Doctor Shin

I suppose my dashboard is ’snowing’, although it really looks like those little white balls from inside a beanbag that are floating across my screen.

This morning I walked in and good morninged a grumpy faced bleary eyed Shin. It’s strikingly odd to know his formal title is “Doctor Shin”, because he wears the same pair of shoes and pants, the same shirt and sweater, everyday.

“I’m sick”, he complains, by way of greeting. “My daugter passed her cold to me.” His daughter is 16 months old this year. “I want to go home and I can’t concentrate.”

“Me too,” I say sympathetically, and pat him in the shoulder. We laze around until lunch time, because we don’t have flies and without the flies we can’t do anything. Shin accidentally forgot about his flies and heatshocked them overnight, so this morning we found four bottles chockfull of dead maggots.

After lunch we lazed around somemore, and I then Shin said “I want to sleep” and I said, “I want to go home.”

Shin glances around the lab; everyone is busy with their own stuff.

“Ok! Let’s go!” I am shocked, but he jumps up and slaps his pockets, in which he carries everything, from waterbottle to thumbdrive. “Quickly, come!” I grab my stuff and sneak out of the lab behind him.

And that is how I ponn work! Dragged along by Doctor Shin!

I wish tonight

Thank goodness it’s the weekend, and I can hardly believe it’s Christmas again. I remember experiencing, last year and the year before, this same increduility at the sneaky, unnoticed passage of old Father Time. I have vague thoughts about how I’m going to jump stary my vacation with a week of nothingness, I think fondly of all the ‘good bye and see you next years’ I should be saying – then I realized I have missed out entirely on the last day of school, and my first week of holiday will be taken up by Christmas and family, and I’m holding a full time job till then. It’s the first dose of reality I’ve gotten. Not studying for exams or such – those are the 18 long years of deplorable studying and preparation which suddenly, seem painfully ephemeral and inadequate.

I don’t want to grow up. I don’t want to have to hold a 9 to 6 (or later) job and metamorphorsize into those powder-faced marionettes trudging back and forth in the MRT stations daily. I don’t want to have to worry about electricity bills, insurance, finding a spouse, or being pressured about finding one.

I’m allergic to responsibility. But I definitely want the freedom that comes with independence.

To wheeze or not to wheeze?

My most memorable Christmas was in New Haven, Conneticut, the United States of America. We made a wreathe out of fir branches, and my mom screamed when she discovered worms in them. We had snow, we had woollen caps and gloves, we made a sort of snow mound and stuck twigs in for arms, we had giant Tigger and Piglet stockings filled to the brim with snacks and goodies. We drove a couple of hours to Michigan, lunched in the Bavarian Inn, which was woody, antique, with giant gingerbread house and other festive decorations.

At our American relatives’ house, we had eggnog, apple cider, spiced breads and pies, trick candles, golden wrapped present, we had an uncle chopping pine wood outside and bringing it in, we had the freshly chopped pine wood chucked into the fireplace. We had popcorn popped and marshmellows marshmellowed and Post’s Blueberry morning cereal with Haagen Daaz’s strawberry icecream. We sprawled in the yard and made snow angels, and my hardy grand-aunt who went outdoors without a coat, stomping through calf high snow in pants and a vest, to my parents’ wonder. The house was entirely carpeted, their blankets were electric, and little bundles of evergreen scented potpourri hung from every doorknob. This far into winter, there were no more geese and deer, even squirrels were hibernating away. No birds, but we had us. We had the brick fireplace, the dark, bare, endless forests surrounding the house.

Eeyore-ation

Left Biopolis at 6pm in high spirits, good weather, good work done, good schedule tomorrow, most of all, a good mentor. 

Spirits crashed during the commute back home, as they are wont to do, which prompted my restrospection – who what where why how come, I can go from the glow of satisfaction and experience well gained to the sly, sullen gleam of malice in the short span of a few minutes?

