Tears Of The Road Ahead

i am now officially 2 years away to being a quarter of a century old. as far as birthdays went, it wasnt too eventful. but nice enough in its own way. got out of bed late, had a lunch binge at a hotel buffet, and got to watch a movie at night with Jo.

The Interpreter seemed like the only movie in the whole of GV Marina worth watching. i had my doubts, not remembering how the reviews in the papers turned out. it was well worth the risk. Sean Penn is a true workhorse actor with credible emotions, who put in a good turn as a Secret Service agent with a very vunerable, human side. Kidman excelled in a role which didnt require glam-ness per se, and even had a cute little south african accent to boot. excellent plot twists, excellent casting, just excellent. please watch this one.

Who Will You Think Of - Zhang Dongliang

Only You

usually dont blog so many times in a week, but i just felt the urge to reflect on all the stuff that's gone on since we started term. i think the class is going downhill. i suppose its a common theme in all my rants, cos we dont go out and blah blah yakkety-shmakkety. and frankly i do miss watching movies and drinking coffee and karaoke and windsurfing and all that jazz. but the decline has gotten to a level where now everyone i talk to feels a sense of detachment from the class, as if they have been left to fend for themselves. please people, remember that your support network extends to all 34 of us. most of us have made the effort to at least bond with our cluster during year 1 and 2... dont let a friendship slide just because we are in clinics now. we cannot chain our souls to the lab bench. please leave when you should, and not when its past our time. pissing off the profs and supporting staff one by one has no good outcome. i know that there's the perfectionist urge in all of us, and if we didnt have that we'd make pretty poor dental students. but yet theres the ability to sense when something is appropriate, when it is time to cover the wax, wipe off the omega trimmer and walk out the door for the night.

i'd also like to say that these 2 weeks wouldnt have been so bearable without the presence of my Lab Partner PJ. working with her next to me in OD is like having an extra pair of hands and an extra brain. certainly much more comfortable because i dont feel so alone. and her buoyant sense of humour is a definite added bonus. i think i'd really be lost without her, she means a lot to me.

My Will - Dream

Pick It Up And Carry On

after the last week of gaming, i have come to the conclusion that any players from CA, US and TH have connections of questionable reliability. and NUS connection is abysmal. ping times are excellent diagnostic tools where available but not easy to obtain due to firewalling. and if i see any more CA players who insist on their connections being good, i will just request that they be booted. im tired of having precious gaming time wasted.

gonna do my first hand scaling tomorrow. should be quite interesting, cos ive actually never scaled a live patient before. i mean... Oscar sure doesnt cut it as a simulator. he doesnt drool or bleed or complain. hope i learn a lot.

think im getting used to clinics work. the bothersome thing that is exact. and i hope that things will lighten up for the class. everyone seems so disturbed and stressed by clinics. frankly, its gonna be a way of life. have to adapt, or die.

My Wish - My Life - Do As Infinity

I Cannot Recreate What Life Was Like Through Photographs

love lazy saturdays! spent a good part of it asleep, to make up for all the stress that i've taken in through the week. got a new Robotech comic too, shows the wedding of Max and Miriya. now the only major event left for the week is the health screening at Lot 1 tomorrow.

Prof Hsu said that when man is out of contact with nature, he gets more frazzy. suppose its true. when you cannot see the stars or feel the wind blow in your hair, life seems so much more desperate. i know that i feel really good going to school in the morning because i can cross the overhead bridge and see the bouganvilleas in bloom and feel the wind toss my hair. and it all disappears by 11am, when i start to get hungry and floppy...

had a reminder about how to keep in mind people's styles of work in 2 different incidents that happened through the week. its just something so important, but we still forget that our lab partners dont know everything about how we like to have things done, or our character flaws. its something we'll have to work with slowly as we go on into year 3 and 4.

Ci Niao - F.I.R.

