31 August 2004 7:18 p.m. we got the faulty JVC replaced with a cold, Teutonic Sony. when i say "we", it means mum called the shop to complain. i did call, but was told that exchanges weren't possible. just goes to show i asked the wrong question. so there is something about all the salt she's eaten after all (re: chinese saying frequently used by exasperated parents on children who won't listen). the Sony's grey goes surprisingly well with the rest of my room. i'd wanted wood panel speakers, but hey, whatever that works. one by one, my brothers have made the pilgrimage to my room and now writhe in unrelieved jealousy. the spirit of moving things about carried over to work today. i had some free time before i left the lab, so i had a go at the post-grad room. who needs a xerox machine in the middle of a room anyway? my aunt just came by - did you know that there is a snack from New Zealand called Griffin's Mallow Puffs with DOUBLE CHOCOLATE? i can't wait. ... why wait? i know i didn't blog much about the olympics, but now i have to rave about the Argentinian men's basketball team. well, okay, Manu Ginobili, although that Luis Scola fella looks very tasty indeed.
nice guys finish first
ah, bless 'im, goofy grin and all. nothing is more of a turn-on than gold (or maybe a nice pair of legs).
spill-over
trainspotting 101
did you know thy used a teeny sample of Audioslave's Shadow on the Sun in Collateral?
i don't understand it - i plugged in my new JVC hi-fi thingy (do they still call 'em that?) and played half of T. Hives, then switched it off. when i went to listen to it again, the display said "un disk". is it german? is it like the "un-beast" in Saki's story? and then when i opened and closed the empty cd tray, it said "reading" before "un disk" again.
it's broken!!!
you know how people feel vindicated when their fave EPL team wins a game or something? that's how i feel about China's Liu Xiang, who set a new olympic record in the men's 110 meter hurdles today yesterday. it's a coincidence that he's good looking ahaha. i am displeased, though, that the commentator insisted on calling him "Zhang Lui" the whole time. who the hell is Zhang Lui?!
on an empathic-type note, what happened to the USA's women relay team was the same thing that happened to my team in the last year we represented our school. i was in Marion Jones' role, though i'm about a whole foot shorter than her. but yeah, i feel your pain, sugah.
27 August 2004 7:45 p.m.twice in a month is too times two many
so i was bragging to Suze about my slash manga (me am very possessive of 'em) and she wanted to borrow one. she said she wouldn't be in UM next monday and tuesday, so i suggested wednesday tuesday, but she shook her head again.
"why not?" i said.
"holiday lah, that day," she answered, her silvery lapel pin glinting in the fluorescent light (more on that later).
"why got holiday wan?!"
*thwack*
"Hari Merdeka lah, you bangang!" the she-monster screeched. (translation: it's independence day lah, you daft cunt.)
"i forgot lah!"
no need for fiction any more.
shiny things make me salivate
but i don't look at diamonds, so there must be something wrong with me. Suze's lapel pin was a die-cast, life-sized version of the wee eppendorf tubes we use in labs. an eppendorf tube (actual size: 2 - 2.5 cm) is what you use to hold wee drops of wee (or whatever) when you want it to go "whee!" in a centrifuge under the influence of a few G-forces.
i admired it muchly, and, after disentangling my covetous fingers from her lab coat, she told me that the exhibition booths at lab equipment expos always give away cool shit like that. so if you're in KL on the 9 - 11th september, head over to PWTC for some cool shit. allegedly.
and then she showed me her pipettor-pen. now that's cool shit!
it's like pixel-adoption, Paul Frank and Brad Pitt - so mindlessly cute it sends you into raptures, but completely useless.
p.s. - i highly recommend Paul Frank's site.
p.p.s - found Lost in Translation from Sashi's blog. now i know more cool shit.
