I hate the stress that comes from ANYTHING that has to do with school.

In this case, it’s transportation. From airport to campus.

My flight arrives at Des Moines airport at 8 A.M.

I can either:

1. Pay $50 and wait till 1 P.M. for the school shuttle (another 5-hour wait at the airport!! After a 27-hour journey across the globe!!!!!!!!)

or

2. Pay $85 for the cab to pick me up. RM270 for a 45-minute cab ride!!!!!!

* * * * *

I am not happy with either choice.

When someone is happily walking down the street, and suddenly some bird a hundred feet above decides to kena him with bird shit, you would say that person is damn unlucky, right?

But if a person sees a crowd of birds perched on the branches of a tree, and he decides to choose that same tree to sit under while he sings Lady Gaga songs very loudly and very horribly, then if one bird represents the others to shit on him, you would say that he was damn well asking for it, right?

The worst thing that can happen to a blog owner has happened to me. I lost ALL the published posts and the saved drafts I’ve written in the last year.

But I am like the second kena shit person. I kind of asked for it =(

I wanted to change to a cheaper web-host, so I emailed the old host at 1:35 AM the night before my expiry date, telling them to terminate my account and not to charge me for another year.

Then I started backing up my site, downloading everything onto my computer.

Then they emailed, at around 1:45 AM, telling me, okay we shall close your account, hope you will choose our service again in the future.

They replied me 10 minutes after I sent out the email. I did not expect that to happen!! Not at 1 in the morning!! I was STILL in the middle of backing up my blog! If they close my account at that instant, I will lose the rest I haven’t backed up!

So then I panicked, hoping the download goes super fast and is over before they do anything to my account.

And in my haste, I forgot to do one very, very important thing. I forgot to backup the database of my blog.

End of story is, I lost everything I wrote since August 4, 2009.

That is why the post below is from 2009.

I don’t care about the published posts la, those are not important, but the unpublished ones that I keep as drafts are very very important one lor. For one thing, they are super a lot longer than the average published post, and are definitely not a what-I-did-today sort of post.

I am really upset about losing them haih.

But whatever lah. Even if life’s a bed of roses, there are still those darned thorns right?

Oh man oh man! I was so inappropriate and inadequate! Literally!

I mean, so literally inadequate, you couldn’t imagine what happened unless I told you (err privately of course!). But if you are smart enough you can pretty much catch on when I say I was literally inadequaaaaaaate!

Not enough. Incomplete. Lacking something.

Sometimes, I am just so Wrong the minute I step out of my house.

Aaaanyhow.

I almost scraped the side of a (stationary) RapidKL bus today.

Well, that’s about it actually.

Oh I read that the people standing at the front (first few rows) during the Switchfoot concert had been waiting since 2 p.m.

Crazy, I wasn’t even standing too far back, I was only blocked my annoying hands and cameras, and I’d arrived close to 7 p.m.

Yeah, that’s about it.

I can’t wait for Chinese New Year, man!

And the long drive back to HomeTown will be made so much more bearable with the downloading of a new audiobook, and brand new headphones! Not the cheap flimsy kind, mind!

Okaythanksbye.

There is nothing, and I mean nothing quite as confusing as Facebook!

There’s like a gazillion things in there!

I accept applications, and hardly know what to do with them.

I feel so noob-ish.

I am very much in a I-Need-to-Celebrate-Life mood right now.

“Celebration” is a very exciting word, isn’t it?

So is “Jubilation”.

Ditto “Adventure”.

Suddenly I am very excited about nothing in particular.

And suddenly I so appreciate everything and everyone around me.

I mean, I feel like having the biggest party ever, get everyone I know and like to attend, then party the night away to all my favourite songs. (All MY favourite songs!)

I also feel like going on a round-the-world road trip, a spontaneous one without any planning.

I have been in a very Uplifted Mood since my last post.

Gaiety, song-and-dance, belly laughs. Sigh.