Blott En Dag

its been so long since i blogged, and so much has happened in the week. it seems as if im too busy to even read patient files, which isnt exactly good... and everyone is amazingly tired.

heres a song that came up during SF...

Day by day, and with each passing moment,

Strength I find, to meet my trials here;

Trusting in my Father’s wise bestowment,

I’ve no cause for worry or for fear.

He whose heart is kind beyond all measure

Gives unto each day what He deems best—

Lovingly, its part of pain and pleasure,

Mingling toil with peace and rest.

.
Every day, the Lord Himself is near me

With a special mercy for each hour;

All my cares He fain would bear, and cheer me,

He Whose Name is Counselor and Pow’r.

The protection of His child and treasure

Is a charge that on Himself He laid;

“As thy days, thy strength shall be in measure,”

This the pledge to me He made.

.
Help me then in every tribulation

So to trust Thy promises, O Lord,

That I lose not faith’s sweet consolation

Offered me within Thy holy Word.

Help me, Lord, when toil and trouble meeting,

E’er to take, as from a father’s hand,

One by one, the days, the moments fleeting,

Till I reach the promised land.

is it not God and God alone who keeps me on my feet all day, and gives me the energy to do what i do? i couldnt do it alone, it would certainly be so much more miserable...

DotA v6.06 is out! gonna test-run it before i go crash. Sand King got balanced... see what else has changed...

Days Of Days Over You - Love Psychedelico

The Legend Of The Thornbird

i just got the new F.I.R. CD! its pretty good, good tunes and some thematic linkage to their last album. more thumpy music for my DotA playlist...

watched The Pacifier yesterday with Jo. it wasnt too bad really. coherent plotline, good comic work and Vin Diesel can actually look paternal. quite amazed by that. also a very Jacky Chan-esque fight scene in a nursery room. it was great to watch and de-stress to yesterday...

got a new patient today. a Filipina from church is having pain, Prof Foong said it looks like a pulpitis. i hope i can slot her into the Wednesday Perio session to begin E&D, and if there really is a pulpitis that requires intervention the OD doctor will have to step in... either way its a learning experience.

LOVE*3 - F.I.R.

No Way Through

one week of clinics gone by. got to say its been the most tiring school week ever! im actually quite amazed im still alive, all the clinics is just so sapping. and people can still stay late after school and do work. its just crazy.

got to go out for a while today. it woulda been longer if we coulda dislodged some people out of the lab faster... but it was good to walk the streets and see the sights, eat food not cooked on Kent Ridge and just have fun. on the one hand clinics are interesting, but on the other hand we still need to de-stress. at least my cluster isnt too would up... most of my new cluster people are okay workers.

Lofty Spires Of Ice That Pierce The Intense Azure Vault

day one of school has gone by. one patient seen, and i want to die! guess its pretty common all ard the class, for those who had to see patients. esp for A and B cluster, since we were solo-ing the session. at least i got my stuff banged into exact. i still have to rearrange appointments with a patient due to not knowing that RP sessions are meant to be spent working on more pre-clinical stuff. and theres all the E&D stuff to clear up! still have to find out wtf my patient is on. high platelet count? platelet depressor? what in the world? splenectomy? man... the things you never knew you never knew.

i miss my holidays already. studyin for the RP test tomorrow just highlighted that my brain probably atrophied with joy while i was on holiday. or shrank in the cold of Yulong Xueshan. that place was fun! even though the area at the top of the mountain was so small and restricted, snow is always great to mess around with (but not to live in, i'll qualify) and the view on the way up rocked. i think i'd actually willingly consider Yunnan as a honeymoon destination. places like Heilong Tang and Yulong Xueshan are really scenic. makes Singapore look so small and boring... not that this is a revolutionary statement.

i really should find time to finish off the paladin. the armour has been brown-washed and drybrushed and highlighted. work on the tunic has started. and thats it.

