yes, seeing that it is only 1 day to the new year, the ever-present and daunting task of writing a new year’s resolution is at hand yet again. why daunting, you ask. well, as i am no longer a student struggling with academia and am finally of age, i guess it’s time to actually fulfill my resolutions instead of just writing them for the kick of making a new list. so lo and behold, my uber-practical and functional NYR for the first year of a new decade:

STOP:

1. staring agape at the tv (apparently i do this a lot. but what can i say, it’s a hereditary problem)
2. talking so much
3. raising my voice at people who ask stupid questions repeatedly even after you’ve answered them
4. forgetting what the other party is saying mid-conversation and thus becoming starry-eyed
5. eating so much
6. spending so much money
7. saying mean things about people which i don’t mean
8. being so confrontational and opinionated
9. laughing so loudly at inappropriate moments
10. ____________________________________ (HIMITSU)

1. being more punctual
2. being less messy
3. being more patient
4. sleeping before 12 every night
5. working
6. (and thus being able to) save money in a proper bank account
7. reading more classic english literature
8. an expenditure recording book
9. being more hard-wroking and meticulous
10. giving myself the benefit of doubt

hopefully i can accomplish everything i set out to be on this list, even the sketchy big picture numbers like “being less messy”, because let’s face it, big picture resolutions never get fulfilled simply because the item in question is too ambitious, too ingrained within our psyche to change and/or impossible to solve because there is no way of coming up with a working plan to counter it. but most of all i wish to become a better and nicer person, and become more independent.

btw i’ll be moving come 2010. a new blog for the new year!

rebel without a cause was a really boring movie, despite all the editorials, recognized magazines hailing it as one of the best coming-of-age films in hollywood. granted, it might have been ground-breaking and amazing for the kids back in 1955 but they don’t make teenage angst like that no more. the life of the angsty teen is now stereotyped into either that of the spoilt rich kid of gossip girl, the annoying blonde of miley cyrus or the you-need-to-lay-off-the-white-face-makeup vampire of twilight. oh well. at least i learnt something about teenage angst from the movie: james dean is very extremely hot (can you even put 2 emphasizing words together like that?). pity they don’t make them like they do back in the day, haha. if only he were still alive and didn’t have do die so young.

well at least we still have james franco :)

okay my super long movie ramble start here so you can skip it if you wanna –

hmm over the week i watched a bunch of movies. there was this almost b-grade movie called frankenstein unbound which i watched with bj and mom. basically it is:

a) scientist invents ray to vapourize stuff but causes rifts in the space-time continuum of universe and thus
b) gets transported back in time to meet mary shelley, author of frankenstien
c) scientist meets the real slim shady aka frankenstein but is unfazed by its ugliness
d) stuff happens (we also meet 2 gay looking guys who live with mary shelley, i think they are her stylists)
e) scientists zaps frankenstien, his girlfriend, the scientist who made franky, and himself to some place that looks like antartica but in the future
f) everyone dies (long story) except scientist dude
g) scientist dude walks into sunset. end

special mention to the ugliest frankenstein ever; it looked like a cross between davy jones from pirates of the caribbean except it had tentacles for hair instead of a beard, and arnold schwarzenegger from back in the first terminator movie. AND it had stiches in its eyeballs!! plus he was pink and reminded me of corsola (the pokemon), which made it all the more worse! it looked just…. wrong!! it couldn’t get any worse than that. but despite all of that i love watching b-grade horror movies, they are really funny because they take themselves too seriously, haha.

