'Tis Not The Season To Be Jolly

but we be jolly anyway.

or at least for awhile.

this is the first time in my whole and entire life that i'm not spending Christmas with my family. saddest part is, this is the first of many years to come. for the next 3 years i'll be in Manchester (hopefully. oh God please let me pass EoS please please please) experiencing what Christmas is ideally like (you know, with snow and shit...), and the years after that are a blur.

lately i've been convincing myself that Christmas really isn't a big deal and that all those pomp and circumstance are exaggerated by moneysucking card&candy&christmastree&ornament-producing factories and top hotels enticing people with extravagant buffet spreads that cost equivalent to my monthly room-rent.

although there's truth to whatever said above, i know i was also merely trying to come up with excuses to console my pathetic self. sure, Christmas is overly commercialized these days, but it still means the world to those who believe in its origin. and so Christmas IS a big deal although i try so hard to convince myself otherwise. it IS supposed to be celebrated with the people close to us.

and we are NOT supposed to be studying!!!!!

so what is this! why am i here burying my head in all these books and notes when i should be back home in Ipoh with my family? WHY? it's bad enough that i didn't get to go home for CNY this year (again, same reason - IMU's just sadistic aren't they), and now the whole world is on holiday except for my whole batch. so bloody unfair. but we all know that we've got to do what we have to do and make this little sacrifice to ensure our one way ticket to clinical school.

so stop whining, Swee Leen.

stop whining.

.

i'm thankful for church today. it was good. very packed, but that's a good thing i suppose. haha.

i'm also thankful for my other family, the family whom i had gone through the last 2 1/2 years with, whom i will unfortunately have to bid farewell to in about 2 weeks time (boohoo). we had one last blast together (missing a few) in what was supposed to be a sad, miserable and cheap Christmas eve celebration (seriously, we were contemplating between McD/KFC/Ramly burgers), but it turned out to be rather splendid. :) as luck would have it i happened to stumble upon a simple little café less than 5 minutes away from Vista, and instantly decided that it would be the perfect place to spend Christmas Eve with close friends.

and the perfect place it was indeed.

decent food at reasonable prices and the whole cosy nicely-decorated upper floor to ourselves (and not to mention Michelle's new DSLR - oh DSLR i love thee), we couldn't have thought of a better way to spend our night. besides, since it's only a 5-minute drive from Vista, we didn't have to worry about traffic jams and crowds AND we managed to balance between having fun and rushing back home to satisfy our nerdy needs (i.e. study).

happy happy! :)

mi familia.

Edwina i'm going to miss you. :( nvm nvm but notts is quite near to manchester hor?


nice winddddddddddddddddddddddd


from the fan.


hahaha Kwan is a weirdo.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Mind Your English

i'm not one who uses big fancyschmancy words in my daily conversations or even in my blog, but one thing i'm exceptionally particular with is ensuring that my word-spellings are correct and that my sentences are strung well with flawless grammar - or at least i try my best to.

as i browse through our local newspapers each day, i can't help but to be irked by the numerous grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors in many of the articles. seriously, does the editor know that his/her job is to proofread all his writers' works? many people say reading the newspapers will improve your language. hah! with the standard of english rendered in our msian papers, i beg to differ, please.

today i got so appalled after spotting a few unforgivable mistakes that i just HAD to send in a complaint, in which i stated that "dessert" and "desert" are two very different things. harhar. call it an oversight, call it a typo, but i don't think the newspapers should leave any room for flaws in language especially since they have a regular section dedicated to promoting correct usage of English. don't get me wrong, some articles are written perfectly well, but there are some which obviously lack flair, and some that make you wonder if the writer actually passed his/her high school english paper.

another matter left me in dismay today, having read that words like "aisle", "bishop", "chapel", "empire", "monarch", "abbey" and "willow" have been dropped from the Oxford Junior Dictionary to make way for words/phrases like "MP3 player", "voicemail" and "attachment". wow. astounding. no wonder kids are getting more and more dimwitted these days. sooner or later the mere existence of a good storybook will be obsolete and we will see kids obese by the age of five sitting in front of their computers retrieving voicemails and listening to MP3s of shit songs. i'm not saying that it is wrong for kids to know the meanings of these words, but to remove such common words like those mentioned earlier just doesn't make any sense.

do you remember our enid blyton days? haha. i wonder how many times we came across the word "willow". pity, now kids won't even know what that is. =P

Taggetytag #2

tagged by joon. (you should feel honoured because i usually don't respond to tags. hah.)

