Friday, February 25, 2005
there is nothing like waking up in the morning and finding out that there are waffles with the face of the pillsbury doughboy on them to be eaten! torturing little effigies of the pillsbury doughboy is my favourite way to start the day. what is yours?



the pillsbury doughboy has himself a good stretch, certain that today is going to be a beautiful day!


he abruptly changes his mind when his legs wind up in my stomach.


since it is now exam season, my neighbours are drilling! yet again! it never fails to happen for any exam since jc! i am this close to having a little nerdling rage blackout where i head over there and hit them over the head with a book full of pictures of corpses! well, sure they need to fix the pipes now! they need to be fixed right away! geez louise! i can't think of any reason they can't just let the pipes be, live and let live, and go about their business with toilet contents regurgitating themselves all over the bathroom floor! you'd just have to enter the toilet on stilts and wearing biohazard suits, but that's something that could be lived with? right?


| mando | 6:05 PM

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Sunday, February 20, 2005
since getting the discovery travel and living channel, i've been watching way too many cooking shows for my own good. skinny chefs constantly tempt me with whole raspberries in chardonnay jelly topped with full cream. it makes me want to sprint to the refrigerator and forage for these magical ingredients so i can cook them and invite my friends over to sit in the garden among ferns and rock fountains while savouring the raspberries and cream. and the camera would blur professionally on our satisfied faces! but all i could find in the fridge were things like peanut butter and chicken breasts, which when put together would not make for much savouring. and so now i have all this unexpressed chefly energies with no outlet besides peanut butter chicken breasts! i have culinary constipation! this is frustrating!

anyway besides watching nigella lawson, i've been watching jamie oliver walk to his windowsill planters and pull off some herbs and shove them into the deep dark underbelly of a chicken without appearing to wash either one. aparently this is called organic cooking, and the tangy flavour of insectiside and the subtle bite of the salmonella only serves to further tickle the palate. but i totally hear ya on the organic cooking, jamie! why stop there? why not give soups extra flavour by uprooting entire potato plants and seasoning the broth with the sweet, sweet earth that mother nature must have only meant us to ingest at a four course dinner? it's not just for invertebrates anymore, y'know.

let me just balance out all this food talk with a bit of exercise talk! today i went for a jog, during which i managed to overtake one sweaty uncle who looked like he was going to go into cardiac arrest if he exerted himself a bit more. it was a very slow jog, because its hard to jog when your lungs fill up with haze particles and you have to cough like a jaded cigarette smoker with a seventy-year habit. we're having fires all over the country and bushes are just bursting into flame everywhere! just like in biblical times! i just hope it rains a little soon, or the national parks board is going to have a lot of problem promoting singapore if they have to change our byline from "clean and green garden city" to "full of ash and shriveled, charred trees city".


| mando | 4:32 AM

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Monday, February 14, 2005
happy valentines' day everybody! our anat group boys did something very sweet for the anat group girls and bought us all flowers! thank you anat group boys! you're such angels! hersheys kisses were being flung around prodigously and girls all over the place were plotting what to do on their valentines day dates. and i am very honoured to have spent my valentines day with my favourite gen as she left for sydney to start college! i'll miss you muchly hellopandafriend! enjoy yourself and don't get kicked by any angry emus!




lonely boys jasper and dehan, lonely girl amanda, and sydneysider gen

in honour of valentines day i will now write a list of things i love.

1) God
2) my family
3) my friends
4) sundried tomatoes and feta cheese
5) this shirt


6) the smell of the gangway onto an aeroplane
7) graphic novels that make no sense
8) a big squishy armchair


9) playing with my sewing machine pedal and pretending i'm driving an F1 racing car
10) angel-hair pasta
11) knowing i'm in a foreign country by looking at the colour of the roadsigns
12) reading the doodles on my lecture notes
13) saying "whee" when i round a corner in the car
14) making inanimate ojects talk to each other
15) walking on carpeted floors in hotel rooms
16) flea markets
17) saying things in foreign languages that i don't understand
18) speaking with funny accents
19) ben and jerry's ice cream


20) chocolate milk from a glass bottle



i forgot to mention that lynn the gummybear spent a sleepless night printing little valentines day photocards for all of us! thank you gummilynn! below is lynn's card depicting us looking nice at dinner and dance, and getting a lot of work done in the library.



