See Time Fly
Hrrrm. I just realised my stay in Fifth Hun is very nearly over: tomorrow will be my packing-day and the day on which I register for the subjects of the next semester, and then I still have to get at my dad for money. How very annoying... I don't know why, but asking people for large sums of money always leaves me extremely self-conscious for days; at least, doing it in person does. It'd be all so much more convenient and easier on my nerves if we could just arrange some sort of rough guideline--say, a fixed sum of money every semester for the tuition fees and accomodation, wherever that might be, and then a smaller sum periodically for living expenses. I don't know why he insists on making me plan out an estimated amount of money every semester, which I've always had to tell him is wildly unreliable and probably won't work out, mostly because I can't predict the future at all and so I don't know how much money I might have to use.
Life is... well, life. Up and down, and very annoying mostly; the weather's irritating to me, since the temperature's been going up as summer approaches. The locals keep saying that it's not really hot yet, and we should just wait and see how it is when it gets to be 40+ degrees Celsius in the shade and the weather gets broadcasted on national TV as a work-safety hazard... and nobody therefore goes to work in the affected areas. As it is, the afternoon sun is roughly 35 degrees and I can't stand going outside because I'm pretty much guaranteed to break out in floods of sweat instantly. These days I can even sweat at midnight about two minutes after stepping out of the shower, and my spectacles get themselves into dangerous situations just by being slippery enough to fall off my face. I've almost decided that as far as weather goes, the best place for it is outside and very far away from me.
We got a Wii a couple days ago, and have been playing with it on-and-off ever since; we got a pretty OK deal, I guess, from the seller; Google says the average price is about USD 400, which more or less translates into RMB 3000; we got a Wii, spare 'mote, and 15 games (pirated, of course) for RMB 2300, which may still sound like a large sum but certainly is much less than RMB 3000. Still, to the US customer, that RMB 600 is only about USD 50 or 60 and not exactly worth haggling over. Then again, I don't know the US price of games (I take it those aren't pirated) and 'motes. We got a few games of our own choice and a few for Parental Appeasement: you know, the sort that convinces parents that a particular game engine counts as educational and therefore character-building and therefore good. We haven't loaded a single one of those yet, apart from one that turned out to be surprisingly fun (which meant that it almost immediately fell off the Parental Appeasement list). It's actually quite fortunate, in this respect, that some of the other foreign kids at the international school that my kid siblings attend also possess Wiis, for which their parents bought the games; as a result, those kids play golf and tennis and ping-pong on their Wiis and have derided the whole thing as hopelessly boring--but their parents gave mine a pretty good approval rating. I'm pretty sure that approval rating fell when we didn't buy any golf- or tennis- or ping-pong-based games, though; what we have is things like Brawl, Bleach: Shattered Blade, Mario Kart, and Wario Ware (that's roughly how my kid brother pronounces it and I haven't looked at the disc jacket; the contents of the disc are Japanese and I've no idea how to read that. I'd take Japanese as an elective for a semester, but my dad's already said that if I'm going to learn any foreign language it had better be German, because it's much more "useful"). We had to return a few of the discs that didn't work out well or were just plain boring (DDR, Iron Man, and Transformers amongst those), but this time Mom came along to help choose the discs, as a result of which we now have some soccer game lying around collecting dust. I look forward to the day when she commands us to play that one...
I realised last night that I seem to talk differently depending on what I've been watching; while my accent does sometimes change depending on the other person I'm talking to, my accent doesn't change according to my choice of TV shows--my vocabulary does. It's very strange, and if you've noticed that my style of blogging has been changing every now and then, you can assume I've been watching or listening to something other than the norm. Or possibly even speaking to someone other than the norm, because I'm starting to think my speech patterns are more fluid than I suspected; although, of course, I'm nowhere near mimicry-level. It's quite odd, perhaps, or maybe it's perfectly normal. Or perhaps it's just a side-effect of me having to treat all places as "home"... or maybe I'll start treating nowhere like home and just designate places where I stay by their locations or by whomever I know in that area. Truthfully, I must say, the idea of a jetsetting life does not at all appeal to me. I can sympathise with the people who, like in the movie Jumper, want to have breakfast in Paris and lunch in London before stopping over Milan for a shopping spree and then taking a nap in Beijing before strolling by the Nile; I just wonder how long it'll take them to feel that the world is much too small and start lobbying for tourist visas to Andromeda. Myself, I just want a little house somewhere--it doesn't even have to be a house per se, a flat with four or five rooms will do--and I can be pretty much satisfied with a bit of grass and trees outside. Going all over the world gets boring, or at least I would think it should, because it's a depressing truth that wherever you go and wherever there are people, the immediate vicinity is bound to be rather... less than idyllic, one might say. People. Bah.