It only starts when I go on the MRT, and it happens only when the MRT (or the bus or house or whatever) is crowded  – meaning passengers standing back to front in each carriage – and it don’t take no rocket scientist to figure out what’s happening. 

I don’t know how to explain it, but -

Wherefore, whyfor, inasmuchaswhich, neither reason nor rationale for these long, drained expressions, these white painted faces with their rouge coloured cheeks? Down is a thicket of clay columns sculpted into stilletos, a timberland of cashmere, cotton or silk; up and around is even worse, lips short and slack on the face, brows a loose furrow, eyes weathered to a lacklustre dull. Some lucky faces are engaged by the phone or another face.

You there, and so many in others in your optimus prime, why so sad? This is your life and your job, know you not what you want, why you want it? - Mayhap forgotten the why to live? Or is it that the public trinity of Raffles Place, Cityhall, Dhoby Gaut, so uniquely Singaporean, these names, such the pragmatic Singaporean - Cityhall interchange. If you are travelling to Bugis, Pasir Ris or Changi Airport, please alight at the next station. Cityhall interchange. - have no place for childish grins?

It is 6pm, it is during the year end holiday, and after a full day at Biopolis, 17 year old Ang Wei boards the train at Buena Vista, saying : I need to go back to school.

It is 7pm,  it is during the year end holiday, students board the train at Orchard, on their way home. These 13 or 14 year olds would remember singing, a few years back :

- We shall try to do our best; Never stopping for a rest…We are girls from RGPS, always striving to be the best.-

That sick rollicking tune and the high childish voices of the brainwashed girls, most of which will grow, after a decade or so of doing their best without rest, to become the faces of the bathetic, mawkish beings training from office to home.

It’s just draining. No wonder my instincts scream against adults.

King Kong with Chopsticks

“Hoohoohoohoo! Good morning, Emma-ya-ya! Come come, many flies to dissect! Lalalala!”

Today, I befriended my needle point forceps, made a pact with the microscope, bribed my eyes into staying a-socket with loads of massage. 10am to 5pm has been a practial of ovary extractions. It’s pretty fun when you get a perfect pair of tiny white globules floating around in PBS solution – up the magnification and you can see the rows of egg chambers in long strings…it’s much like pulling transparent intestines from a breathing corpse and seeing the boli of food moving under peristalsis, because that’s how the egg chambers are pushed around in their ovaria. 

I am King Kong trying to pick up individual rice grains with chopsticks. No empire states building, and no pretty blond haired virgin lass, either. Only lots of buzzing ex-virgin fruitflies bloated with lymph and ovary.

And that’s about all I did today, actually. My mentor’s name isn’t Shin, but it’s close, and for privacy’s sake will be named so.

Me : (Looking up from the microscope, uncrossing my eyes, and pipetting the extracted ovaries into a tube and capping them) Done!

Shin : Really? (looks) OO-aa, perfect! Now you can do these. (Hands me a tube containing about 20 flies) Hoohoohoohoo!

That is how he laughs, like Tigger. Mad as a hatter. Waltzed into the lab in the morning boasting of his baby daughter’s nonstop wailing that morning, spent the next twenty minutes or so dissecting flies and emitting baby noises at random.

“Hoohoohoohoo! Enough, will continue later. Let’s go eat, I’m hungry! Lunch! Don’t forget the lights, Emma-ya-ya. Lunchlunchlunch!”

- At Shin’s workstation, signing off.

Continuing from before.

3pm - My contact lenses slide off my eyes from their continuous cross-eyed position and I groan. Microscopes suck. I am pulling apart unctuous oil drops smaller than a pin with my bare hands. Drop my forceps and rub my eyes, pushing my contacts around till I can see properly. I curse some.

Shin sticks his head in. “Tired? Go outside walk around take a break.”

‘Nah, I’m fine, just my eyes…’

“Yesyes, go around walk about awhile…coffee! Coffee break downstairs, come up later. No use doing work tired.”