25 August 2004 11:28 a.m.quasi-philosophical queasiness
Faust said i should pamper meself today. great, an excuse not to shower, brush my hair or wash my face!
i was thinking of the broken tubes - they actually looked pretty inside their metal buckets. the shit-water must have held the glass jigsaw pieces to the sides, so it looked like a teeny little installation art piece. i would have called it the Human Psyche - deceptively frail despite its apparent stability, fragmenting in the face of adversity; held together only by societal norms.
or, each piece would represent a single person, hard, jagged, and small - nothing on its own, a semblance of something in a mass brought together only by circumstance; banded by iron, falling apart at the least bit of interference. what is this we call reality?
they shattered with sharp, brittle cracks, like the snap you read about in stories - "something inside her snapped," or, "his mind snapped."
literal metaphors - gotta love 'em. i need to get out more :D
Hicham El Gerrouj has finally won an olympic gold medal!
24 August 2004 8:17 p.m.it's nothing pumpkin soup won't help
maybe it's karma or neglect or extreme sensitivity (moi? surely not), but i have 3 whacking huge pimples. they're like Shrek - big, mean and green (or will be); so juicy they're gagging for a picking. so maybe i shouldn't have eaten those 2 curry puffs and 2 samosa for brekkie on monday.
did you know the sound of breaking glass isn't in the least bit therapeutic when it's that of the glass centrifuge tubes holding the samples you spent 6 hours preparing? and i broke 4. i think i'll stay home tomorrow, i feel so demoralised.
i mena liek y mak em outta glass if they r gunna break at 5000 rev per minute (rpm)? and i'm supposed to spin them at 6500 rpm, so bollocks to pyrex and gang.
(for the boffins out there - yes, i balanced them. maybe their warranty ran out or something.)
in the time between struggling with shit and breaking more shit, i flipped through product catalogs. lab equipment aside, they also offer, in the glowingest terms possible, all manner of marker pens, only they're called "sharpies" and "laboratory markers". in a pack of 6 distinct colours for convenient colour coding, they too can be yours for a mere $16.90!!!
they also offer those sewing storage box things, the ones with tiny drawers; but they're called "lab storage utensils" or something suitably hoity toity scientific.
i just saw a pole-vaulter's pole break in half! speaking of the olympics, did you see the spanish diver did you did you? he took part in the men's diving event and completely destroyed all coherent thought.
pseudo-intellectual-Manson-esque half-thought that came to me at the fume hood when i was suffocating from the formalin - i see your shit, i know what you're made of.
i didn't say it was clever.
we saw an ant swarm for the first time ever in the lab. this does not bode well.
you know, waking up early in the morning is bad for me - i'm morose and inclined to be an asshole. i combatted (?) this by daydreaming - i saw 2 lab technicians go into a lab together and pretended they were boyfriends.
well, shit, my entries never plan to be long ones.
21 August 2004 7:41 p.m.the 4 degrees of L
Faust asked for it. you have no idea what you've done - i dropped IQ points when i told another friend about it.
a long time ago, in the last millennium; i was on the state track team. those days prompt warm fuzzy memories that make me go "awww", except when i think of my final year. that was when 15 year old Linda* (L) managed to gate-crash her way into our comfortable clique of 4, which comprised of me, Sharon* (S), Alice* (A) and Debbie* (D), pretty much the senior girls of the team (be quiet).
maybe we felt sorry for her because she didn't have a group with which to hang out during training camp (which were experiences in virtual village life, for some reason), so we sort of took her under our wing, the same way we did with 12 year old Emily* (E), except that Emily had BRAINS and Linda DIDN'T.
when i first talked to her, i thought she was a bit out of it, but put it down to her feeling overwhelmed at her first training camp and all. now, ima drop-kick tha fool who tells me not to judge by appearances.
one day, we were checking out one of the lads during training, who had conveniently misplaced his shirt and was walking around the 400 meter track as though he hadn't a care in the world.
me: ooh, who's that?
D: dunno.
A: hot guy lah, no need to know anything else.
S: *still training*
: later at dinner :
D: we saw a hot guy today.
S: where?! *looks around wildly*
me and A: we are so deprived.
D: *points* that one.
S: what's wrong with your eyes?
D: hot body lah!
E: *bounds up* what, who?
us: hot guy.
