Mermaid- Chieko Kawabe [lyrics]

And there’s a side of me that no one sees.
I hide my tears, You know my fears. Your smile is all I need.

It’s rare finding a Japanese song with English sayings that are not Engrishy at all. Mermaid is a sweet, emotional song that I’ve already loved since Sec 1.

I came across this song and the rest of Chieko Kawabe’s discography through the Ouran High School Host Club anime. She sang the opening song, Sakura Kiss, which I thought wasn’t too bad so I went to check the rest of her songs out. Glad I did!

Duvet- BoA (UK band) [lyrics]

And you know what they say might hurt you
And you know that it means so much
And you don’t even feel a thing

I first heard this song through Stepmania, in late sec 1 and early sec 2 I was obsessed with Stepmania. I even bought the dance mat! Though I used it intensively for like 1 week and more or less stopped after… I should start again; It’s pretty good exercise…

I love its mellow tune and the lyrics, although I suppose there are too many “ands” used.

If We Try- Don Mclean [lyrics]

Faces come and faces go, in circular rotation
But something yearns within to grow, beyond infatuation

I absolutely love the lyrics of this song. They are so heartfelt and mean so, so much. I love the chords too.

Do You Want To- Franz Ferdinand [lyrics]

Well he’s a friend and we’re so proud of ya
Your famous friend, well I blew him before ya

I like this song because of the guts behind it, along with the artsy context. Also, the cheekiness of the line above. Haha.

Walking on Air- Kerli [lyrics]

You feel this, unless you kill me
Go on, and you’re forgiven
I knew that, I could feel that, I feel like
I am walking on air

I love the small segment at 2:55-3:02, where she then says “You know that I love you, go on.” The theme for the video’s also quite interesting although it didn’t quite appeal to me at first, seemed a bit goth-pretentious.

I Will Possess Your Heart- Death Cab for Cutie [lyrics]

How I wish you could see the potential,
the potential between you and me

It’s like a book elegantly bound
but in a language you can’t read just yet

The vocals only start at 4:41 but the intro is nice. This song is appears rather stalkerish but I love the confidence that the singing character appears to have.

Love You To- The Beatles [lyrics]

Each day just goes so fast
I turn around – it’s past
You don’t get time to hang a sign on me

Love me while you can
Before I’m a dead old man

I like a lot of the Beatles’ songs but at the moment this is the one I’ve been listening to most often. It’s short and sweet and the Indian-style background makes it so catchy. Aaaaand  it ends with Harrison singing “I’ll make love to you / If you want me to”. It’s so ♥♥♥ Please do! ♥

I have quite a number more, including some K-pop ones but that’s for next time (:

16 March, Wednesday- My class had to go back to school for an extra GP lesson, which lasted about 5-6 hours. I didn’t mind that, really. GP lessons are very amusing. My class is too. I don’t recall a GP lesson in which not one jibe against Sheng yang’s supreme richness was made, or an inside joke not being cracked.

After GP we all cried FREEDOM! and about half of the class headed down to Marina Square for karaoke ♥

It turned out, Kbox was having a special price for students ($8) as long as one person had the Kbox card. None of us had it so Si kai volunteered to purchase one and inadvertently became 11A03B’s karaoke rep.

Karaoke was kickass! I’ve been to quite a number of karaoke sessions starting 2009, but I’ve never been to such an energy-pumped and loud one! Singing Uptown Girls with everybody was fun. There too was a Vietnamese song which we all attempted to sing :P All of us were also practically shouting We Are The World together at the end of it all… and we did it twice! While standing up! Hahaha.

Kbox also has a more updated selection of music compared to the one I normally go to. However it’s limited in terms of Japanese songs. I love Cash Studio in that aspect, they even categorise Japanese songs according to anime! The lack of recent anime until months later puts me off though.

I also kind of have a gripe about its song selection system, it’s completely electronised, on a computer screen on one remote control. It’s quite difficult to navigate around and find songs, and it can only be done by one person, so we have to wait for our turn to search the song database. In cash studio everything is mostly printed out for you in a  thick book, which they provide numerous copies of. Also, you can’t even bring your water bottle in! That is just so.. ripoff.

I must say it was affordable though, $8 per person, for the 3+ hours we were there.

17 March, Thursday- Birthday BBQ party at Andeline’s chalet! Lots of the class came. The food was gooood and I had fun. Also I think it must be quite hard work for her, having to talk to everybody that came and shuttling between the distinct groups of people that came.

18 March, Friday- This day was spent on art in preparation for the MacRitchie SITE exhibition that was coming up. Tianyuan and I met up in school in the morning and went to the library to work on some experiments/discuss. In the afternoon we walked to MacRitchie and soon regretted it because it was so darned hot. We took some photos there to serve as reference for our final art product.

This is what we used for our reference. Using my camera, we took a 360 degrees view of the spot we were in and then I pieced it together in photoshop. It was kind of difficult, finding which leaf to match which leaf.

