Things that are new in Gerri's life.

Newly recruited member of wardrobe crew for Hall's Dance Production.

Bought a chest guard for archery, since coach says it's better coz it stops the fabric of our clothes from catching the bowstring.

Bow is also very nearly almost done with tuning. I'll be done tomorrow once I settle bare shaft tuning from 30m.

Oh, and also this quiz thingy which is really quite adorable. :P Go play with it.

Tired, tired, tired.

Damn tiring day.

The lousy timing of stupid things in this world. Couldn't it have happened like tomorrow instead when I'm free and could've slept the whole day.

Uninteresting tutorial at 10; only upside is that I think I've found myself a good project group-- they seem like good project mates. Terrible lecture after that; couldn't understand a thing that was being said and was struggling to keep awake at the same time.

Needed to sleep so badly, so I took a nap later.

Could've gone back to hall to sleep, but Gerri, being the stupid sort of girl she is, got stuck in clubroom playing silly card games.

And then later, training.

Damn tiring. It suddenly feels like all my muscles dissolved or something.

Sigh.

And Jianhui's new 34-pound limbs feel lighter than mine. They feel like blardy 30 pounds instead of 34.

Shit, I wanna change my bow limbs.

Tired. Gonna go shower and do laundry and sleep.

"Hace un mucho, mucho tiempo..."

A long, long time ago.

Thus begins the story of "Pan's Labyrinth", as most fairytales do. Only this one is closer to the grim original versions than those which we read as children.

I watched it yesterday night with my baby, and I thought it lovely. I've read reviews which were of the opinion that Guillermo del Toro's latest contribution to film seemed like two parallel narratives each fighting for their own screentime, but if you ask me, everything tied in nicely.

Parallels? Well, perhaps there were parallels in the two intertwining stories.

To me, "Pan's Labyrinth" is a story of two broken worlds; a Spain which suffers under the Fascist regime, and the underground realm which Pan-- the faun-- speaks of, searching, searching for its princess all this while, for so long that even Pan himself has nearly lost hope.

It's a story of hope, of how one world finds hope in finding that which it has sought for so long, and of how the other struggles to create its own hope; fighting to force a light out of the darkness of gunfire, explosions and death.

It's a story of courage and fear in the face of so much death; of the rebels who oppose Vidal and fight for a tomorrow which they know they may not see, and of Ofelia's daring and her innocent, unwavering sense of justice-- and it reminds us that sometimes children deserve more credit than we give them. The children of Lorenzo Carcaterra's "Street Boys" certainly did have the courage to stand against the Nazis where all their parents had fallen.

And it is a strange story of love, perhaps.

Of love among family members, of love for the country which one is a part of, and the mischievous, satirical love which Pan demonstrates.

Pan himself is simply lovable.

Most of Pan's lines take the form of semi-riddles in instructing Ofelia what to do; lines which have the flow of prose-poetry as he embellishes them with the strange half-purring, half-growling noise he makes in the back of his throat and his mocking smile.

I wonder if I was the only one in the whole theatre who saw the irony when he warned Ofelia about her second quest, warning her about what she would find; "It is not human." The irony, Pan. Neither are you. :)

And what must have been my favourite line of the whole movie: "This is a mandrake root, a plant which dreamed of being human."

A plant that would dream is a strangely adorable notion. ^_^

It's been some time since I last saw a film which made me happy in this bubbling kind of way, but perhaps, it's as I once observed about myself a long time ago: my inner child likely lives closer to the surface than most other people's. ^_^

Sick. Out of nowhere.

Had bloody killer headache last night, the kind which just pulses away at the sides of your head and from time to time, flares up and feels like something's hammering away from the inside, wanting to get out.

Fever, and cold cold cold.

I woke up feeling sore in the knees, my eyes feel puffy, my throat is sore and water just keeps making it hurt more. I'm wearing a jacket and the fan isn't even on and I'm still cold, the bed is cold, the floor is cold so I can't even bear to step on it because it makes my feet ache.

And then I checked my phone and now I'm just kind of numb.

It's difficult to understand people. I don't understand why when I ask, nobody says anything and later it comes in some form of deliberated digital medium, where anything that I can say will get lost in transmission.

I should ask for less, want for less, expect less, and... I don't know. Just when I'm starting to be more sure of things, I'm reminded of everything that I cannot do, that I don't know how to do, and I don't know how to learn.

