currently craving

crispy fish at aston’s (yes, still)
拉面小笼包
yami yoghurt
korean barbecue

1 week more to go

la cheapa

i just stumbled upon the realisation that affordability moderates my perception of the attractiveness of items. what do i mean by this?

well, for example, while bumming my way through the night shift (during which i may have incurred a sprained thumb due to overobsessive polishing of silver) last night, i was suddenly, from about midnight through to closing at 2am, beset by an overwhelming craving for the breadcrumbed fried fish at aston’s in joo chiat. only $5.90 including 2 side dishes wor.

similarly… i think the affordability of a particular makeup school has disproportionately increased my inclination to select it over other schoos, even after receiving a decidedly negative appraisal of the students’ works…

help.

shallow consumerism

whenever i do go to hk (most likely within the next 12 months), that’s my number one must-buy. not that particular palette, and not necessarily just one either. it’s not particularly economical, though for the number of individual shades the price (in hk dollars, mind) isn’t unreasonable. however, the chief pull factor is the sheer flatness of the thing.

all things being equal i’d much rather have something flatter which covers more surface area, than an absolutely smaller item that just is thicker, and especially not one of an irregular shape. given that this houses 10 circles along its length, it’s clearly not going to fit into anyone’s pencil case. but it would slide easily into a handbag right along with:

yes, i know that the macbook air is flatter, but it’s just too wide to fit into most bags. in the event that it does, the extreme width-to- thickness ratio would probably ensure it gets snapped in two before i can make it off the bus. and the price tag isn’t quite as flat.

come on let’s go!

it’s interesting to realise that though i never used to listen to jay chou during my teenage years when everyone else was mad about him (everyone still is mad about him, but they are no longer ‘else’), the songs he put out during that period are in retrospect uncannily applicable to my life then.

.

perhaps it’s a question of subject matter, because it’s also interesting to note now that i seem to be identifying a lot with songs by sam hui. either that or i really am, as my mother says, traveling back in time. come to think of it i have indeed, to her chagrin, taken to cantonese opera.

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anyway, the new job has been going smoothly. my rostering has dropped to twice a week, as requested, and just in time for me to work on my assignments. the work itself is quite simple, doesn’t involve much physical exertion, and is very obsessive-friendly (polishing metal, wiping glass, writing tags). best of all, my pay came in earlier this week and it was quite a satisfying amount.

.

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as i was saying to my mother, there really isn’t any point doing hard work because although it may fortify one’s character, it never pays as well as ‘easy jobs’. now that i have left behind for good my former job as a drudge, i can’t help but wonder why some of the girls who are australian-born, speaking excellent english and with amazing people skills, continue to work there. i just don’t understand why. for me, now that i know i can (and have) got another job, there really is nothing left to recommend hard labour. seriously. invariably the most exhausting jobs pay the worst, and the cushiest jobs the most. there’s really no such thing as 半斤八两.

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小小的天有大大的夢想

the best news! it looks as though i might finally have found a job that doesn’t require me to spin around the shop floor in a blur or leave me with a headache by the end of the shift. after expending a great deal of effort trying to get yourself employment, why is it that the best opportunities always seem to be those that simply land in your lap?

anyway it seems that the brief interview this morning was a success. thank you aika! thank you my car, for rushing me there with 5 minutes to spare (in spite of my lousy sense of direction leading to several detours). thank you laneige makeup. thank you god!

mind over matter

here’s a clip from i’m a cyborg and that’s okay, which i recently watched. the moral of the story is that “normal” people, including mental health professionals, can be more abnormal than the patients, something i find to be increasingly true the older i get.

the first korean lesson of the year went well considering that i forgot 80% of what i learned before going back to singapore. it is time to start inputting massive amounts of vocabulary. i wish i could just open some valve somewhere in my brain and pour it all in. or maybe chuck the dictionary inside and stitch it up. unfortunately it’s going to involve a lot more pain than that.

also, the first draft of my honours thesis was chucked back at me today, heavily annotated with critical comments that will entail large amounts of work as soon as i recover from the irritation of having suddenly to do so much work in such a short time. a not unforeseen scenario. the upshot is that in the course of the clarificational chat there is a good chance that i will actually figure out it is that i am up to!