Life really is a celebration, innit?

We Will Rock You the musical will be showing in Singapore!

They perform to Queen’s hit songs, so I imagine it’s one heck of a musical.

Best part best part – Mig Ayesa will star in it!

Remember Mig?

Third last guy standing in the Rockstar: INXS show!

I wanted him to win if Marty Casey couldn’t. Ended up both lost, JD won, nevermind I don’t listen to INXS anyway.

I have a video of him performing Bohemian Rhapsody in my cell phone, and he rocks everyone’s socks! Except the socks of INXS members ’cause they obviously didn’t let him win.

Oooh how I miss Rockstar shows.

(I remember the grand finale of Rockstar: Supernova was the night before my Physics exam, so I ended up…… watching the show and studying Physics at midnight.)

Perhaps Malaysia should put up bright neon lights to attract international shows / bands to come over.

* * * * *

Here’s a completely different matter altogether.

I had a I Am Legend-esque dream last night.

Except in my dream, I was not alone in an empty city / world. There was a clique of “Darkseeker” slayers, and I was one of them ahah.

I also had a very close friend / partner always with me, but I don’t know who that person was, sometimes it seemed to be Chuan Ling, sometimes ZiHui, sometimes just a shadowy figure that prances around.

And I almost got killed, by the way.

But it was my dream, and naturally I was the hero, and heroes never die, so I obviously survived.

By then I was scared shitless, wanted to drop out of the clique, but then Lena (whom I met in church in real life and has kind of taken the role as my spiritual guide) told me that… um, that it is my job to slay Darkseekers and that I’d be doing it for the greater good.

So I ended up being a full time Darkseeker slayer.

Oh my oh my. Stupid dream.

For the uninitiated, Darkseekers are the mutilated kena-virus ex-people that are the bad guys in the I Am Legend movie.

They are supposed to be cured (not killed!), which is Will Smith’s character’s job.

Anyhoo. This dream probably has some psychological significance, but nahhhh I don’t read into dreams so much.

Christmas is almost here! Woot!

Wow. Unique visitors count doubled today. Ahah.

Okay so now I’m a little apprehensive about telling people my TER.

From the looks of my last post, I sound like I did so well hor, um no la it’s nothing stellar.

Now that excitement wore off, I realize it’s no big deal. No biggie at all.

Sorry, was just so excited at that time, because.

Well, because my internal assesments sucked like vacuum cleaner. You cannot expect much from a B’s, C’s and D’s sort of person.

Anyway, moving on!

Will Smith is ice cold (“cooler than being cool”)!

I mean, think about it la, have you ever watched a bad Will Smith movie? No.

He’s like Johnny Depp, only a lot less QuirkyEccentric and has more Tough Guy roles.

And my point is?

I Am Legend is an ice cold movie, you really should watch it.

Prepare a packet of tissues also la, you might need it.

Watch watch watch!

* * * * *

Here. Did you know Wang Lee-Hom plays over 10 musical instruments, had a perfect 1600 SAT score, and studied at Williams College (which is the like Harvard of liberal arts colleges)?

I had no idea, until just now. I Wikipedia-ed him.

(Oh, see? ‘Wikipedia’ is a verb now! Just like ‘Google’! As in, “Why you Google youself so tak tau malu?!”)

Book smart, musical genius, pretty good eye candy also!

And he’s multilingual. Wah that totally tops it.

So I watched ‘I Not Stupid Too’ again the other day, and you know those unbelievably irritating students that cannot speak Chinese?

It made me feel so guilty for not even attempting to improve my mandarin.

My bro’s mandarin is BAD, that if you put him in primary school he’d still have a hard time during chinese classes.

But he used to say, “So what? I can speak I can understand, good enough already la!”

I can speak, I can definitely understand, and I can read (albeit a lot of effort is needed, so much so that I get lazy and not bother most times), but I wish I could write like Chuan Ling and ZiHui and LiAnn in their blogs.