Nagai Aida - Kiroro

Take My Picture Off the Wall If It Just Won't Sing For You

here i am freezing my toes off in a Lijiang hotel room. amazing place, a low-rise hotel concept with amazing facilities, like a computer in my room! the china trip really looks like its a lot more fun than i thought it would be...

to summarise all of the places i've been so far would be to exhaust my infamously bad memory. i've skated in the middle of Kunming City, eaten dog ribs and roasted chicken heart seated on woven straw stools. i've strolled the streats of Lijiang Old Town and been in too many photos courtesy of my Dad. i've seen toilets ranging from long-drop-into-cesspit to amazingly nice public toilets in a historical district. i've strolled the park in HeiLongTang and the streets of Kunming after midnight. and yet...

every time i hear Sun Yanzi on the radio i think of home. every time i see the planet hanging out near the Big Dipper at night i think of the ones i left behind. guess im still a Singaporean at heart. because whats important to me is still there. my heart, my home, my life, my DotA clan. this place is great but at the end of it all i'll be glad to be back. even without the huo guo.

Ni Hao Zhou Jielun - An Youqi

Are We There Yet?

in Terminal One siphoning the free starhub net access from terminal thingy. its laggggeeeee! but its free, so not too much to complain about.

to my total amazement i actually managed to get 2 or 3 patients for Week 1! yeah, now i'll have stuff to do for perio and OD sessions. really got to thank God for all the calling that got done at the last minute. and even the perio patient who transmogrified into a partial denture case. when we bring her in we'll see how her perio status is lah... hope she can go straight on to the RD but if not we'll have to stabilise her gums lah.

without DotA for a week... scary thought. and no Anime on Central. tried smsing Charles to ask him to tape it for me but not reply. damn!

Patience

got a little dosing of reality today. finally got my fat ass round to calling patients and 2 of them said straight off that they wanna be discharged! scum... i now have a serious problem with finding perio patients. was so sad i called Shafiq to bitch to him and din even call the OD patients. dammit... and this holiday is being a pain in the posterior. goddamn it... i dont mind going off if everything and i mean everything is all tied up so that i dont have to come back to worry about stuff. but obviously everything is not okay with clinics and patients. want to go and kill stuff right now.

got some personal clinic visit time down at Trinity Dental. was a pretty good insight into the life of a GP... dont know if thats the life for me yet but it looks workable... the kinda practise that you can grow into and watch your patients for all the years. its not the most glamorous work out in our field... but hey it cant be that way for all of us.

Lazy Gun - Jet

Swing When You're Winning

another week is swiftly disappearing into the nothingness of the past. and i am so running out of holidays! and the worst thing is all the clinics preparations... i so need to get all this clinic stuff settled... like how i need a freaking perio patient for the first week and all. going to go down to school and check on patient allocation tomorrow and see if i can get sth sorted out.

me and Shafiq got the sound recording done for the preventive project. managed to turn a time-wasting endeavour into quite a fun exercise. hope the voiceover does ok once Shafiq resynchs all the slides.

after the great dubbing adventure we + PJ went out for dinner at Suntec. discovered the joys of overeating at Fish & Co. specifically a menu item called Grilled Swordfish Collar. for basically one Yusof Ishak more, you get almost twice the fish, on the bone no less, and its good stuff! ate until i wanted to faint, and then ate some more. so if you ever find youself ravenous and with cash to blow, consider this a viable option.

today's Karaoke was very well attended. there were earsplitting moments, and there were moments where we were treated to the audio genius of Anqi and Wanyi... and i think i scared the class by remembering all the lyrics to This Love when the pirated karaoke had no subtitles displayed. what to do? the poor song got overexposed and it somehow went in. just like the wu ye tian which i kinda partially sang from memory since i couldn read the fan ti.