| mando | 4:51 AM

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Sunday, February 13, 2005
yesterday me and the judo girls went angbao hunting! first everyone came to my house to bombard my mother with a large pile of oranges, and we had a big lunch and had a very demure yusheng laoing session! then after that we all piled into the back of luohan's bread van and huddled in the corners of the van like illegal bangladeshi construction workers and rode to luohan's house to stuff ourselves with chocolate wafer sticks and play cards and watch people have affairs with each other on zhen qing. after that luohan's brother gave us a lift back in the bread van, and since he drives like mr toad's wild ride, we were tossed around in the back of the bread van like freshly popped kernels of popcorn in the microwave! luohan's brother was rewarded for his kindness with an hour's worth of teenage giggling and screaming! it was a great day, and luohan is a very good driver, even though she ran a red light on the way to her house! but she ran it just like a pro!




the judo girls and a ginormous plate of messy vegetables

kenneth the tv guru has just supplied me with the first two episodes of a new show, 'Lost', and i'll be damned if it isn't more addictive than chocolate-coated marijuana leaves nestled on a fresh bed of pringles potato chips! it's about a bunch of people whose plane crashes on a little island in the middle of maroonville. and the island comes with its own mysterious, unseen monster that chews up innocent survivors and spits them out again. the lead character who saves everyone is called jack the doctor, and throughout the pilot episode he runs around saving the world and beyond with his doctory skills while everyone else screws everything up. i'd like to think that if i was a doctor and stranded on that island, i would be zipping around the beach of chaos confidently while wearing a cape and a stethoscope, giving the kiss of life to everybody instead of standing in one spot pissing myself or sewing someones nose back on in the vicinity of their elbows.


| mando | 4:22 AM

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Wednesday, February 09, 2005
it's chinese new year! happy dongdongchiang day to everyone! it is that time of the year where my hakka relatives whip out their handy filipino domestic helpers and slave for hours in their kitchens over enormous cauldrons of yong tau foo and abacus beads and all manner of strange shellfish dredged up from the murky depths of the ocean. and it is that time of year where the whole hakka clan gets together to stuff their faces with these shellfish until their stomachs explode from their shirts and hold conversations with other relatives while burping loudly in between sentences. i had a nice time catching up with my cousin ann who is looking more and more like a model every time i see her, and when i compared the amount of reunion dinner food we ate i am beginning to understand why. this year a new and wondrous thing happened, which is that none of the relatives remarked that my face was hideously swollen with acne! instead all of them praised the marvellous effects of roaccutane! but since i don't have hideously swelly acne anymore, my grandmother told me loudly that i should go on a diet while simultaneously insisting that i eat more fried popiah. common sense and age just go hand in hand, don't they? and then last night i had to stay awake past midnight so that my parents would live for all eternity! but because of the massive amounts of food consumed my eyelids were pretty droopy. so i kept myself awake by thinking of the angbaos of tomorrow and rubbing my hands together until my fingerprints wore off.

and today the visiting and angbao giving and mandarin orange-recycling began! me and ann couldn't think of traditional chinese phrases to wish people with, so we started making up our own four letter phrases that sounded lucky. because my chinese is very bad, i hope i didn't accidentally curse any relatives with an acute attack of diarrhoea or something. it is too troublesome to think of so many four letter phrases, so i have been wishing everyone dongdongdongchiang. in case you don't know what that means, it is a traditional chinese proverb that means that chinese new year is very noisy. anyway all the little cousins are growing up and so the number of little midgets dressed in tiny cheongsams and little hats with mandarin plaits on them has been reduced to one little cousin michelle. she's growing up so fast! i remember just two chinese new years ago i was playing roll the orange with her and she thought it was the most exciting game in the universe!

after that, our family did our long-honoured chinese new year pilgrimage to borders and carrefour. as it usually is on chinese new year, orchard road suddenly becomes angmorville! and today i saw two psychotic angmor boys about my age at carrefour making hand signals to each other like they were fighting the war in naam and sprinting across the bread aisle like they were trying to avoid invisible grenades pelted from behind the egg shelves. the holidays really take a toll on some people.

as usual, my family bought enough groceries to feed the population of a small indonesian island. and while we were busily poking frozen chicken, i realised that i couldn't get to the airport in time to send gwenda off to sydney vet school! so gwendapanda, i hope you have a safe flight and that all your stuff fits into your dorm/apartment room and that you have a kickass time in college sticking your arms up pregnant cows!

oho and it's jiayan's birthday too! happy birthday to my favourite miss kwok! smoochies from singapore and hope your dorm mates don't do anything too violent to you today!