E: ooh, where?
us: *points*
all: *admire from afar*
L: *comes over* what are you staring at?
me: *vocab is sadly lacking* hot guy. *points*
L: where?
D: *points*
L: where?!
S: you dumbass, over there. *points emphatically*
L: *stares for a loooong time* that one ah?
us: *shrug*
L: you want me to talk to him?
us: we just wanna look.
L: so you want me to talk to him?
us: we. just. want. to. look.
L: so you want...
*coaches call for a meeting*
later that night, she bunked in our room and spent half the night staring at my face, wondering if i was asleep yet. at least that's what she claimed when i finally tried to smother her with her own pillow.
: the next few days :
L: so you want me to talk to him?
A: no.
L: so you want me to talk to him?
D: NO.
L: so you want me to talk to him?
S: asldjsl;fdsjg fuck off.
L: so you want me to talk to him?
me: look, we just like his body, okay. you understand? we like LOOKING. see no touch.
others: *nodnodnod*
L: oh you like him ah! you want me to talk to him? i'm very good at this kind of thing wan!
: after training, she approaches me :
L: eh, you like him ah? i can talk to him for you, you know.
me: fuck. i. like. looking. okay. go away.
L: whyyyyy? you shy issit? i can talk to him for you wan!
me: dsklafhsdlafgsh save me!
S: you're on your own.
you know how in the late 90's the whole world watched Friends and they did that "L" thing for "loser" or "lame"?
L: why don't you want me to talk to him?
me: *loses temper* you know what, you're a lameness in a class of your own *rants* (refer to the diagram)
L: what, what do you mean? you don't want to admit you like him issit?
me: *leaves*
D: L, you are SO DUMB.
* names are changed OKAY.
this non-entry was written with KLUE's decibel01 playing - yay Damn Dirty Apes!
21 August 2004 12:44 p.m.in the name of compassion
i saw a woman and her 2 kids releasing 2 boxes of tortoises into the pond just now. it's a buddhist act of compassion or something, but people have turned it into complete bollocks by going overboard - they buy animals just to release them so that the critters can be "free".
what they don't realise, or ignore, is that these very animals have grown up in captivity ("proper" pet shops and all that) and are completely unsuited to free living. if people took the time to wonder what happens after the photographing and pomp and ceremony, they would hopefully stop such idiocy.
besides, there are too many tortoises in the pond already - i've seen fish with raggedy tails lately.
some friends have had dreams involving me in unfortunate situations. i'm fine, and a dream girl to boot! let it be known though, that to dream of a friend is to see the personification of a value that is common to you and that friend. therefore, anything happening to your friend is actually a reflection of what's happening to the value in you. clever juxtaposition, and affirms my position in everybody's life.
but you really came for this.
21 August 2004 12:32 p.m.the idle mind at work
the fume-hood is a good place for pseudo-intellectual ruminations - it helps take my mind off the task at hand. today, it was making smears of monkey poo. i'm a big fan of Julius by Paul Frank and every thing, but... no.
i was wondering - do lab monkeys get treated if they get diarrhea, or are they supposed to ride it out? it's just that a colleague had to go and collect the samples herself that day, and by her account, those simian yahoos (er...) are nothing but screeching lidi*-thieves.
i'm just wondering if it's because they were all male, and have probably seen nothing but their own cages and their immediate neighbours, and by god is he ugly. and then, one magical day, the scent of a female wafts in, awakening their long-dormant instincts. all ready for a major shag-fest, they do their best to outwit, out-play and out-last out-do each other for her affections.
who wouldn't be pissed to find out that there wouldn't be any shagging whatsoever?
* - thin sticks made from coconut leaves. great for poking stuff.
in other news, someone read Cold Cold Heart and said it was kinda dark. um, yeah, that was the point.
also, the faculty cafe is good for something after all (other than smelling suspiciously like ammonia). i trotted down in the hopes of finding something to assuage the tummy ache brought on by skipping lunch global angst and nearly cried with joy at the sight of piping hot popiah and crispy samosa! heaven in a mouthful, but the upshot was a pimple. life is unfair.
