my money!!!! Part IV

I've decided to work. Kino looks like a good place!

my money!!! Part III

A longer sweep of the internet has me find a fair number of sites that actually list the EP-630 as a reccomended product. Apparently it IS the best you can get for this price.

I just can't get over the sadness of the sound. Perhaps my standards are just too high. But HECK, what is music without good SOUND?

my money!! part II

Okay I seem to be most pissed at the canned-sounding inteference that my in-ear headphones makes with my sound, especially when it comes to the vocals. The vocals come out sounding harsh and bright and fuzzy. I might use it on the train on the way home if I'm desperate for distraction, but for serious listening I'm going to have to use back the earphones that came packed with my Zen Wav. At least from there the sounds are clear and nuanced and coloured all the way down -- the reason why I purchased a portable music playing device in the first place. If only the earpieces weren't so BIG.

My only priorities to buying any earphones are price, durability, sound quality and comfort (in no particular order), so I'm afraid the Creative EP-630 didn't really fulfill any of these. Being a poor student I blew my pocket open paying $45 for the silly things. I'm not sure about the durability, that will take me time and use -- and since I'm not using them, this point is moot. I've just described the quality of sound I got. And about comfort -- ah, perhaps I'm not suited to having in-ear earphones in the first place. It feels awful, as if an air bubble is building between my eardrum and the plugs and is threatening to implode my inner ear. Maybe they take time to break in, as Pong suggested, but since the sound quality is so bad I don't feel AT ALL inclined to go to the trouble. I'll take my $48 as wasted.

According to a quick sweep of the internet the EP-630 are surprisingly well-regarded. Most gave the sound quality a 4 out of 5 or thereabouts. Maybe it is actually normal to have sub-standard sound quality even if the music is meant to be deliviered directly into the ear. If THAT is the case, I might as well start saving for $500 to buy the high-end sound-isolation HEADphones that, although heavy, deliver music so good you'll never want to take them off. Or at least the $200 headphones at Best Denki, which I can at least try on before I buy. I feel my pockets springing leaks at the very thought. I wonder what it must be like to be, oh, Gatsbyesque rich.

my money!

My new Creative in-ear earphones isolate very well, but the sound quality is TERRIBLE!

Fuck it I seem to have wasted $45

Bike Journal #3

The view at the track is unfailingly pretty. Little waterfalls cascading between long vines and little mobs of morning glory, even on the far end of the road where the grasscutters have commenced their dastardly work. Now they've worked their way to under my window. I can her their machines BUZZ. They're scaring away the kingfishers.

Bike saddle without cover excellent. Stiff but can support bum properly, at least my fats know where to go. Made four rounds, would have done more but that my bum died anyway -- the saddle is kind of hard, so I went numb and this affected my riding a little bit. Travel sickness all but disappeared, but hat interfered with vision and gave me a little headache. Next time I'll just risk sun and freckles.

There was a crazy woman on a unicycle. Her legs went twice the rate at which mine did, but she was a bit slower than me. Her control was amazing -- she dodged kids on four-wheel bikes and baby-carrying daddies and a dog-walker with two leashes. My mum thought she looked comical from the back (hard not to, what if YOU saw a woman in stripey kneepads on a unicycle wearing a bright yellow shirt) but nonetheless, WOW.

Speaking of control, I'm getting noticably better at maneuvering. I can turn tighter corners and have learned to apply my brakes better to weaving around pedestrians. Used the bell for the first time today (at a bugger who was blocking the path making circles with his bike.) Passed the bike to my mum at the Pasir Ris end of the track and plodded home on a numb bum, feeling like a slowpokey landlubber. I think I have been converted.

Oh, and Grace was supposed to come down this morning too, but she overslept (again)!! My fault, I guess, for not calling her half an hour before 9. Although I seem to be managing quite well on my own -- for one, I haven't fallen off yet.