Looking around at my other labmates, each under their respective mentors, I thank my lucky star for this prancing Taiwanese jackanapes who brings life and laughter to this otherwise workaholic environment.

An all new world awaits – Avatar

I look forward to living a lone bachelor’s life – no cleaning up, no ironing clothes, whatever, I’d earn enough money to hire an obsessively fastidious housekeeper, and I’d do the cooking, she could see to the sanitation of the rest of the house. 

Oddly enough, I never thought I’d need help to keep my laptop clean. Let me explain :  

Up until half an hour ago there lingered a very happy delusion that my laptop, while not pristine, was passably, acceptably, clean. My screen was rather dusty, but a screen is a screen and as long as dirt specks are discernable from punctuation, I had no reason to be unhappy about my laptop’s state of hygiene.

Well, belabouring through online publications of The Bloody Chamber, Surrender and The Yellow Wallpaper, I suddenly decided that the smidgens of dust on the screen had to go, and go they did, with some encouragment from Hexo-Dane Antiseptic Hand-Rub with 70% alchohol; reasonably heartened with the result, decided the keyboard could use a wipe too.

Fingerprints drastically more visible, with a few accidental dashes of marker ink, which clung with a mettlesome tenacity to the silver slates. These I could accept, but the eraser dust underneath the keys, I could not. Eraser dust, and the occassional bit of stapler bullet, bits of skin and nails, and some strands of hair that I draw out, long and endless, like an Mr Fantastic’s umbilical cord shrivelled to the proportion of a centipede’s feelers. It’s a bloody Uruk-Hai crawled and died under my labelled keys, leaving veins like oodles of congealed grey worms, a film of dust like the dried remains of uruk-amniotic membrane.  

Something just popped up in my MSN window - it says sniff_achoo@hotmail.com.

blinkblinkwinkwinknudgenudgepolepoke?

If my ineffectual attempts to excavate these decomposed remains signify anything, I suppose I shall have to thank Elbereth that I’m not allergic to uruk-dirt. 

A world away, A-Star research attachment has started. We sat through a two hour safety briefing, during which I did not fall asleep because I was relieving the near-death experience I had in the morning while trying to cross the road (I missed the overhead bridge and was too lazy to walk back.)

My professor-mentor is tall, skinny, baggy clothed and boisterous - he has the gamboling, swinging gait of Jar Jar Binks, and I kinda liken him to a giant, flexible hoola hoop trawling the ups and downs of the Biopolis facility. Bit scary and suicidal, rolling down the hill with his feral grin, but he’s cool and I’m happy with that.

As for what we do, the full blast of it comes tomorrow; as far as I know it involves gleaning virgin drosophila (female, not male) from a test tube and dissecting their ovaries. Our lab studies the singular or collective migration of cells in a certain orientation towards a certain stimuli, and the factors involved; while experiments are too small to be seen with the naked eye, at least the flies we handle are visible and there aren’t many dangers in our lab. I won’t go into detail about actin filaments, VEGF and TKR, but just search  

At the other end of the spectrum, Literature Research is in full swing, I’ve secured all my texts:

I’m the King of the Castle, Surrender, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Bloody Chamber, The Tiger’s Bride, The Yellow Wallpaper and Desiree’s Child.

In the course of choosing my texts I’ve actually cast aside many for their length and yet I want to read them all the same – book surfing is a great way of learning about awesome reads.

What I want to read :

1. The Master and the Margarita

2. Skellig

3. Breakfast at Tiffany’s

4. Middlesex

5. Wrath of a Mad God

There are loads more but putting them here would just depress me for sheer lack of time. I mean, this is on top of all my h2 Literature texts, Shakespeare, poetry, not to mention erotic fanfiction, and such.

It’s way past my bedtime, and I’m rebounding on my attempts to wean myself off caffeine.

Cans of coke today : 2.

Cups of coffee today : None

Status : stalemate.

Puff!

