polar opposites

People say opposites attract - I think attraction is tiring. With opposites, you have to keep answering questions, explaining yourself, trying to make yourself understood. Those whom you have more in common with, you can just cut to the chase, forget all the superficial conversation fillers that does wonders for resisting attraction. Chemistry does not lie in exchanges of fact, but personality. So stop talking already.

adultery

Been traipsing round the island in search for a new cello. The present one has reached its maximum potential, more or less, and is on its way to a new owner soon. I feel like a proud parent giving away the child for marriage, only the sex is reversed - my cello is male.

So if selling your cello is like giving away your kid to a marriage, buying a cello feels like a marriage of sorts. Considering I spend a lot more time with it then with my family, or even my house, that is not an inappropriate analogy. And I haven't even started on where it normally resides when I play it. In short, finding a new cello is a big thing. It's like going on blind dates - sometimes you get pleasantly surprised, although it doesn't look very good, sometimes it looks gorgeous but sounds wonky, other times it's PMSing and you decide to come back another day to see if it sounds better after some modifications.

So far I haven't found anything good yet. I think my expectations are too high; I expect it to be an instant love affair the way it was with my current cello, but it feels more like a mercenary evaluation of worth now. I suppose it has to be, if I'm going to spend something like $10k on it and be permanently broke for a long long time to come.

hmph. why am i doing this?

walking through the countryside

I don't believe how I'm ending my 5th semester already and I still haven't managed to come to terms with the fact that group work will never turn out well, despite my whole already-cynical stance that nothing good can come out of group work. Maybe because I was proven wrong last semester, where I had an okay-ly capable group, a LOT LESS groups, and people who had initiative. This semester, I have been investing most energy in my Japanese studies group and ignoring the Medical SW one, until now. They aren't bad, motivation-wise. They started very early, they actually do their work, but it's just they have a very weird kind of English that mixes up the past with present tense, that is very disturbing.

Maybe because hope and optimism is timeless.

Or maybe they had Eugene-O-Neill-like epiphanies like "The past is the present, it's the future too."

Either way it makes for gross editing, and I just rewrote the paragraphs in question. Very presumptuous eh.

But I can't help it. The perfectionist streak can't leave something alone if it's sub-standard, and I'm not even saying that it's perfect after the edit. It frustrates me because I just add work for myself, which explains why my social life (quartet an exception) is wilting, withering, non-existent, and I haven't even been to VivoCity when most of my guy friends have already gone. Not that I'm dying to go, but it's a measure and I'm failing to measure up in many ways again.

School's getting very irritating because it's getting inane and mundane and inconsequential and it's like getting a brain itch scratched but nothing more.

My classmates might say, "No what, the videoconference with a US University quite cool, no meh?" Stitch asked the only questions for the night because there was so little time, and he asked the classic "How would you define gay/lesbian?" question, the question I asked him over lunch at Subway four months ago, and he still hasn't gotten over it.

The question was met by something like stunned silence from the other side - as much as silence can be interpreted through the fuzzy big screen - until someone replied that it really depends on how the person defines him/herself, we just accept their own definition as it is. Now they probably think Singaporeans are totally ignorant and sheltered and mountain-tortoise-like.

I read SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st century
over the weekend and it's quite an enlightening book if anyone wants to get perspective on the "other side". It's found in most National Libraries around and I think I'll ask Stitch to read it, if he's not too busy mugging.

purged

Having gastric flu is one sure way of increasing crabbiness, so my true colours show and i snap at anyone who has the misfortune of pissing me off. Thankfully there haven't been many victims, because I've largely avoided meeting people, except when I had to play for the Pois fashion show. It was a miracle how I survived it after not eating anything for two days and being doped up on tons of meds just to prevent anything from exiting out multiple orifices. Let's not get into the details.

Plus side to gastric flu is losing weight! Grand total of 2 kg which is probably only fluid loss. Bah.

Yucky price for a plus side though.

Origins of the flu: It probably came from FloppyHair13 from Ang Mo Kio Secondary school although I don't know how it could be contagious after he sort of recovered from it. I'm not ruling out the girl from Japanese Studies tutorial who left halfway because she felt nauseus. But, well, tutorials do make people nauseous sometimes.

More probable origins: I'm working myself to death. It was incredible how many people I had to contact and how many students I had to cancel on just to stay home. And that's not considering those I couldn't' cancel even if I needed to, unless of course I died. Which wasn't a too unwelcome option given the circumstances then. I did make funeral arrangements and such with my brother in my moments of delirium.

Spent today frantically playing Sudoku (i love the handheld! many thanks!) to evaluate how many brain cells have been killed by the fever.

But I think just this post is telling enough. I am losing all my ability to sound faintly cerebral.