Bike Journal #2

I am badly out of shape. Two rounds about the track and my thighs are completely busted. Good exercise nonetheless.

The saddle is really uncomfortable. It's not so much that it's hard, but that I have no idea exactly where my bum is supposed to go. Perhaps it really is the seat cover's fault.

Am making progress with turning and control issues, but still haven't figured out which brake is for the front wheel. Pong was supposed to meet me this morning to Give Me Pointers, but I assume she was asleep. Will take first real look at bicycle this afternoon, before I go and kill my backside again. Beats running certainly.

I love my bike.

Merry Christmas!

230 posts!

Jobbing done, portable music device bought, SAT II results in. I feel vindicated and hopeful. Whee!


Merry Christmas, everyone!

sayonara, XT!

Now that you are flying into a new world of white chrismases, Inuit dances, elk and glacial crumbling, be sure to send me some pictures!

Bike journal #1

Just went downstairs to give my new bike a spin. Writing ten things here so that I won't forget them the moment I drop off to sleep.

1. posture.

2. don't look down. Look in front.

3. Confidence good.

4. Prudence better. (i.e. Carelessness bad. Nearly careened into partition and nearly sent flying into the longkang)

5. Trust the bum.

6. If absolutely vital to fiddle with bike parts, fiddle carefully.

7. Ring bell

8. Know limits

9. Take drink in basket next time

10. More practice


The ticking sound my bike makes only happens when I'm pushing it, not riding it. I am told that this is normal. But it is still very annoying.

My bum hurts. My balance went off because I wasn't seated comfortably at one point. A combination of that and inattentiveness (I, like a silly wank, was wondering how claymores were balanced when I went sideways) nearly flipped me into the adjoining canal.

Saddle, even with cushion, is unforgiving. Seat will train bum muscles until they are as hard as rock. Soon I will be able to kill someone by cudgeling them with my impeccable bottom. Cycling very good, feet don't hurt -- one of the main reasons why I hate running. The sense of speed, the wind in my hair, my height from the road, all of these are amazing. They took my breath away. (Literally. I'm still slightly breathless, and I want orange juice!)

There is the very real joy of having a machine beneath you to regulate your rythem. I find that when I jog this is a real problem. I get bored so easily that I attempt to run faster, only to find that it is unsustainable. And since I'm naturally lopsided one foot receives more weight than the other, which is clearly bad. Not a problem on a bicycle. On a bicycle, you are told very concisely the moment you go off balance i.e. you fall over. Once you have a vested interest in keeping balance, you pay very close attention to the rythems of your blood. It gives me a high, it does. Except when I'm about to run into freefall if I miss a step or... drop into the canal.

More practice needed. I have trouble navigating corners or doing u-turns in a space less than three metres wide.

I feel a little nauseous during and after my ride. I begin by blaming my flabby abs, and then the relatively new circumstances of going beyond walking speed at night. (because sometimes I get travel sickness sitting in the front seat of the car at night also.) If the former is true I should be cured of it very quickly as I intend to cycle often, but if this continues a week after daily cycling I might get into trouble.

I look forward to when I can graduate from the track beneath my window to the track at pasir ris, and then the whole of the park connector linkway. And, blasphemously, (because my parents have explicitly forbidden it,) when I finally decide that I am competent enough to cyclocommute.

I love my bike.

Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium

Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium is not just holiday twee. When it comes to pacing and concept it is infinitely better than the screen adaptation of the Golden Compass. It is thematically meaty and wonderfully ambient. But if you don't like being told about life and death a-la Tuesdays With Morrie, that is still no reason not to go and watch a toy store throw a magnificent temper-tantrum. The opening credits alone are worth the $8 ticket.

bike porn

taken direct from diary.


9.25 p.m.
My mum is mad.

She is so nuts that if she ever booked a flight to Fruicake Land they would automatically upgrade her seat to ambassador class and, upon arrival, crown her their queen.