Qing Fei De Yi - Harlem Yu

He Lives, And Now I Know That I Shall Conquer Death

"there are only two kinds of people in this world, those who swing and those who don't" - Swing Girls

Easter is almost over! the musical is done, and now my throat can rest. got some kinda evil laryngitis secondary to a nasopharyngial drip. freaking irritating! it meant that even though i hit evry high F nicely i wasnt at max volume. the guys were quite dying... and having to do 2 shows was a killer! very heartening knowing a lot of hands went up after Pastor Mike's sermon though.

just to set the record straight, why do people think that the easter bunny and eggs have something to do with easter in the christian sense? had 2 people ask me if i was going to be in a freaking rabbit costume today. not funny. it was enough of a put-off to make me forget to ask one of those people to go for the easter musical. sigh...

went to watch Swing Girls in the evening. a japanese show that was an utter gem to watch. the characters are genuiely likeable without descending into pseudo-adorable cliche, and i swear they actually play instruments! not like the fake stuff you see people in TCS commit whenever they need to pretend to be musical, which is one of my pet peeves. the plotline is strong, and the gag sequences are funny without being overly hammy or show-stealing. this one is a show not to be missed!

Sing Sing Sing - Swing Girls

The Unique Solitude

another week of holidays gone by... coulda been more fun-filled of course but it hasnt been too bad all things considered.

got myself a little knight miniature from PI. something different to develop my painting with. and if the D1 vs D2 match comes through i can give it as a trophy. with like a bazillion layers of semi-gloss of course!

went to PJ's place after the Good Friday service to discuss clinic stuff, like allocation of the OD sessions and all that jazz. and ended up playing monopoly with her and Shafiq... it was pretty pretty good insight into our different game mindsets. when i get Shafiq up to scratch with DotA his meta-game may well be very kick-ass. if YH and gang don't keep raping the poor boy of course...

now listening to the CD which i got for PJ's birthday... burned it onto my HDD just now. it sounded a bit weird at her place, but its growing on me. very old-school crooner. perhaps it was a bit funny because the first track was bebop-styled Nat King Cole, who was taking some major liberty with the phrases.

She's The One - Robbie Williams

The Legend Of PrInCeSs_StArRi

yeah... so we were bored that saturday afternoon while DS was assembling Stan's new com. and so, in a flash of inspiration i decided to create a new BNet account and go trawl for desperate DotA players. and hence PrInCeSs_StArRi was born. success rate? one poor soul convinced i was a zha bor. he even asked to add mi to his fwenz list lolx *giggles*. and we lost the game, for the record. lag killed my ability to assassinate effectively, even as the Nerubian Assassin.

my new modem and router are hooked up! significant increase in surfing speed, and i can now put my feet up in my own room instead of at the study table! woohoo! no more booting my brother, no more fiddling with USB! happy days are here again!

need an outing... Stan's rigging up a Sakae binge on wednesday afternoon, and i need a good excuse to get out of the house. anyone interested please read yer mail!

broke the screw holding one of the silicone rests on my specs when i dropped it at night.... ended up with the distal end of the screw still stuck in the thread. the spectacle shop i went to couldnt effect a full fix cos they couldnt get the broken bit out, but they gave me a new pair of rests and screws for free! and then, left to my own devices on the way home, i hit upon the idea of using my pin-vise to trephine the broken bit out! score one for reading the textbook for pre-fab post removal techniques! worked out fine... though i couldnt actually pull the broken bit out on the end of the pin-vise, i managed to screw right through it and dislodge it from the threads so that i could put in the new screw all the way. happiness!

Come Around Again - Jet

Doing That Thing You Do

another long-remiss update. whats happened since my last update? plenty, probably...

DotA v6.02 is out! distributed to all of Clan BDS, and we had one trial run together. mixed reviews lah, really hope that the next few versions will be able to rebalance things and iron out bugs so that the community moves forward from 5.84c_v2. i mean... yeah old stuff good so far but life has to go on. and im developing a fondness for the mountain giant. Throwing people around is kewl!

got my modem and router but due to the phenomenal jack-up of forgetting my internet password, i cannot use it yet. damn. so much for better connectivity and surfing the net from the loo (yeah like hell i'll do that) and i'll be DotAing from the old modem tonight. will have it hooked up tmr morning though.. and then happy days are mine! no more kicking my bro off the com to play, no more hauling my laptop to the study table to plug in via USB, and hopefully no more of mum peering over the top of my screen at 2am and scaring the hell out of me.