I can't ever seem to do anything right.

I'm tired.

I've never wanted as badly as I do now to be someone else.

The last two days were spent at Sembawang CC, participating in their archery competition.

There was some screw-up which I still don't know the nature of on the first day-- the day of the individual events-- which resulted in the events being pushed back *hours* after the time they were scheduled. My category, for example-- C Class Female. We were scheduled to start shooting at 12.45 pm, but we only really started our shoot at about 7-plus pm.

The Compound and Recurve Open categories, initially scheduled after C Class Female, had to be moved to early the next day before the team events, since we were only done shooting at about 9.30 pm.

Longest and latest-ending competition *ever*.

So all we did was sit around and play bridge for most of the day. I was a little unsettled about the sighting round-- there was no solid backing at the back of the range which would stop our arrows from going through the fence if we missed the boards, and I had good reason to be worried; I hadn't been able to make it for the sighting rounds on Friday sicne I had classes on during the time that the sighting was scheduled.

Plus, I wasn't too sure of my 50m sight; shooting in school on Thursday, I found to my horror that my sighting for 50m *seemed* to have moved down by one whole division, from 3.2 to 4.2. Something about that just didn't make sense or sit right with me.

Good thing that we were given two sighting ends before the scoring rounds.

For the first sighting end, I set my sight to 4.0, feeling very uneasy. I shot four arrows and would later retrieve only two-- three had missed the board and two of them were shattered-- such is the nature of carbon arrows. Which meant that of the seven arrows I had, I was reduced to five, and I needed six per end.

Desperate situations call for desperate measures, so I had to bring out the set of ACC that the club gave me for my 21st birthday and use them, despite the fact that they were untested and untuned. A "trial by fire", as Janice said. :)

I moved the sight up to 3.4 and shot four of the ACC, got a good sense of where my sight should be and then proceeded to start the scoring ends, feeling just a bit rattled by the whole thing.

But things went well; after a pretty good first two ends, I started to settle down and get back into the normal feel of things.

In the end, I achieved a score of 267 (out of 360), second after someone else's score of 291. But that someone was older than most of the other competitors, so it prompted Connor into grinning and asking later, "IVP first?" (First place for the institutional shoot, which is happening in about 3 weeks) Hm.. I'll try, Connor. Lol. :P

Even better was that there were only three teams in the C Class girls' category, and Kristy, Janice and I were the team that NUS fielded, and our combined individual scores placed us as the highest-ranking team! Which meant that we had a "by"; the second and third teams would shoot against each other, and we would take on whoever survived. :P

It was a good advantage, since we made use of the time during the "by" to confirm our sighting and we brought back the gold medal in the end. :)

And hey, it's my first team medal! :D

The Standard Class girls and guys did well too; gold for the girls' team and silver for the guys. But only because they lost out to a team of uncles who look like they've been shooting since we were in diapers. Jianhui and I were wondering what on earth they were doing in *Standard*, of all things.

So the medal haul for us is 14 medals (not including an appreciation plaque for loaning our boards to the organisers):
Standard Girls: 6th place and 5th place;
Standard Guys: 6th place;
Standard Girls' team: 1st place;
Standard Guys' team: 2nd place;
C-Class Girls: 5th place and 2nd place;
C-Class Girls' team: 1st place


Team photo 1, with the C-Class guys' team on the left pretending to look sulky.


Team photo 2, with the "pushover" that's becoming disturbingly like a tradition. :P


My gold medal-winning team. Clockwise from left, Janice, myself and Kristy. :)


Standard guys' team. My baby's on the left. :)


The Standard guys' and girls' teams.

And last but not least, my trophies:


IVP, here we come; NUS Archery is now stronger than ever. :D

Ladies and gents, welcome to yet another semester.

School for me starts at 12 pm later; for now, it's good to be back in hall. My room now is kinda bare-- especially if you compare it to the cluttered state that it was in during the exam period last sem-- since I've just moved back in, but with all the notes and stuff which accumulates over the course of one semester, I think the shelves will be filled soon enough.

