. Unfortunately, if I'm not wrong, they were, um... "imported". The athletes, not the medals.

4) With the WCG (World Cyber Games) in town, I just can't help but imagine an extra scene with maybe a team of five players high-fiving each other over a bank of computers. Haha. :D


Benson and Albert Loh are shooting Recurve individual and team for SEA Games, and it turns out that the rumours flying around during the Indoor shoot this year really are rumours after all: Jennifer isn't shooting. And I heard the ladies' recurve team didn't make the cut. Sigh.

Hopefully Albert will win gold this year! That should teach the SSC to overlook the lesser-known sports. Ha. And maybe give the national team a better training ground, for goodness' sake.

And look what I found when I was surfing through SSC's site; they actually have profiles of the individual players! Benson and Albert Loh are the only people I recognise in the list of national archers; only some of the rest look um.. vaguely familiar. Well, okay, I'll admit most of them don't. Haha. I like the pictures on the profile pages. Very cool. Especially the background.

Have a look: Benson and Albert.

Benson's bow just steals his thunder in his picture, haha... Seriously, I've always loved the silver riser. Damn cool, can. I wonder if the national team gets paid. And if so, how much. :D

And Benson always makes me think of the time when the seniors asked the nat team seniors to give us some pointers in one training session after our AAS shoot; I'll always remember how I took a MONTH to understand what Benson was trying to teach me about perfecting my release. But I got it in the end, and it seems that as a consequence of that, everyone else on the NUS team seems to know my release as the "smoothest" on the team. But you know how you can be good at something but you can't explain it?

Yeah, that's a minor source of irritation for me, coz I can see the problems with release that the juniors whom I'm mentoring have, but I can't seem to make them understand. Sigh.

This is making me think about training. I miss my baby.. my darling bow.. I badly need to train; my back muscles are deteriorating due to the lack of training, I can feel it. It's a funny thing that seems to happen only with me; when I don't train for too long, my back muscles actually start to ache.

Shall consider training on Tuesday morning, especially if I'm gonna stay over in school on Monday night.

And while we're on the subject of shooting... someone help me think of a relatively embarassing forfeit for a guy to do (and please don't let it involve kissing another innocent bystander or something like that; no one else needs to suffer except this guy in question, haha).

My junior challenged me to a shooting match after exams; loser does a forfeit. He's already set the forfeit for me; if I lose, I'll wear a skirt and a spaghetti-strap top (which I actually did for the Sports Awards Dinner, which is where he got the idea. *rolls eyes*). So now... I have to return the favour. Haha. Use the tagboard on your left for suggestions, please. :D

Was studying in Biz library today with Denise; she was telling me last night over MSN that Biz library is really quite conducive for studying coz they have these cordoned off tables; like the ones that we had in IJ, in the library, lining the walls. Each table is its own little unit with a wall rising on both sides and in front of you, so there's very little to distract you, unlike the Central library where the study area is just open space with lots and lots of tables, so you can still see what everyone's doing.

For me at least, that's distracting.

So today was my most productive day in a LONG time: I managed to finish 3 chapters of my Methods text! :D

Going back tomorrow; shall try to finish another four or five chapters, so I can read the extra qualitative research notes.

It's funny; exams start on the 18th, this Friday, and I don't really feel anxious or anything. Unless I consciously think about it. I think.

I wanted to be like you
I wanted everything
So I tried to be like you
And I got swept away

I didn't know that it was so cold and
You needed someone
To show you the way
So I took your hand and we figured out that
When the time comes
I'd take you away

If you want to
I can save you
I can take you away from here
So lonely inside
So busy out there
And all you wanted
Was somebody who cares

I'm sinking slowly
So hurry hold me
Your hand is all I have to keep me hanging on
Please can you tell me
So I can finally see
Where you go when you're gone

If you want to
I can save you
I can take you away from here
So lonely inside
So busy out there
And all you wanted
Was somebody who cares...