Time was when one acquired from a nameless flea-inhabited market three pairs of bermudas, Adidas imitations all -  different colours of the same thing. It was a long time ago and after a considerable buffet; o exalted stretchable waistbands of these new pants bestowed upon my bursting seams such magnanimous abundance of forgiveness that I was moved to a short-lived but well meaning repentence from gluttony. Days wore my brand spanking pantaloons into my roomy companions, in no time at all we were good and homely creatures of habit. I went nowhere without my cheeky chinos and went so far as to wear them under my skirt. Come boredom or plain juvenile ideas, my daredevil dungarees would save the day! Theses pocket brothers of mine were like furry balloons, and could smuggle anything from a can of Pringles to a pair of slippers, making them ideal accomplices in various petty and juvenile crimes. I also had the bad habit of snapping the rubber waistband against my pot-belly because I liked being the center of annoyance. Very trusty they were, the three musketeers and I. 

On a side note, this started out as a time to groan about how the rubber on the waistband wore so thin and loose that I eventually needed a clip to hold my pants up. It was supposed to be a gripe on how life just wears us all out so that we’re hanging together only by some external force. Unfortunately I find better solace in my books and so this comical recount shall have to stop here. Ta!

 

Happy Feet

A row of dirt-crusty sausage-like spades, twinned by colour and  shape

Canvas with ‘Converse’ and limp fabric crosses bridging paired up collars,

Constrained to your knots, tightened to your comfort. 

Thus thy humble fleshy stump esconced within a jealous clam

sheathing blistered sole and sweaty sock smell.

Now off with the puddle soaked rain doused shoe!  And see

The five pronged forks wriggling like stubby anemone

Beneath the chill, churlish smirk of light and wind.

In other news :

1. Mr NWY : A girl who bares her feet before men is one who will always be herself.

2. MJ : Hey! There’s cake in the canteen for you! (I gleefully traipse off in the direction of canteen) There’s also Kevin, though. (I make a resigned u-turn)

3. Ma’am : Student, why weren’t you at the subject rep briefing?

SH : Aw, nuts. Can we change subject rep? I don’t want to be lit subject rep. Anyway…I suppose it really is kinda sort of like a very long story.

Ma’am :  Change subject rep? You’re the only one in class taking this subject! And summarize it!

SH : Yeah, and I hate the subject! Well I got out of bed at 9.30 and spent 15 minutes being angry at myself. Then I came to school, by which time the briefing was over!

Ma’am : …The lit rep briefing just ended!

SH : What? No way, Wilnard and Kevin were done and over here ages ago!

Ma’am : Student, they were in a different subject rep briefing!

4. GP tutor : My son is 10! 10! And he talks about politics! He’s going to be a social recluse – how dare my husband walk around the house with that beatific expression of one extremely pleased himself -

I don’t want him to be a nerd! That’s a terrible thing!

 I always try to help by encouraging him to look at girls. When he goes to Sunday school, my husband will ask, “so what did you learn about God today?” and I will ask “so did you look at the pretty girls today?”

5. Dogtor : (bragging) I got 14 out of 15 for Chemistry MCQ!

LCK : Wow. How many hours did you spend praying to my portrait?

(As put by my friend : Scared time hug Buddha leg!)

Smothered, squashed, into a corner

My blood, it roils in my veins – I am quivering right now! Ah what a stupid kid…catch of the century. If you need it, just gimme a holler, love.

Ten life times would not be enough fuss.

You make me so happy.

When we’re ninety seven there’ll be rotund little kids running circles around us – why would they be comparing our Jc 1 grades? In any case, IF Black Junior does ask : “How many ‘A’s did you get for your Promos, yo?” I’ll photoshop your name into my grades and impress Black(s) Junior with your outstanding results.

I dedicate everything to you. My grades are your grades.

Nonsense. You love the limelight.

It’s a crucial part of my charm!

I know you love it. So I sent a request to the boss above, and he obliged.

Have I told you? You bring out the best. Always.