I used to wonder just how did they find chinese phrases like the ones they used. Then I realized, they don’t “find” the phrases, they came up with those themselves.

So poetic, you know?

That’s the thing about mandarin. If you can compose in mandarin, then you cannot help but be poetic.

Unless you talk crap la, like the messages Ling left in my Bahasa Cina Form 5 textbook I lent her.

And I think it’s so cool if you go off to some foreign land, and people ask if you can speak Chinese (being Chinese yourself), and you go, “OF COURSE!” and start word-swishing away in that Orang-Cina toned mandarin.

As opposed to being ask if you can speak Chinese, and you apprehensively go, “Err yeahh..” and start speaking in an ahpek toned mandarin.

(But then again, them being foreign-land people, they probably don’t know mandarin, so you can pretty much simply insert Ming Ju Jing Hua, and no one would know if you were wrong.)

Speaking of which, Chuan Ling laughed at a Cheng Yu I used wrongly. Embarrassing as heck.
Just so you know, Chuan Ling you are so not helping!

I used to think it’s so weird, ’cause I’m not entirely Orang Banana, ’cause I’ve had -counts- 11 years of chinese classes. Eleven! But I’m not good at it enough to stop constantly having to ask my friends what they mean when they use slightly more advanced mandarin.

But ah, I am SO grateful that my parents ultimately decided to send me to a chinese medium school! My dad wanted me to go national school initially.

I think it puts us to shame, when American kids at American colleges go for Chinese classes, and end up being better Chinese speakers / writers than us. (And by us, I mean only some of us la.)

But I am trying.

[Did you know I once won the Zui Jia Zuo Wen (err, best essay?) prize back in primary school?
I must've took the wrong turn at the junction to end up here!]

Zi Hui I read every single Chinese post on your blog!

And here, I go off to sleep. Night!

[Added: Oh I just read Chew Woon's blog. Wah coincidence! LOL.]

That ‘Enchanted‘ movie was like a smack in the face!

You know, I actually believe in that “love at first sight, happily ever after” crap.

And, I believe in soul mates (or in Enchanted‘s case, a Prince Charming).

And yeeeeess I totally believe in a “True Love’s kiss”.
(Exactly the reason why I don’t think you should kiss every guy within kissing range.)
(What I mean is, first kisses are reserved for the soulmate-ish perfect someone.)

Yes I believe in out-of-the-blue singing, also!

The movie was okay.

It is worth a special mention though, ’cause I seem to have overtly idealistic / naive views on Love (spelled with an upper case ‘L’!).

I never realized I was being so unrealistic (and I didn’t realize it was so obvious), until someone asked me in a somewhat frustrated manner, “What, you think life is a fairy tale?!”

But me Close Friend defended me and said that if it’s what stops me from sleeping around, then there’s no harm having fairytale thoughts.

A loooong time ago, I had this girl-talk with my Close Friend, and I actually told her I ‘know’ when and where I would meet my soul mate.
(Somewhere faaaar away, and not in high school, nor in college, nor in the very near future!)

It seems sooo silly now, but yeah, I always thought life had these weird fairytale-like qualities.

Most time, it makes me very excited about life.

Ending this very abruptly. Ciao!

Go on, push!

(In case you needed a bit of nudging.)

My goodness.

According to Fool.com, with the amount of money I’m possibly going to have to pay for an overseas education (and by “money I’m paying” what I really mean is “money my parents are paying”), I’d break even only at the age of – get this – 39!

When I start getting wrinkles!

My guesstimated input of annual earnings upon graduation –> minimum wage.

So. Moral of the story is, don’t study overseas. Or, don’t get paid minimum wage.

I feel kind of guilty now.

What kind of overseas education is worth depriving your parents of a post-retirement life that involves shopping sprees at KL Pavilion and expensive high-tech gadgets?

Universities, grant me scholarships! (Pretty please!)

So much for wanting to leave the blog idle.