(Michelle Branch's "All You Wanted")

For Jared, because this is our song. Because all we've had is each other for so long. Because we keep each other sane. Because it's cold outside and somewhere around each other we're warm. Because everything around us is broken and we break everything we try to have. And because sometimes I wish I knew where you were.

Nghh... Pissed off.

Was playing NavyField just now; today's a good day. Earlier on, in the wee hours of the morning, there were a lot of Light Cruisers being "charitable": you had at least three rooms at any one time which were "7 DD vs 1 CL" (7 Destroyers vs 1 Light Cruiser) or stuff like that. Was good fun and good teamwork, coz it was all of us against one CL, haha. Although there was one of those games where my team's teamwork was crappy and the CL ended up taking out all of us. 1 CL took down EIGHT DDs. 0_0 (I was the last one down, haha.)

Anyway, was playing again just now, and had quite a few good games; won some and lost some, but still managed to level up my sailors and accumulate about 5000 credits. But the last game I played pissed me off.

3 teams, Alpha, Bravo and Charlie; I was on Bravo, and we decided to go pick off Charlie first. About five minutes into the game, C was down to two ships and we were down to three; the three of us were ganging up on the second last one; he was on my left, and he was already dead in the water-- things were looking good. Then the ASSHOLE teammate on my right decides he wants the frag, so he releases his torps.

And I'm on his left.

So the torps went through me, SUNK me, and the remaining ones sunk the Charlie ship. Effing asswipe TK'ed me!!! (TK means "team kill".)

Stupid bastard. Ngghh.


But, onto... happier things. Might be getting a new phone later; I'm not *too* keen on the Nokia 6101 that's on offer, but I guess it's all right... Well, we'll see. For now, the books are calling.

Zoo trip was.. hm. Fun. In a way. Might have been more so if we'd actually walked through that rainforest walk that Ivan told me about and which ended up being my main impetus for coming along.

I was still only in half a mind as to whether or not to go on Thursday, until Ivan told me about the rainforest walk thing where they had animals freely roaming around and which you could touch... I'm not so sure about that last point, but that's what he said so, yeah.

We left the zoo at about 6 plus, then a few of us went to Orchard and had a bit of fun by ourselves; Hock and Leon and Ivan Chen joined us at Orchard, but Hock had to leave early. I left a while after he did, mainly because it was getting late, and I was losing interest.

And on the bus, I came to realise something.

In the clubroom, among the guys who played DotA, there once existed what was known as the "DotA Widows Club". It was enough of an internal joke that it even got featured in the Thank You Dinner video.

And the "Widows Club" once had four members; the girlfriends of four of the guys who played DotA.

And what of it now, you may ask?

Well, it doesn't exist. There's only one of them left which has survived the ravages of such a short time, but one member is hardly a club now, is it?


"...He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good."

(excerpted from "Two Songs for Hedli Anderson", by W.H. Auden)

Papers are all handed in! And the semester's over!

Which means that exams are starting in about a week's time. Bummer. Can't an undergrad get any rest?!

A few people were saying that they'd got the email regarding seat numbers for the exams already, but I haven't so decided to just go check by myself instead of waiting around for the mail.

And I was playing NavyField last night; got fed up with manual firing again, so I got lazy and switched back to the auto Firing Control System. I'll learn manual some other time. And I got rather pissed off last night coz in all the battles that I joined, I had crappy teammates (or the other side had better teamwork), so I didn't earn much in the way of frag or credits. Damn.

But, on the bright side, three of my sailors reached level 14, and two of them are stationed at the torp tubes, so I can fit torp tubes now! Only thing that worries me is the safe distance; they need 15 km before they arm, and I'm not sure if that's a very long or very short distance.

And, talk about um.. culture shock. If you can call it that. Most of the time whenever I've played NavyField in the past, there's a lot of Spanish and German and whatever else flying around on the chat panels; mostly European languages and English, but last night, all the Singaporeans were online.