Yeah, so I can be wrong about people. But as long as I get the important ones correct, the others don’t matter.

 Looks like I can’t die young after all.

I’d teach the stars to write your name, even if it takes a life time. How I’d love to see that.

You make me so happy.

Wild River

Promos are returned, and applications for H3s are up. Not that I’m particularly psyched, or anything, because my results have a habit of steamrolling my hope for anything. CTs were bad enough, but I made up my mind to demolish that aberrant ‘E’ in my report. I did get rid of an E, but I also got rid of both my As, and The Final Result stands at 4 Bs and 1 D, mugging-be-damned.

Stark and terribly depressing is the fact that a B or D does not matter if I could have done better. What’s the point of getting all A’s in class tests if I flunk the final – furthermore, what is it about me that just can’t seem to muster any form of motivation for myself? There’s always a cycle of self despair, short lived hope, and a brief burst of productivity before I sink back to this trench of motony. And it’s getting increasingly evident in everything I do, everything I try to commit to… I hate being a disappointment. Because I hurt myself. And when others express disappointment in me, it bounces right back to me, because I have no shortage of love, affirmation, care, encouragement, wisdom, advice or otherwise any excuse to fail myself and them.

Freedom. Too much time, too many distractions…the feeling of wanting to get somewhere, but at the same time not wishing to be a slave to the future. I’m sick of the words ‘challenge’, ‘potential’, ‘talent’, ‘ambition’, ‘dream’, ‘what do you want to do in the future?’ ‘where are you going?’ ‘I’m sure you could do more in you try’.

Just as bad, these bite sized pieces of reality : ‘You have your whole life ahead of you’, ‘live your life to the fullest’, ‘make the most out of your time here,’anyone can do anything if they only try’, ‘to hit the ball, you’ve got to swing your bat.’ We all know this. What we can’t seem to do is make these statements matter to us.

Society worships, fawns and chases achievement, and why not? Achievements in sports, achievements in beauty, achievements science and the arts, as can be seen in every facet of our lives. Barack Obama’s worth in how much he achieves for America, Michael Jackson’s accomplishments in the music industry. How many girls have you dated, how many of them have you bedded? As is every other human in his own personal arena.

High flying successes with their high flying statements advocating all out pursuits of high flying goals. How often do we look at a nerdy, mawkish teen meddling away with a lego model and think to ourselves, now, that’s the sort of patience and passion we should have! or at a pair of drunken teens making out in the street and think : those people really live in the moment. It’s bad for them, but at least they do what they want and to heck with the world.

Someone once gazed into the tinted glass panels of a building so tall its granite spiral scraped the sky’s sagging belly and sunlight sank into its slate depths. He would one day work in there, poised to be the very epitome of sleek, sophisticated success. He would be influential, good looking, incisive, capable, and all admirable traits. The italian tailored jacket and the jet leather briefcase, Armani pants and other scented luxuries would speak for themselves. Gleaming Ferrari and the sly, foxy ladies by his side at his favourite restaurant. Spices, exotic furs, and warm, warm stones gleaming on his throat, in his fingers, beneath his sculpted, chiselled body. Each night was one to remember, the golden city skyline straight out his window and the slow meander of carlights on the traffic congested road, side by side with Chopin’s selected waltzes and a glass of aged Bourdain.

Another day, a scrawny mustang colt with a mane of sable and a coat of crimson sand was born. He was as strong as the sun, wilder than the river, and impossible was a joke. The blood bay plunged through the snowbanks and raced the Stella’s eagle with impunity, disregarding guns, ropes, whips and those numerous bipedals. There was this lithe lakota brave whom liked to jump him, but the mustang wasn’t having any of that. After a few kicks and bucks, the brave learned to respect the stallion. Freedom and health, everything.

Rubbish

The whole of today was complete rubbish. What for? Nothing.

Moan gripe curse swear self depreciating statements – all obscenties disallowed.

Moderated blog indeed.