6 things i'm passionate about:
1. music
2. food
3. animals
4. good movies
5. tv series
6. medicine (i'm not kidding)

6 books i read recently:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA oh god. medical textbooks! ok la...
1. joanne harris's chocolat
2. joanne harris's the lollipop shoes
3. stella gibbons's cold comfort farm
4. kenneth grahame's the wind in the willows
5. nigella express (yes, the cookbook - it is a good book btw, she writes very well)
6. bram stoker's dracula! (again! and again! did you know imu library has the book? i was so excited. the person who has been keeping my book for 5 years kindly return it to me THIS INSTANT!)

6 songs/albums:
1. silverchair silverchair silverchair (all songs, dont care)
2. coldplay's viva la vida album
3. the academy is...'s after the last midtown show
4. dishwalla's angels or devils (favourite song of all time)
5. wallflowers' one headlight (2nd favourite song of all time)
6. pete murray's so beautiful

6 things I have learnt this past year:
1. i can live without my laptop which died late last year (read: MY laptop, not a laptop)
2. i eat 2nd fastest among my friends (michelle is the fastest, hands down)
3. kwan is really really really really (x1000000) obsessed with britney spears (at first i thought he was just a fan but turns out he's insane)
4. heroes is simply awesome
5. apparently i can tolerate really maximal levels of retardation (because i love little britain and i'm friends with michelle lim)
6. i can do with < 8 hours of sleep a day

6 valuable things i own:
1. my coach bag
2. my whole closet (counted as one)
3. my violin
4. my Friends vcd/dvd collection (i lose one cd i cry)
5. my dior perfume collection
6. my kumar & clark clinical medicine - because it wasn't i who bought it! hahaha.

6 people i tag:
- whoever who bothers -

IMU: The Final Leg

today it just dawned upon me that we are technically supposed to know ~50% of what doctors should know since we are already halfway through our course, though we know that what we have studied so far is only the tip of the iceberg. we have SO MUCH MORE to learn in the future. scary. but i look forward to clinicals because that's when we actually get to make sense out of all the crazy stuff we're saturating our brains with right now.

mich was pointing out how cool it is that we now actually know all the 206 bones in the body. but then if you think about it there are 33 vertebrae; the 12 ribs x 2; the sternum; the bones of the skull, some paired; the 3 ossicles; the hyoid; and bones of the lower & upper limbs all crammed up in dr nilesh's TWO notes... so actually it's not that impressive, really.

but it's good to take pride in little things like this. at least you get through the day knowing your memory isn't quite failing you... yet. haha.

you know what, i'm beginning to love my current daily grind of being a nerd. am i crazy to say that i actually ENJOY preparing for EoS 5? i don't know, maybe it's cos my routine is about the same each day that everything i do is somewhat automatic (no need to plan or think about what to do), or maybe it's because we are less than 5 weeks away from bidding farewell to each other that i'm appreciating the times with my friends, which, unfortunately, are spent in the library, nerd-ing. whatever the reason, i'm glad i *seldom* feel depressed and am not on the verge of giving up.

for those who have absolutely no idea, this has been my schedule for the past few weeks (though i wish i had started this wayyyyyyyyyyy earlier):

wake up
wash up
eat bread
drink coffee
browse through newspapers which includes scoffing at msian politics
defaecate
bathe
go to uni library
study
make fun of mich
study
use library comp
study
listen to songs
study
laugh at tr/red making fun of mich
study
daydream
study
listen to pei rave about twilight
study
(somewhere in between: attend lectures when feel like it, lunch @ horrible uni cafeteria, tea @ library cafe)
practice osce on some days
study
dinner
study
go home
surf net
watch heroes/spongebob squarepants/friends (i know, again and again)
talk to mummy
sleep

okay doesn't look that fun after all. but i feel at peace. SO BE HAPPY FOR ME!