hmm i also caught the avengers. it was this pretty cute pseudo-english (which i assume, since it was most probably made in hollywood) movie whose genre wikipedia describes as “campy nostalgic”. it is one of those movies reminiscent of the 60s, whose villains are highly stylized, and the main character is a james bond-type of persona (complete with corny gadgets), whose dialogue with the supporting female character almost always involves some sort of sexual reference. in this case the chief villain is a woman called Father, who opposes the head of FBI, a man named Mother (lol). the james bond-type character is played by ralph fiennes (who was totally rocking the suit and the ‘do btw) and his female interest is Mrs Peel, or uma thurman. PLUS the villain villain (like the boss guy) is played by sean connery. the main premise of the movie is that ralph fiennes and uma thurman must stop sean connery from wrecking havoc on the world because he can control the weather and is sending hurricanes to wreck buildings and stuff. yup and as per usual a whole lotta stuff happens (like cloning, running around in a maze made of hedges, swordfights, hot air balloon exploding etc etc). the whole thing ends with everyone drinking champagne. how classy :D

lastly there was red dragon. which starred the ever brilliant anthony hopkins, edward norton and ralph fiennes (who looked mad with a cleft lip but still looked hot……………ish). anyway it’s this film about a guy who copycat murders people a la hannibal lector, and the cop has to consult hannibal on this new guy and the type of victims he’s gonna kill next. it was a great movie, but apart from that i hated the part when ralph fiennes (copycat murderer) was flashing pictures of the corpses of the women he killed to another guy he kidnapped on a screen, and i was totally unprepared for the pictures shown, and spent the night having gruesome nightmares because of that. didn’t help that i watched the 2nd half alone!! at 2am in the morning. :(( LOL, but for once i was grateful for the singapore censorship because if not there’d be more violence/gore in the movie and i’ll have more sleepless nights. plus there was this funny part (which was not meant to be funny) in which i was reminded of pam: hannibal lector serves his victims to his party guests, so there was this shot of people eating the food, and it looks EXACTLY like puffin meat!! seriously. same consistency and colour and everything as that gordon ramsay video.

and in between i saw bits and pieces of other films but meh. this post is too ramble-ly already. haha. i’m turning into some sort of omega movie geekazoid.

p.s. gg out to study tomorrow guys, wish me productivity! :D (and restraint to not buy anything)

top five things i have learnt today in descending order:

5) red bull really does give you wings… but then it’s just crash and burn

4) what the fuck has happened to muse guys??! they’re going into america with their new album and turning into a disco-synth-disaster-of-blondie-proportions (not hating blondie or anything, they’re awesome in their own right, but they’re hardly alt rock!) oh well the album is awesome still, once you get past the whole blondie thing. haha. the instrumentals at the end are mmm mmm mmm! fantastic :)

3) madonna used to be sooo pretty when she was young. or at least prettier… comparatively. that’s before she became Madgenator AKA Cyborg with iron biceps filled with mercury veins

LOVE THIS PERFORMANCE:

2) lady gaga is teh shizz. period. her epic mtv vma perf last night is just too epic for words. it was like madonna’s 1990 rococo vouge performance all over again, except new and improved!!

“WHAT? taylor swift won best female video?? unacceptable! “

“I’M NUMBER ONE!”

1) have you ever had the experience where something that seems not so significant from the past comes back and hits you like WOAH, in the present? in lit it’s called a chehkov’s gun haha. oh man i just had such a moment. three words: never underestimate the powers of public transport. really. it’s shocking! it’s shock value even tops the whole lady gaga perf, haha that why it’s at number 1 on the list.

sigh, i feel like a bad girl. i’ve gone out 3 times in 1 week and i’ve been neglecting work. tomorrow i’m going out again! and i probably failed chem, cos madam had this funny/ominous talk with me, about my results. anyway today i travelled to town with yuechin, who had dental, and we feasted (our eyes) on the delicious food present in the food fair. then i met with the babes for a good ‘ole chick flick “it’s a boy-girl thing”, which is about how this nerdy-girl and jock-boy switced bodies (and who happen to be neighbours) and had to reconcille their differences to work together, trying to maintain each other’s lives. it’s kind funny, and really romantic <3 just the kind of movie i can relax to, because it’s not intense like movies about serious themes or fright-inducing like horror movies, and it’s a typical chick-flick-romcom type movie. which is in total contrast to wanted, which is like the movie all guys like because it involves swearing every five sentences and bloody, gory violence and ANGELINA JOLIE, haha like all things guys like in a movie. if i made a list it’ll probably look like:

movies guys like must include more than 3 of the following:

1. action
2. hot female lead(s)
3. swearing
4. guns
5. sci-fi/non-real life premises (i.e. cgi effects)

movies girls like must involve more than 3 of the following:
1. romance
2. hot male lead(s)
3. humour (esp since for a romcom)
4. a happily-ever-after ending
5. real life premises (school, work etc)

seriously if any guy wants to get the chicks, the only thing they need to do is to mimick the tricks and the pickup lines of the male lead in any good chick flick, and alter the situation to that of the movie. the girl will just fall head over heels in love with you. and it’ll help if you had brad pitt-esque good looks and a hot bod, so she’s distracted enough by your face to fall for all that mushy/sappy stuff.

as per norm:

i’m so tired. :( i’m tired of school, tired of living. i’m so scared about my results, i feel as if i’ve let everyone down. yup, life’s fair so you’ll get your comeuppance if you have done something you shouldn’t, or not done something you should. maybe i should pray for an angel to come down and save me, because i’m gonna need a miracle to save myself from this mess. but wait, i forgot. i don’t get that kind of special treatment. but if any guardian angel happens to read this and take pity on an agrieved soul, please help me out in some way, because i think my guardian angel’s been on leave for a long, long time.

recently i’ve been making yogurt! it started when i was in shanghai on vacation, and grandmum took out this really old yogurt-making machine, which is at least as old as i am, but brand new. Essentially it’s like an incubator, and all you need to do it put some milk, sugar and a teeny bit of store-bought yogurt in it (for the bacteria to turn the milk into yogurt), and after 6-8 hours you get this really lovely, creamy yogurt. The best thing is, it’s au natural because there are no preservatives and chemicals (save for the ones from the store-bought) AND the next time you make the new batch of yogurt, you can recycle some from the previous batch for the bacteria to be used! So essentially it’s really fuss free, healthy, and best of all, so adorably simple.

and ever since i discovered that i’m lactose-intolerant (only to diary milk and products with a lot of whole milk in it), i had to give up drinking it. which is quite sad, because i like drinking milk. ): to find another healthy way of replenishing natural goodness, i decided to turn to this solution:

the yogurt-incubator incubating the milk concotion. i used 1 litre of strawberry milk, 5 tablespoons of caster sugar, 1 small cup of strawberry Magnolia yogurt (around 4.t tbsp) and a quarter of a teaspoon of strawberry essense. as you probably can tell, i’m a big strawberry fanatic. but i was more worried about the sour taste of the yogurt overpowering the strawberry taste/smell, so i took (a little) more initiative ensuring that the taste will stay, haha!

after refridgerating: the yogurt acheived the texture of a jelly-like chawanmushi! it was really smooth and a pretty pink colour!  

a closeup of the jelly-like consistency. pity the original flavour of the strawberry milk got a bit wonky compounded with the sour-ish yougurt taste.

for the next batch, i used fresh, plain diary milk and 100% diary yogurt (after my dad’s suggestion that my previous one was total strawberry overkill, lol). it turned out less sweet and powdery tasting (i suspect the strawberry milk was made from condensed powder) and more like true yogurt. however i couldn’t resist butting some strawberry bits in it haha! i diced some fresh strawberries, soaked them in a thick sugar-water solution, and kept it in the fridge for a bit to get the sweetness in.

muahaha looks store bought *ego*

the consistency is more like true yogurt this time round, and tastes less “fake”. i suspect it’s because the bacteria in the yogurt the first time round wasn’t strong enough

hmm, last paper on monday! going out with mingyi and kingkong next friday, can’t wait! we have so much to catch up on.

but despite the fact that the midyears are pretty much over (and that i think i did pretty badly… haha), the huge lead weight still haven’t been lifted off my shoulders.

list of things to complete:

1. IOP essay (long overdue!!)
2. TOK term 3 essay
3. EE proposal/framework + think EE topic and read books
4. Chem revision for monday’s paper
5. CAS stuff (i think i’ll be danger listed S: )
6. 徐志摩 poem analysis/appreciation
7. File stuff
8. Clean room

edit (7 july 08): almost done!