19 March, Saturday- Spent the whole day at home for the first time during the March holidays.

20 March, Sunday- OG outing! (: I was very very happy that we were having one although it wasn’t on a very good date. The turnout at Marina Square at first was 4 people, who proceeded to play pool. I don’t know how and I wasn’t particularly interested in learning so I just watched. I’m quite the spoilsport come to think of it :P

After that we went to Dhoby Ghaut to watch a movie at Plaza Sing. 3 more joined us yay ♥ The movie was When in Rome, which was kind of funny. Watching a chick flick. Haha. In my opinion it wasn’t a movie worth my $10 because the storyline was rather clichéd (as most chick flicks are), oh so predictable and the female lead was- a la shoujo manga heroine mode- acting rather stupid although she was supposed to be a capable lady. I admit it was pretty cute though and since she got her Prince Charming in the end (obviously) it was d’aww-worthy. Where’s mine, huh? (:

We bought 7 tickets at the front row but somehow we got split into 5s and 2s because 2 idiots decided to plonk themselves in our seats since we were a bit late. I hate it when people do that. I remember back in secondary school, some girls from another girls’ school did the same thing but they, at least, had the decency to move back to their original location. Grrr.

Actually nowadays I think I get annoyed very easily. I curse a lot in my head. This happens a particularly lot when I take public transport. I get so mad when people block the way and don’t give a shit about the people trying to get out or lean against the pole even though the train is crowded. Once during the bus ride home from the mrt there was this aunty who kept talking on the phone in super loud Hokkien. Most people in the bus kept glancing at her. I was totally seething mad, in my head.

Am I being reasonable? Is this due to lack of sleep? I don’t know but I hope I don’t literally rage and kill everything in site or something.

Recently I have not done any digital art at all; everything I do is either in my art journal or on my foolscap pad. Here’re some pages of what I’ve done lately, using whatever scraps of time I can salvage from my terrible schedule.

Quick messy sketch done during our first human geog lecture. Mr. Kamal gave us an introductory quiz and I failed at it.

Ball point pen sketches. I like drawing with ball point pen because it’s smooth, fun to shade with and creates a nice effect but the problem is if I make a mistake I can’t rectify it.

Leaf practice. Pencil, charcoal powder mixed with water and skewer stick.

Drew this after I watched Alice in Wonderland. Black pen, I didn’t draw with pencil beforehand. Drawing this reminded me of the presence of my copic markers (used for eyeshadow and lips), which had been lying in a corner collecting dust.

The ink from the copic markers seeped through the other side so I drew the red queen again. This time a different side of her. I’m not very good at drawing faces facing the right side. lol.

Opposite page of my mark-making assignment for art.

Alice inspired, again. I was listening to Alice by Avril Lavigne when drawing this. I really like using my black pens!

Faces. I’m not happy with how most turned out but I do like the side profile one!

Baroque art. I am deeply amazed by artists of that era. So much detail. So much effort. So much time.

Still a work in progress. Let’s see how this will turn out (:

Yep. There is more of course but some are pretty connotative, apparently, and I’m not really willing to take photos of the rest. too much effort.

14 March, Sunday, I received a call from my uncle in the morning who told me that he wanted to push math tuition today back to Tuesday evening, which meant that my Sunday was now free for once. Feeling that I absolutely had to spend my Sunday outdoors, I went to watch Nodame Cantabile with Sarah ong at Plaza Sing. Tickets would normally have cost $10 but thanks to Sarah’s safra card we got them at $8 each.

The movie was great! It covered roughly what is out on the anime version of Nodame at the moment. Chiaki is as handsome and Nodame is as cute as ever~There were also lots of cute anime-esque special effects that added to the charm of the movie.

The music of course was also spectacular. Especially when the Roux-Marlet orchestra played 1812 Overture Finale, composed by Tchaikovsky. I love this piece. It is so grand and victorious.

Actually it sounds like an awesome track to play when in bed…. makes me wonder actually. Do people play music when in bed? If so, what kind?

Anyway, after the movie Sarah and I walked around and explored spotlight and Daiso (in which I spent lots of money on necessary things) then we met Clarissa, who had just finished Chinese tution.

She was looking for a new schoolbag and wanted to go to Robinsons at Raffles city to check something out, so we all took the MRT there. We window shopped quite a bit before going into Robinsons and Clarissa wasn’t appeased by the bag selection there so we took the MRT down to Bugis.

We went into Bugis Street which was rather crowded and warm. I like some of the clothes they sell there (particularly the natural kei styled ones!) but the sizes always looks so darn small… at times like these I wish I were skinny. There were cheap, pretty shoes too but the focus was on Clarissa finding a bag. She didn’t find any that shouted out to her however.

So we went to Bugis Village, but that too didn’t work out. It was about 7pm when we all gave up and went home. (:

15 March, Monday, all J1 students taking art were summoned to the Singapore Art Museum by Mr Chia to visit some exhibitions and practice Feldman’s approach to art criticism.

I met Sze min at J8 for lunch at 1130am first and we ate at KFC after walking around a little. We had gone to BHG and checked out all the toys they had there. Barbie clothes are really expensive. $10 for a small piece of cloth!