I'm not exactly in good spirits at the moment, in case it didn't leak over into these words yet. I'm due to return to KL and then Singapore in a couple of days, and let it be known I'm not looking forward to two departures so short a time apart; not to mention that I do have a lot of stuff to be done in both places, as well as here, and it seems to me that I've gotten everybody else's agendas complete while my own are still barely begun. It's annoying when it seems like whatever you had planned, somebody else has a better idea that must preclude the possibility of yours ever seeing the light of day. Such as yesterday, when I wanted to sleep and mom got wanderlust and dragged the kid siblings and myself off to a mall. 5 storeys of mall, of which 60% is women's products and the only good things were the Transformers figures in the children's section and the Osim chairs, available for sampling. So we sank into those and stayed there until we could go out for lunch... and then were lured off into a bunch of nearby shops for groceries before we could get at lunch. As a side note, those chairs really are as good as they say in the advertisements; very comfortable. At least, they were comfortable to us, but then again we'd just finished traipsing around 5 storeys of shopping mall and were sore in the feet and extremely fractious.
Gah. I hate dealing with money. Not buying or selling; those are easy enough things to do, and if I couldn't do those I'd be long dead by now, or at least classified as mentally incompetent. It's just that the mere mention of money always makes my hackles go up, and I very much dislike having to ask for it in large sums, especially if I have to do it repeatedly; and of course, with my leaving imminent, I have to ask my dad for enough money to get through the next semester with as well as set up plans for additional amounts as needed. While the tuition fees are justifiable (and huge), it's the living expenses that get my goat more. I don't think of myself as lavish, though I do tend to overspend while on sprees (another good reason for me to avoid such things to the best of my ability); but calculating the amount of money spent on food in half a year is always depressing. The same goes for my miscellaneous expenses; travels, unexpected expenses, stationery... Fortunately, I've already got a year's supply of gel-pen refills so I'm none too worried on that count. But even at only 3 meals a day at SGD 4 per meal for 4 months (120 days)... Granted, all those amounts pale beside the tuition, but even so I still cringe whenever I have to ask for it, because there's always the unspoken "If you had only got just a little better, you could have saved us 80% of this". And certainly having to ask for it every semester doesn't help one whit.
My arms are sore, very sore; and oddly enough, I can't touch my left shoulder with my left hand, or do the corresponding movement on the right; at least, not without a lot of contorting. I hope my tendons aren't contracting or anything... I blame the Wii for the soreness, and more specifically the Bleach game, and even more specifically my hurt ego at losing to my little brother at a game that is, after all, based on one of my favourite mangas: I spent an hour or so this morning online and memorising the specials and combos of all the characters we have so far, and then just now lost hugely to his sheer killer instinct and indefatiguable arm; after two or three matches, I'm already sweating and sore and he's now playing Mario Kart. Obviously when it comes to games of this sort, I still haven't figured out how to translate the random trivia to useful attacks. Then again, I might as well not get too attached to it, what with me leaving soon and all. Bah.
Life is... well, life. Up and down, and very annoying mostly; the weather's irritating to me, since the temperature's been going up as summer approaches. The locals keep saying that it's not really hot yet, and we should just wait and see how it is when it gets to be 40+ degrees Celsius in the shade and the weather gets broadcasted on national TV as a work-safety hazard... and nobody therefore goes to work in the affected areas. As it is, the afternoon sun is roughly 35 degrees and I can't stand going outside because I'm pretty much guaranteed to break out in floods of sweat instantly. These days I can even sweat at midnight about two minutes after stepping out of the shower, and my spectacles get themselves into dangerous situations just by being slippery enough to fall off my face. I've almost decided that as far as weather goes, the best place for it is outside and very far away from me.
We got a Wii a couple days ago, and have been playing with it on-and-off ever since; we got a pretty OK deal, I guess, from the seller; Google says the average price is about USD 400, which more or less translates into RMB 3000; we got a Wii, spare 'mote, and 15 games (pirated, of course) for RMB 2300, which may still sound like a large sum but certainly is much less than RMB 3000. Still, to the US customer, that RMB 600 is only about USD 50 or 60 and not exactly worth haggling over. Then again, I don't know the US price of games (I take it those aren't pirated) and 'motes. We got a few games of our own choice and a few for Parental Appeasement: you know, the sort that convinces parents that a particular game engine counts as educational and therefore character-building and therefore good. We haven't loaded a single one of those yet, apart from one that turned out to be surprisingly fun (which meant that it almost immediately fell off the Parental Appeasement list). It's actually quite fortunate, in this respect, that some of the other foreign kids at the international school that my kid siblings attend also possess Wiis, for which their parents bought the games; as a result, those kids play golf and tennis and ping-pong on their Wiis and have derided the whole thing as hopelessly boring--but their parents gave mine a pretty good approval rating. I'm pretty sure that approval rating fell when we didn't buy any golf- or tennis- or ping-pong-based games, though; what we have is things like Brawl, Bleach: Shattered Blade, Mario Kart, and Wario Ware (that's roughly how my kid brother pronounces it and I haven't looked at the disc jacket; the contents of the disc are Japanese and I've no idea how to read that. I'd take Japanese as an elective for a semester, but my dad's already said that if I'm going to learn any foreign language it had better be German, because it's much more "useful"). We had to return a few of the discs that didn't work out well or were just plain boring (DDR, Iron Man, and Transformers amongst those), but this time Mom came along to help choose the discs, as a result of which we now have some soccer game lying around collecting dust. I look forward to the day when she commands us to play that one...