Only my mum would think of walking 3 km to buy a bicycle and THEN, with it in tow, buy a pair of fash footwear (nothing for me, as the ah Beng family assistant at the offending shoe shop drawled out in his fresh-faced,neighbourhood-secondary school way), and then hop along cheerily to taste DURIANS. And then, because it promptly started to rain, travel 3 km home dragging along said bicycle, its basket now stocked with durians. Her daughter was in attendance to hold their one umbrella over her and the durians (admittedly that was my fault, because I live in mortal fear of a poke in the side from the handlebars.) We yelled at each other all the way home. It was great fun. It would not have been such great fun had the rain been anything beyond a mild car wash spritzer affair, so for this small mercy I thank the gods of weather and dedicate to them the durian that now resides within my tummy.

I love my bike. I would be the first to admit that it is a very girly bike. The top bar is missing from the frame (to allow missish people to ride in skirts, or pantaloons if they so choose) and it is coated in a lovely silver. The bell is alarmingly pink, but then that's what bells are for (to alarm, duh.) The ticking sound it makes when I move it is even more alarming, but that (I think) is because I must have done something clumsy and inadvertant to the geras as I was attempting to steer it for the first time. The silly thing ticked all the way home. But when my father fixes it I shall love it much better.

My bike has only been with me for two hours and already I've had an adventure with it! I love my bike!

hello stranger

The scholar returns to his family, looking like an unshaven Harry Potter (minus scar, plus actual hair) and bearing treasures within his laptop. THERE IS NO ODEX IN AMERICA. WA HA HA HA HA HA HA.

My mum is making huge feasts out of every meal now that he is back. I am enjoying the side-effects of this. I am exactly the same weight of my mum. I should be ashamed of myself.

Perhaps before he returns next time I should ask him to help me buy some peanut butter cups.

arm candy

My family invited my grandmother out for dinner, and when we drove to below her block my mum asked my younger brother to go and escort her downstairs. He turned in his seatbelt and gave her a LOOK.

I said, 'You couldn't make me to do something like that even if you threatened me with the worst thing I could think of, like extra exams.' What I really wanted to say was 'for love or money', but come to think of it love would be the ONLY thing that would make me want to escort someone, apart from money. I would gladly do it for fifty bucks. But I can't speak Hakka and I nearly can't speak Chinese, so my grandmother is a special case. i.e. NO WAY.

But my brother went, and when he came down with my grandmother they were both smiling like crazy he was hiding a pack of raspberry chocolate in his shorts. Awwww. 'Gentleman!' we greeted him. RI has trained him well. And if common home patterns are anything to judge by he's stuck with this job for the rest of their lives, may he accumulate a mountain of raspberry chocolate in reward for his labour.

Me, I don't do escort -- not even for raspberry chocolate. Though I might consider it if you offered me a donut.

I love my job.

I love it so much I am, for the first time in my life, seriously considering it as a future career.

But I'll save the future-related turmoil for later, when I've actually finished my job.

bourbon jelly

At Carrefour today I was standing in the line at the exit counters when the cashier suddenly disappeared.

It was an intensely magical feat. She darted around a pillar and she was gone. I didn't even need to blink. She had simply vanished into empty air. I and the rest of the queue stood around like idiots, waiting for her to reappear in a burst of flaming sparks and cheese.

She returned five minutes later bearing two large broccolis in two plastic bags with price tags taped on them. It seems that she had disappeared to perform her adopted function as errand-runner for clueless old women who don't know that they need to weigh their broccoli at supermarkets before they buy them, even though everything but the things that need weighing have already been pasted with a price tag. Perhaps Clueless Old Woman assumed they were free.

I wouldn't have been quite so bitter about this if the clueless old woman in question didn't have her hair sprayed BRIGHT BLUE.