| mando | 6:01 AM

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Saturday, February 05, 2005
kenneth the oc supplier has just burnt the two newest episodes of the show for me! thank you kenneth for fanning the flames of my roaring uncontrollable addiction! i just watched it and discovered that the oc has turned into lesbians live! this makes me all wicked out, because television lesbian action already ruined one of my favourite shows of all time (buffy the vampire slayer), and i don't want to see the oc spiral down a half scrubbed toilet bowl. and mostly because i don't understand how two girls can smooch each other with as much lipstick as they have on and not have things get extremely messy. and also if the show comes to singapore again and they have to cut all the scenes with girls smooching other girls, the show would probably be about five minutes long, and quick shots of seth will have to be interspersed between fifteen-minute long magiclean commercials. luckily this will also mean that they cut all the scenes with marissa in it, which works for me! give me the magiclean mopping lady over marissa any day!

anyway valentines day is coming! valentines day means a lot to me. mostly because of the valentines day chocolate, which if you are furtive or tricksy enough, you can buy a whole trolleyload of for your own consumption while making bystanders think that you are a very giving girlfriend. i think i will spend the day avoiding orchard entirely and in front of the tv contentedly eating fudge hearts while watching unhappily married middle aged farts wash their dirty laundry on desperate housewives. hopefully not going to orchard will mean that i get speared by fewer dangerous valentines day bouquets than i did last year!

lately we have been studying the skull, and i have unscrewed wally the skeleton's head from his torso and have been using schoolwork as an excuse to carry around his head in one hand and do tragic monologues from hamlet. alternately i have been unhooking his jaw and making the head talk to my brother in a funny voice, which i know he secretly enjoys but hides it by giving me looks that tell me i am crazy. or at least that's what i like to think.

yesterday i helped a little old lady carry her ntuc bags back to her flat. she had three plastic bags full of things like cookies and yeo's drinks and anvils, and she was trying to load these onto her brand new mop and carry them home just like in her old samsui woman days. she would load them up, walk two steps, watch them all fall off, and start loading them again. which is a good system if you want to get your chinese new year goods back home just in time for christmas, but something told me she had other plans. anyway we had a nice chat in which i only understood half the things she said to me in hokkien (one of which was that she bought her very nice mop for $3.50 and that i should get one too). and then when we reached her house she tried to give me five dollars. old people keep trying to pay me off.


| mando | 4:54 PM

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Wednesday, February 02, 2005
xingning has flown the coop! we went to see her off yesterday and found the airport swamped with the many friends of xingning. the area surrounding xingning was like mecca during a particularly busy pilgrimage, except with much fewer songkoks. after talking to xingning and discovering that almost everything that she was wearing and carrying was a goodbye present, we thoughtfully decided not to weigh her down with anymore goodbye presents and gave her many goodbye hugs instead! i felt a little gloomy after she scuttled off to board her flight with her entourage of mother and cousin (whose sole purpose seemed to be to haul around xingning's carry-on luggage), but was quickly cheered up by jasper and jianyang, who once again repeated their traditional conversation about who owes who money.

then on the way home on the bus we decided to journey forth to purger king to make use of jianyang's safra card, the only good thing besides free stationery that comes from being in the army. halfway towards purger king, we decided that eating prata was a healthier option and went to eat delicious marine parade prata and had a long conversation where we remembered everything we ever did in jc. and i suddenly became filled with nostalgia because right across the road from the prata place was the hdb block where we went to catch millions of monstrous cockroaches for our science project in j1! and a day after our efforts (which involved running away from really athletic cockroaches and dialling home to call my fearless maid to come and help us scoop up some vermin to take home and experiment on), we discovered that half of the cockroaches had eaten the other half. even though esther's mother popped by and dropped half a da bao into the cockroach tank, their greed was too great. come to think of it, it may have been nausea and not nostalgia. but it was a good night of remembering things like the unhygenic prata uncle whose culinary speciality was overnight roti john. and with all the remembering, i must say that i have been blessed with wonderful friends!



and since it is now dongdongchiang season, shawn has sent me an extremely branded hallmark chinese new year card! according to the printed message on the card, shawn is honoured to have done business with me! why yes shawn i am honoured too, and we must export illegal firearms again one of these days!

and now i have to sign off before my laptop generates enough heat to melt a small hole in the middle of alaska.


| mando | 6:07 AM

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