快使用雙截棍!

everybody knows who bruce lee is, right? well, for some reason one day i started thinking about it, and realised that for the life of me i had no idea even whether his movies were in english or canto (as it turns out, they are in both). well, 35 years after the fact, i have to say that he is really, really cool! by which i do not mean because he can bash people to bits, but because he is totally 潇洒… the way he scripts his english lines and says them with a canto twang (“awwn the cawntrary…”) and so authoritatively; how he strolls around like a random 流氓; how he continually emits those odd hoots and shrieks (took me ages to figure out where they were coming from); how he’s totally cool with trotting about in a banana-yellow unitard (my sisters called it “a kill bill outfit”. 有眼不知泰山).

anyway, it suddenly appears that that everybody knows how to use nunchaku. i suppose one shouldn’t be surprised that my recently-married cousin’s husband does them, since he’s a fitness instructor cum martial arts exponent. however, my sister has just informed me that our (apparently) sedentary dad used to have a pair (they got confiscated by the police in singapore). guess it’s my turn to 有眼不知泰山.

lab barbecue

as it turned out, the mango cake was subsequently sequestrated by aunty yin fong, leaving me with a choice of green tea cake or tiramisu. and, since there seems to be a surfeit of chocolate cakes on the increasingly emergent menu, i decided to go for green tea. they still have about 40 hours to object.

other news concerns the snowballing carpool gang. originally, the plan was for me to drive up to rachael’s house, and for her to drive us there. then, change of plans, i was to drive up to whitfords shopping centre and rendez-vous with her there after her shift. at that time i was still blissfully ignorant of the relative locations of whitfords, my house, and the destination joondalup. i later discovered that the distance from my house to whitford is something like six (?) times the distance from whitford to joondalup.

the next twist: the freeway south will be closed on sunday from 4am to 10pm. on second thought this isn’t as bad as it first sounds, since it would probably take me no less than half an hour (probably more) to make it from joondalup/whitford to the start of the freeway south, but still not a nice thing to have to worry about.

in the red

thanks to a tip-off from aika, i called up the tie rack at the airport this morning to enquire about job applications. they said that they were looking for someone to work in the mornings, as opposed to the (uber-lucrative) night shift that i had been hoping to work.

anyway, i will have to (snail — how backward!) mail in my cv first thing tomorrow, which means typing up a cover letter tonight (or rather now, but i’d rather be typing this and then watching i’m a cyborg and that’s okay). but as a backup, and before i lose my momentum, i shall try to find a minute to dart out to the garden city mall and look out for any help wanted posters. in fact, i should probably reactivate my application to work at myers, in spite of the bad taste left by last year’s interview.

the reason why finding employment is so imperative is that in the absence of a reliable (or indeed, any) stream of income, i cannot with confidence proceed with any of the things i intended to do this year. most likely i should call up my sonsengnim soon to arrange lessons, but even what money i had in storage (that in any case only sufficed for 6 lessons) has been eaten up by course readers and other miscellaneous unforeseen expenditure that in retrospect really should have been quite foreseeable.

not to mention that the although the ah longs of uwa have not been pounding on my door or leaving behind any poultry or porcine carcasses, they are probably sitting in their vaults happily counting the interest that is accruing now that my interest-free period has expired. having missed office hours by 5 minutes this afternoon (blame the course readers), i figure that any marginal interest from tomorrow will not exceed the cost of the petrol needed to get there and back just to run that one errand.

in short, a financial crisis looms but you never know… if you wait long enough, the rabbit may just strike.

what am i talking about?!?

鬼佬 = 热气-immune?

sunday is the annual lab barbecue, which does not involve roasted rodents or pigeons (though the latter might be nice). the main lecturer is supplying the roastables, but has subcontracted snacks and desserts to the rest of us.

my mother has volunteered to donate a cake, after all she will be making a mango cake and a tiramisu this weekend. naturally, i asked her whether  a mango cake would be yit hei.

“no lah! mango where got yit hei? anyway guai lou don’t have yit hei one lah…”

surely, i replied, they too would experience the detriments of excessive yit hei (bbq, mind you) without having to be aware of the concept.

“no lah, if you scared yit hei then you don’t eat lah!”

so, does this mean that yit hei and associated concepts exist in the mind only?

“you go and bring bak gor yee mai lah, then nobody will eat.”