Obviously she wanted to make an impression as part of the hip younger crowd. But I'd rather she stuck to washing her hair with the usual stuff and cleared out with her purchases without making all of us wait for the poor cashier to run away with her broccoli and run back so that she can pay for her food. My bag was quite heavy, you know! Why don't I pelt you with it!

And all I wanted was a damn cup of bourbon jelly.

huayu

My father is going to teach me Chinese. He's serious about it. (More serious than Japanese anyway -- I don't blame him) I think I'm serious about it too. I've committed to the extent of getting him to order the Chinese newspaper for me (and to reading it once it starts arriving, ARGH) and talking to me in Chinese, despite the huge possible misunderstandings that used to wreck most of our conversations. If anything it will force me out of my comfortable one-language equilibrium. Between this and work, I shall have no life.

Actually sort of looking forward to it. I am a masochist.

I'll dip into Japanese once I am absolutely certain that my Chinese does not completely suck like it does at the moment.

old quotes unearthed.

'He believed it was always a mistake to open a conversation cold; more than a mistake, a kind of assault. It took time, he felt, for two people to organise their feelings about each other, to bring them out of store, before it was appropriate to speak the first words.' -- Firesong, William Nicholson.

My table looks pristine and I'm completely, as the Feegles would claim, 'pished'. I'm going to have to gallivant hard tomorrow to make up for this.

The number of posts per day should show you how free I am right now

The personality test results on Pong's webpage got me curious, so I grabbed it. The results are really very accurate. I can't put it on the blog, though, because Blogger doesn't have the option of obscuring a huge chunck of text with a link -- as far as I know. I am computer-illiterate and ashamed of myself.

Huh?!

My cabinet doesn't look like my cabinet any more. Sigh.

Here is the flaw in the diary: I've just lost it.

althea

Jobbing has been delayed (again!) until Next Tuesday! On hindsight this is a good thing. It means that I have the whole weekend to clean my room.

Am in the middle of digging out crap from the recesses of what you would normally think is a straightforward glass-fronted cabinet. I unearth stuff from primary school and stare at it as I would some new species of moth. On the way, however, I have also managed to find all my old photos -- Tioman photos, class photos, baby photos, polar bear photos. Looking at them makes me happy for a while, until I move my books from their shadowy hidey-holes into the newly cleaned cells and notice how oddly pretty my cabinet looks!

I love all my books.

Stopped cleaning halfway to go and watch the Golden Compass. VERY GOOD STUFF. Nicole Kidman does evil like nobody else. No complaints about animation, amazing soundtrack. Tension was masterful. Dakota Blue Richards was Lyra all the way to the set of her mouth. Lee Scoresby was cool, not nonsensical. (I confess I worried about this a little before I watched it, because his character is so susceptible to abuse by his accent.) I like the way the witches fly. Everything was very strong, very natural, very quietly dangerous. All the way down to the concept of Dust and the eponymous Golden Compass, and especially Lyra. VERY cool. Completely sucks you in. If I were a nitpicker I would complain about how you can never really translate a book into film without losing something. What would have made the movie a must-see-twice for me would have been at least one good introspective scene, or if the characters didn't find it necessary to explain everything through dialogue to their daemons. I imagine the latter was a practical concession to the target audience, and therefore a very good thing, but I am a sucker for subtext.

Oh, and my third complaint about the whole experience. Nothing to do with the movie itself. A group of noisy young nuts were sitting behind me near an important scene. 'Stop it, stop it stop it,' laughs a female voice. Suspicious giggles and some smacking sounds. 'Kindly shut up,' I say. I am a TERRIBLE specimen of wild youth.

I've decided to keep a written diary. This is so I can scrib things down when I think them up and not misplace them before I blog. This is also because I may need somewhere to rant inappropriately. The fact that you are reading this already shows that, at best, the blog is a semi-public space. At worst, it is tabloid fodder.

Now, to clean out the rest of the cabinet.

going jobbing!