I realised last night that I seem to talk differently depending on what I've been watching; while my accent does sometimes change depending on the other person I'm talking to, my accent doesn't change according to my choice of TV shows--my vocabulary does. It's very strange, and if you've noticed that my style of blogging has been changing every now and then, you can assume I've been watching or listening to something other than the norm. Or possibly even speaking to someone other than the norm, because I'm starting to think my speech patterns are more fluid than I suspected; although, of course, I'm nowhere near mimicry-level. It's quite odd, perhaps, or maybe it's perfectly normal. Or perhaps it's just a side-effect of me having to treat all places as "home"... or maybe I'll start treating nowhere like home and just designate places where I stay by their locations or by whomever I know in that area. Truthfully, I must say, the idea of a jetsetting life does not at all appeal to me. I can sympathise with the people who, like in the movie Jumper, want to have breakfast in Paris and lunch in London before stopping over Milan for a shopping spree and then taking a nap in Beijing before strolling by the Nile; I just wonder how long it'll take them to feel that the world is much too small and start lobbying for tourist visas to Andromeda. Myself, I just want a little house somewhere--it doesn't even have to be a house per se, a flat with four or five rooms will do--and I can be pretty much satisfied with a bit of grass and trees outside. Going all over the world gets boring, or at least I would think it should, because it's a depressing truth that wherever you go and wherever there are people, the immediate vicinity is bound to be rather... less than idyllic, one might say. People. Bah.
I'm not exactly in good spirits at the moment, in case it didn't leak over into these words yet. I'm due to return to KL and then Singapore in a couple of days, and let it be known I'm not looking forward to two departures so short a time apart; not to mention that I do have a lot of stuff to be done in both places, as well as here, and it seems to me that I've gotten everybody else's agendas complete while my own are still barely begun. It's annoying when it seems like whatever you had planned, somebody else has a better idea that must preclude the possibility of yours ever seeing the light of day. Such as yesterday, when I wanted to sleep and mom got wanderlust and dragged the kid siblings and myself off to a mall. 5 storeys of mall, of which 60% is women's products and the only good things were the Transformers figures in the children's section and the Osim chairs, available for sampling. So we sank into those and stayed there until we could go out for lunch... and then were lured off into a bunch of nearby shops for groceries before we could get at lunch. As a side note, those chairs really are as good as they say in the advertisements; very comfortable. At least, they were comfortable to us, but then again we'd just finished traipsing around 5 storeys of shopping mall and were sore in the feet and extremely fractious.
Gah. I hate dealing with money. Not buying or selling; those are easy enough things to do, and if I couldn't do those I'd be long dead by now, or at least classified as mentally incompetent. It's just that the mere mention of money always makes my hackles go up, and I very much dislike having to ask for it in large sums, especially if I have to do it repeatedly; and of course, with my leaving imminent, I have to ask my dad for enough money to get through the next semester with as well as set up plans for additional amounts as needed. While the tuition fees are justifiable (and huge), it's the living expenses that get my goat more. I don't think of myself as lavish, though I do tend to overspend while on sprees (another good reason for me to avoid such things to the best of my ability); but calculating the amount of money spent on food in half a year is always depressing. The same goes for my miscellaneous expenses; travels, unexpected expenses, stationery... Fortunately, I've already got a year's supply of gel-pen refills so I'm none too worried on that count. But even at only 3 meals a day at SGD 4 per meal for 4 months (120 days)... Granted, all those amounts pale beside the tuition, but even so I still cringe whenever I have to ask for it, because there's always the unspoken "If you had only got just a little better, you could have saved us 80% of this". And certainly having to ask for it every semester doesn't help one whit.
My arms are sore, very sore; and oddly enough, I can't touch my left shoulder with my left hand, or do the corresponding movement on the right; at least, not without a lot of contorting. I hope my tendons aren't contracting or anything... I blame the Wii for the soreness, and more specifically the Bleach game, and even more specifically my hurt ego at losing to my little brother at a game that is, after all, based on one of my favourite mangas: I spent an hour or so this morning online and memorising the specials and combos of all the characters we have so far, and then just now lost hugely to his sheer killer instinct and indefatiguable arm; after two or three matches, I'm already sweating and sore and he's now playing Mario Kart. Obviously when it comes to games of this sort, I still haven't figured out how to translate the random trivia to useful attacks. Then again, I might as well not get too attached to it, what with me leaving soon and all. Bah.
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