At KFC, the Bishan gay was there as usual. He seems so free. I got cheese fries with my student meal and realised to my horror that the price for doing that had gone up by 20 cents. Stupid inflation! We then met Tianyuan at Bishan mrt around 1210am and set off for SAM from Dhoby Ghaut.

On the way we passed by SMU and they had a mr. bean outlet there so i bought ice cream! They only had the green tea flavour but that was fine. I love mr. bean ice cream; it has a mildly sweet taste.

We went to look at the exhibition by FX Harsono at SAM. The exhibition is from 4 March to 9 May 2010. It started on my birthday! :D Much of his works are about Indonesian politics and social issues. Thought-provoking.

We were all given an assignment to do, due end of the holidays. (more homework, gah) We each had to pick one of his artworks and describe and analyse it, providing detailed sketches.

I chose this piece. It made me feel something like I’ve never felt with other artworks before. I shan’t describe it much because all of that goes into my journal.

Other interesting pieces by him include:

Bon Appetit. beautiful yet not something you want on the dinner table.

Thousand Times Pain. Bees, lots of them. The mass murder of insects reminds me of how I kill ants that crawl on my table. When they cluster I just use masking tape.

We also went to 8Q, where there were even more exhibitions.

I liked Living Fossils

We had some debate over this. Was it a festering boil? Tomato sauce with cheese? Egg and sperm?

After we were done some of us left to eat at the Kopitiam nearby. Mr. Chia went with us. Most who went bought roti prata. I went for the dim sum instead and bought prawn dumplings. 3 for $2.20. Not very worth it.

Later on, Ruchi, Sze min and I went to Bras Basah complex. They got very excited over the cheap books sold there and bought quite a bit. I was tempted since $1 per book was way affordable but I didn’t know which to pick. How can you tell which book is worth reading? Anyway I doubt I have the time or the patience. ):

We left the place and got to city hall at 7pm, then we went home O:

I was told that the seminar would start at 8.15am and would take place at the Lee Kong Chian lecture theatre, so today I left my house at 6am. I reached NTU at about 7.45am, so I bought warm soya milk from the mr. bean outlet that was located in the food centre near the lecture theatre and had breakfast there while waiting for Sarah. I love the soya milk! It’s of perfect sweetness and temperature and costs only $1!

Sarah arrived at about 8am and we headed for the LT together, finding it strange that we didn’t see anyone around. When we finally reached the place, there was a paper sign pasted there saying that the venue had changed to LT 1A. GAH. Luckily Sarong’s iphone had GPS, so it was not difficult to navigate there.

When we got to LT1A we saw many JC students in various uniforms. How did they know about the venue change? It was also written on the signboard there that the seminar would be from 9am to 5pm, so we weren’t late and had to wait for it to start but wtf, I could have woken up later…!

Sarah and I sat in the middle of the LT, some distance away from the screen. Behind us were some girls who constantly chatted in Chinese and appeared not to take the talks seriously, although they occasionally made comments about what the lecturers said. It made me wonder if they had to pay $10. I set next to a J2 guy from HC, I think. He kept twirling his pen and dropping it on the floor but he took a lot of notes! Motivated me to take notes too.

I found the lectures intriguing, particularly that of Behavioral Economics. If art doesn’t work out I might want to pursue that in the future. There was also a lot of emphasis on the recent global financial crisis, so I think what was covered there really will be useful to me right now.

I was hoping for some chocolate eclairs at the two tea sessions they promised but there weren’t any. Instead there were brownies, chocolate muffins, banana cakes and the like so it was still alright. I also took a cup of tea but I didn’t take sugar so it tasted like drain water.

After the seminar we took a while to look for the bus stop inside the campus so that we could take 179 to Jurong Point. It was raining heavily by then and I didn’t bring an umbrella so… we shared and Sarah got quite wet, I am so sorry.

At Jurong Point we walked around a bit, then went up to Kopitiam for dinner. There wasn’t any space however so after minutes of standing there looking in vain for seats we went downstairs and ate at MOS burger instead. I had the tako cutlet rice burger and it tasted good! The sauce reminded me of Malay cuisine somehow.

Which reminds me, it’s been 9 months since I’ve been to Jurong Point! The last time I went was right before the June holidays, for dinner with my service learning group mates- Chenrui, Darrell, Joong, Szemin <3 Being at Jurong Point reminded me so much of Service Learning and of the kids at YMCA (Jurong West) since sometimes we’d drop by Jurong point to buy stuff for them before heading for SL. They are so cute! I really enjoyed watching them draw easter eggs and attempt to fold origami hearts XD I hope they are doing well.

I want to go to Jurong Point again! Except it takes me so long to get there from home. I swear I will visit and eat at the Japanese-food-basement one day.

Speaking of memories, on the bus ride out of NTU, I saw my old-old house! Sort of. My family used to stay in Jurong until we moved to the old house in Kovan when I was about 4 years old. I don’t remember much of the old-old place except for its familiar brick red colour, but I asked my mum and she said we used to live in block 920. I also remember the boy who lived next door, I think he was about my elder brother’s age and we called him Ah boy. He had a shaved head :D