I should be wriggly with anticipation for tomorrow. But I'm not. Instead I feel vaguely disappointed (at WHAT I am not sure) and a little distressed at how much money I've been spending lately (this feeling hasn't appeared in a while).

Damn I am craving pasta. No, I must hold out until next week.


pasta, soup and drink = $25 (estimate, with %GST and service charge)
library membership = $21

*money left for the rest of all my meals = $24, despite
*amount I had MEANT to save for the week = $20


solutions:
1) stay at home a lot.
2) go to the library if staying at home becomes too sad, but go home for meals!
3) S-11 has great food for $3 - $4.50. Plus it is near the library.
4) eat cereal. (this works until I get tired of cereal. From previous experience, getting tired of cereal takes about a week. Without more expensive supplements, it is also unforgiving upon both the colon and the weighing scale-dependent ego.)
5) work like mad and enjoy it so much that I'll forget about wanting lovely food. This one works best. All the better for some extra moola.

I plan to do all five, anyway. Okay except the cereal part. I value my colon very highly. And I love my mum's cooking! It's just that I've eaten it all my life. HELL AND HEAVEN WILL WITNESS HOW I WANT PASTA right now.

I go home at nine o'clock while my friends are able to frolic at pool parlours deep into the night! Perhaps I am a Freak. But I enjoy being alive in mornings, for they are pretty. Not to mention that if I stayed out past the last bus playing games with balls and sticks my parents would throw two fits and never let me out of their door again.

I make a very poor specimen of wild youth.

penne

Oh for the second time in my life I have had a pasta dish which I didn't get bored with before I've finished it. In fact, I am craving for more. And the best part is that it costs less than $10!

Fare thee well Pastamania, with the attraction of your 30% discount lost due to my fading studenthood, I embrace the happier alternatives with enthusiasm and a teddy bear.

I'm going back next week!!!

F-BOMB. not pissed, only annoyed.

aaaargh MUM you do not start JABBERING AT ME ABOUT THINGS I COULD PROBABLY DO VERY WELL WITHOUT YOUR damn NAGGING THE MOMENT I STEP OUT OF THE BATH. FOR GOODNESS SAKE I HAVEN'T PUT ON MY GLASSES AND MY HAIR IS OVER MY FACE AND THERE IS A PIECE OF WET PINK UNDERWEAR HANGING FROM MY LEFT HAND. I AM HALF BLIND AND LOOKING FOR A FUCKING HANGER. Please stop now or I swear I will make good my threat to bring earplugs into the shower so that when I finish my nice bath next time I WILL NOT BE ABLE TO HEAR A SINGLE BLAZING THING YOU SAY, BE IT RELEVANT OR NOT.

Okay, calming music, calming music...

torrent

no reason to exist: no reason other than to have eaten nasi lemak, to sit very straight and watch the rain.

it might sound like a very stupid thing to say, but the library is really the best place for reading books. time don't pass in the library. I read there until I got hungry. Nobody to ask you to vaccum the floor, no screams of the fallen coming from the computer, no oddly comfy bed to invite you to doze off. Mmm.

stuffed

It is very nice not to have to do anything that your life depends on just at the moment. I feel as free as a desert animal who has just left his oasis.

on the other hand, there is more space for books!

The hit count for disposed worksheets rises. The stack now stands to my abdomen. I am not sure how many arch files that makes.

fisheroos

I've completed 3/4 of my genocidal campaign against the dust bunnies residing in my room. On the way, I have also evicted a complete set of fine lizard bones and a stack of newly outdated worksheets (comprising approximately 1/2 of what I intend to throw away) that could choke four arch files. I wonder what kind of fortune I could make that the garang guni man could give me for those?

My parents are home! They took 500 photos on their trip and were bent on showing me them all. My mum swears she would have taken 100 more if my father hadn't stopped her.

Serial Experiments Lain is so strange and frightening and superb and abstract that I don't think I can watch it more than once. The opening music, though, is stuck in my head.