And you have no idea how funny it was to see Hokkien curse words scrolling up on the chat panel.

Any Europeans playing in that room at that time would probably have been thinking, "What the hell??" Especially with the standard of the English that was used. Er, *when* English was used, that is. Haha...

Going to the zoo tomorrow, with the rest of the 25th MC and a few of the Arts Club affiliates. Don't know what on earth there is to see, but Ivan says that there's a rainforest walk thing where there're animals roaming around freely in there and you can touch them!

Still very tired though. Not going to finish my revision at this rate... *sob*. -.-

Essays are almost done. Just one more to go; editing group report right now. Hand it up tomorrow morning and I'm free! YAY!!!

Over the past week or so, I feel like I've become some sort of Microsoft Word expert; I now know a lot of functions which I never really knew before. And I now have a sort of template for my papers! My own personal template kinda thing, that is. Getting the hang of writing essays now.

My lack of sleep at night still hasn't managed to disrupt my body clock very much; I can go to sleep at 6.30 am and I'll still wake up before 9 am. Annoying. But at least that means that I can maximise my time. Always need to look on the bright side, yes.

I've only actually slept at night about two or three times in the last week and up till today (didn't sleep last night either); I know that my neighbour's fish will start bobbing up in the pond and making gulping noises at about 2.30 am, I know that the newspaper man comes by at about 5.30 am, and then I can hear the soft putt-putt-putting of the scooter and the quick plop of the paper on the front porch. And then I hear him doing the same for the neighbours.

Didn't you ever used to wonder where the newspaper came from when you were a child? You'd wake up every morning and there'd be a paper on your doorstep, sitting there all by its innocuous self, with no indication of how it got there, and in your little childish mind, you could never conceive of the fact that someone was awake before you were, riding around dropping off the papers...

Because you thought the world only began when you woke up, and you didn't really have an idea of where the time between last night and this morning went.

Even in the midst of rushing my Sociology of Food essay I'm taking breaks here and there. To do completely useless stuff such as this:


My life is rated PG-13.
What is your life rated?

Using the Singaporean system though, I'd actually rate it M18 for violence, violent language and ideas, and occasional use of strong obscenities.

Oh, and lookie what I found while looking through some Harry Potter sites!



Just... whoa. Haha. Droolworthy. Very suave. XD

Ho-hum. *Wanders back to essaying-land*

I like the Harry Potter trailers... On the official site, there're three of them and I LOVE the second one!!

The music is just wonderful!

Well, of course, the trailer as a whole is nice too, but the MUSIC!

I suppose you get my point. :P

I just love the music most of all. And Harry Potter is slowly becoming like Lord of the Rings, in that aspect; the music, the drama (becoming more end-of-the-world-like now), blah blah blah and everything. Well, aside from the bit of teenage hormonal angst every now and then like how Harry angsts over how he just can't get laid a girlfriend, it's a lot like Lord of the Rings, yeah.

And speaking of Harry's girlfriend! Cho Chang in the movie is not overly stunning. I mean, she's pretty, but.. hm. Well, then again, I suppose it's enough. She *is* quite pretty. Disagree with my sister saying that she's "ugly".

The girl playing Fleur Delacour is damn pretty!!

And I watched the "Memoirs of A Geisha" trailer as well. I don't think Zhang Ziyi is *that* pretty.

All right, shall return to thinking of a topic for my Soci of Food essay. Need to do lots of things, and cannot sleep, although I probably need to sleep, as am sick again for the fourth time this year. Gah.

Keep thinking about how I'd like a new Chronicles of Narnia box set.

I'm digressing. Blame my fluey-ness. Hope I get better really quickly after all my essays are due, coz first paper is on 18th, and if I don't get better soon, nothing I study will get into my head! Argh.

*sulk*

Well, a lot of good that's going to do.

Sigh. Dinner now. Which will probably not taste like much since I can't smell or taste anything. Sigh.