Michelle's just moved in this sem; hey girl, you're finally a full-time Eusoffian! Haha... So now I have one more person's room that I can just pop in to. :P

This sem, four out of my five classes have lectures in seminar rooms; the classes must all be pretty small. I checked the class rosters this morning, and it looks like there're less than a hundred people in all those classes. Not to mention that this must be the most amusing thing that I've seen in my five-- six?-- semesters here: the XD3102 module (Gender Studies across Disciplines) I'm reading this semester has a grand total of SEVEN students.

Lol. Frankly, I'm not surprised. The module's one of the two compulsory modules for my Gender Studies minor, but it's only being offered for the first time this semester, and a prerequisite is that one must have read four other modules in the Gender Studies minor course. Lucky thing for me that I have.

But if the number of students in the class doesn't change even after all the bidding rounds that're still going on... hm. Can we say "no bell curve", anyone? ^_^

This sem is also the one and only semester in which I managed to completely clear out my Program Account: over 3000 points accumulated over the course of five semesters, and I blew it all one just one module this semester: a level-4000 module for which there was a vacancy of one in round 2B, when students other than honours-year students were allowed to bid.

So I got the module, but at an extremely high price. To quote my mum: "better make sure you bring back a super A+ for that one".


Joseph was helping me move most of my clothes and the bulkier stuff into my room on Saturday, after which we sat down for a while and watched "The Devil Wears Prada". It's funny and all, and you know, it's one of those shows where the lead character has to make a choice: relationships versus career. Invariably, the lead is a woman.

So then it begs the question: why should she need to choose? Why can she not have both? Why is there always something "wrong" when a woman has a dysfunctional social life at the expense of her career?

As Andrea pointed out in the film (regarding Miranda's semi-slave driver work style): "if she were a man, there wouldn't be anything wrong with it".

So the way I see it, perhaps "The Devil Wears Prada" isn't just about how we shouldn't sacrifice our personal lives for corporate success. Perhaps it's also about how women always seem to be the ones who run into more of these dilemmas, and how the media continues to play a part in this. And perhaps if we believe it enough, we have a hand in our own unhappiness.

Happy New Year, everybody.... ^_^

It's been a pretty tiring but enjoyable past three days; relatives on my mum's side came down all the way from Malaysia on the 30th, and we had steamboat at home. One hell of a squeeze, I tell you-- 14 people crowded around the table. My parents, my two sisters and myself, two aunts and an uncle who're single, and my married aunt and her husband and her two sons (my cousins, of course), and our two lovely guests, Ben and Joseph. :D

Dinner started kinda late coz we were waiting for my dad to get back from work, so Ben, Joseph, my sis and I entertained ourselves by playing bridge-- during the course of which we learned that our dear Gen really isn't too good at bridge. :P

We finally drank the Chardonnay that Joseph bought last week and everybody had ice-cream from Venezia (1.5 litre tub, 4 flavours-- caramel, belgian chocolate, strawberry cheesecake, mango-- at a discounted price since Gen's working at the Venezia just down the road for the holidays) after dinner, and in my mum's words, the "younger generation" started making plans to go out the next day so we could catch the New Year's Eve countdown fireworks at Marina Bay.

So my baby and I went out with my two cousins and our uncle; we walked around Marina Square for a bit, had dim sum for tea, walked over to the Esplanade to see some of the pre-countdown preparations and such and baby snapped a few pictures as well.


They had these white balls floating in the river-- I have no idea why, but the sight of large inflatable balls always makes me squeal. They're just so.. cute, in some way. ^_^ From where we were (behind the Esplanade), I could see the balls had writing on them. Probably well-wishes for the new year.



Baby and me in front of the Esplanade, and us against the CBD skyline, on the bridge which outside the Esplanade.

After that, it was back to Marina Square for dinner, at Billy Bombers this time, during which we got ourselves thoroughly stuffed by their humongous portions.

We made our way out onto the bridge at about 10-plus and got ourselves a pretty good spot to watch the fireworks; we sat on the aluminium railings along the sides of the bridge, and pretty soon, lots of others got the same idea.

So we had a good view-- we weren't blocked by anyone directly in front of us-- and we had much fresher air too where we were, up above the crowd, and the fireworks display really was something. It lasted for about five minutes and it was so pretty...!! :D

For those of you who weren't there, you really missed a good show-- was quite something, despite how short it was. :)

I've never actually spent New Year's outside before; always spent it at home. For a first time out it was pretty all right, I guess. :)