Last Chance - Jet

Crop Rotations

finally i can blog after a few days of Blogger being bitchy and not letting me in. all that stuff to say, and im sure i'll leave stuff out...

got to watch Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events. the reviews were accurate. Jim Carrey is not scarey enough for a mail villain. the best thing about the show is the Baudelaire children and the visuals. the costumes look really funky in a period way, and the set design is pretty good. suppose i should go get the books... heard theyre really good.

DotA with Clan BDS has been a bit rough lately. oppo is either beyond easy or mad skilled. it ranges from games where i cant even get Power Treads by level 16, to a game where i got a Skadi for Rooftrellen by level 21! never ever been able to do that!

Standing Bird - Love Psychedelico

Hop, Skip And Jump

its the last paper of my 2nd Pro Exams tomorrow! and to extend my trend of disgusting happiness, i got to watch a movie and buy CDs yesterday!

caught Robots with Jo after orchestra. unfortunately, it wasnt quite up to scratch. visuals were top notch, excellent animation work. good voice characterisation too. but unfortunately this movie runs on individual gags without a string plot. the 2 female leads were not developed (see i cant even remember their names) and so we saw nothing happen to the rivalry between them for the male lead, whatever his name may have been. many many screwball moments from the character voiced by Robin Williams, and he goes home as he most memorable robot. nothing has topped The Incredibles...

listening to my new (old) Love Psychedelico CD. good stuff! in fact it even seems nicer then their 3rd CD, the one that i bought first. have yet to listen to the Kiroro, but im sure its gonna be good! and my fragging music collection is hereby declared to have increased.

washed, de-flashed and half-pinned a mini, waiting for it to dry up so that i can go and spray-prime it. i havent done this for so long! hope she turns out nice... was actually thinking of seeing if i can come up with a fantasy mini as a trophy for the D2 vs D1 DotA match... see if my generosity survives a meeting with my wallet.

I Will Be With You - Love Psychedelico

Cloud Age Symphony

its finally over! all the theory papers are done up, and i feel pretty good! just a patho practical on monday and im done.

a bit saddened tho by the small response to going out today. i guess its one of the more common laments on this blog but the class is really getting dead. and its extending to even the more fun people. the ones who used to bring a smile to my face are now looking so drained even after the last theory paper. its quite worrying really, we still have like 2 more years worth of time together. and if everyone is gonna go solo how will we survive? it's going to be miserable!

one game of DotA with clan BDS so far. it was a noob-thrashing festival. pity Mao and Shafiq werent able to pick up copies of TFT due to what looks like a bloody nationwide shortage of TFT. how is that physically possible?

Cloud Age Symphony - Last Exile

When The Wind Blows From The North, Leaves Fly South

Day 2: Pathology And Microbiology complete. looks somewhat more passable than i was expecting! at least the patho questions werent on obscure stuff.... but dammit i studied all the obscure stuff! nooooooo! and how the hell do you write more than one page on lymph nodes?

was somewhat inspired by Jen Ming the DotA addict today. Jen Ming is this medical student we met in the library after Stan et al hijacked my com to have an illicit DotA session in the library about a week ago. aniwei, Shafiq observed on multiple occasions that Jen Ming is a very mobile student. in the course of a day you might be able to spot him in at least 6 different spots in the library. and today i found out why... he stays mobile so that he won't fall asleep. a very proactive solution, compared to me. when i get tired, i just die at the table for 2+ hours. think i should try to stay awake more often in the library.

its lonely in the library today. no-one around my area from our year. trying to beat the loneliness with a good dosing of Wu Ye Tian... hope Shafiq comes along soon. this sucks.

Roll Over Deejay - Jet