Oh my! I've really outdone myself this time, haven't I? Almost two months without a blog entry. Well, I've been kinda busy...preparing for exams. Yeah, right. Me preparing for a mid year exam. To be honest, I've just been too lazy to blog, or perhaps not motivated enough to.
Phwoar, there's a lot to blog. So I'm gonna try to keep it short, sweet and streamlined. Wish me luck.
Pre-holidays
Can't really remember what happened. One thing that stands out in my memory is a tongue-lashing meted out by Narindar to the whole history cohort at one shot. That was for the whole level pretty much flunking two tests for the two history papers. Apparently my class was one of the better performers... but we still failed overall. T1 got an average score of 4 out of 25 according to her. :S I got 12 by the way... :D I passed! Yah, so she threatened us that if we didn't perform much better for the MYEs aljunied and her would stop supplying us with notes... which means we would have to do it ourselves which means more work. I was horrified. Made a mental note to study well for history. Could't find the note when it came to the pre-exam weeks.
Also remember attending countless rehearsals for Pre-U Sem Presentation. Our skit improved with every practise. But I still got the vibe that the whole thing wasn't too relevant or based on our report. After a few weeks of ammendments and changes i think it lost its focus. (or foe-kuus) Ah well, its over anyway.
First week
Makeup lectures. Were pure crap except for lit(and the only reason so is because the lit teachers didnt finish their syllabi on time). For Maths we came back on TWO separate holiday days to go through ONE maths worksheet. Talk about wasting time. Luckily me khai chongying dhanesh and peter went for MAcs breakfast and came in halfway through it.
Second week
PRE-U SEMINAR! In retrospect, I shouldn't have loathed the prospect of it. Sigh, it's just that preparing for the skit, and in the process realising my apprehensions about it unnerved me. But at the end of the 5 days, I was so grateful that I was chosen to attend the Pre-U Sem. Not to listen to Minister Ng Eng Hen's keynote speech(which was the only segment with politicians in it which I found interesting ), not to chat with Tharman Shanmugaratnam ( yeah right. 25 students crowding around him and given the opportunity to speak with him for like.. 5 minutes. bs... ), but to make such a great group of new friends who were my family for 5 days. And incidentally, Gerard who was my s.l.o. for those 5 days, could be considered my dad. :P And it was great meeting up old friends and catching up with them. From the recent ( soonkit gerard keefe ) to the ancient (jiewei siling shanyi). Dang. group C 18, we have to meet up again soon.
Highlights of the Pre U sem.
The Skit went well, considering that the laptop was lost before it, and we weren't notitfied till like an hour before it. In the end it came out okay. We did well, especially Khai who was brilliant at improvising.
There was a telematch which really got our adrenaline pumping like crazy man! We were supposed to grab this thing from behind a certain white line... and the competition between us and the other grp was amazing! We were like bettering each other's record until finally they proved just too good for us. But the teamwork shown by our group was amazing! Simply amazing. Everyone was just so willing to help and those that were unable too were unbelievably supportive!
On the fourth day we played some games like three-legged soccer and captain's ball. Which was REALLY fun 'cos we won both games ;). Operation Innovation and Enterprise.. was rubbish lah. In the end Jerry got to show off the montages we created to Tharman Shanmugaratnam. The fun part was the belly-dancing performance we were treated to afterwards. The Belly dancers were good, but we were all amazed by the musicians. They were so cool! Yah anyway afterwards they called for volounteers and our whole group saboh-ed Sony up on stage! Haha at first he was real shy but after a while he hammed it up, gyrating and shimmying away! Hahaha. He even created a few new dance moves, like what Srinivas called the 'figure-of-zero'. =) Soon Sony would have his revenge as he called Srinivas up on stage to dance alongside him. Srinivas later called it "the most fucking embarassing experience of (his) life". Afterwards we were forever mimicking his funny side-step of a belly dance.
Then soon a chanting crowd managed to convice Gerard (yeah, gerard yeo) to try on some of the belly-dancing costumes. Finally he managed to wiggle his way into a stunning red bra and skirt set. His friend got into another piece, this time a jade green outfit. They started joking around, poking each others' .... new-found assets. And the thing is the NJ multimedia team caught it all on video! That was to have serious repercussions later on... =D
And our group spent most of our free time and interaction time slots playing this game called I have never. Found out quite a few interesting things about my fellow group-mates. 0_o Yeah especially on the last night, where we willfully broke the curfew imposed on us by the autocratic, rude and disrespectful NJC organising committee made up of their teachers. (Just the teachers actually, not the NJC students who were GREAT!) So we were in the air-con lounge at like 2 am, playing that game when news filtered in that teachers were on the lookout for curfew-breakers and later screwing them. Scolding, I mean. Yah so we sneaked out of the lounge back to our dorms. For most of the guys we took the straightforward route and just rushed back to our dorms with no nonsense. But the others, I heard, went through more drama and suspense.... getting themselves trapped in the toilets and even the toilets that they did not belong to due to fundamental structural differences. Yah so apparently after a lot of networking with us back safely in the dorms, and a lotta grand schemes to go and 'resuce' them, everyone somehow safely made their way back.
Well there was also Operation Test of Life which was an amazing race-like thing on sentosa. Haha at one station we had to bury three ppl from our team... and we were basically shuttling and scurrying back and forth across the darned island. bleargh.
Oh yes one thing I must write down. After some tea session with Mr T (tharman), the JC contingents gathered together. And quite a few were cheering together as a contingent. So there were we, the cjc contingent, gathered, and we were silent. Didn't cheer at all. That's so typical of our school really.. no school spirit at all. Sigh. That kind of school rah-rah spirit may be described as superficial by some.. but i think it is sorely lacking. It's just that... coming from SJI, it's a big loss to me that not once have a group of more than 20 or 30 ppl in cjc have come together to cheer in unison. Sigh. Maybe being in council, we can change something about that. Maybe.
Pre U sem is over. On the last day when we were supposed to check out of our rooms, I took one long last lingering look at the room which was my house for 5 days. Upon checking out, before boarding the bus back to cjc, I said my goodbyes to all my dear groupmates.. and took one last look at my groupmates, the closest people to me for those 5 precious days. I'll never forget those 5 days and I'll never forget those 18 wonderful people. Alvin Shawn David Daniel Sony Srinivas Steve Jerry Gerard Jieying Sawhoon Rash Rai Venus Natasha Michelle Esther Chengyi.
Kayaking expedition to Southern Islands Day One
So after barely a weekend to recuperate from the exhausting (that was the excuse I gave myself for slacking around haha) Pre-U Seminar, I had to set off for a kayaking expedition to the Southern Islands of Singapore. So there I was on a sleepy monday morning, taking the bus to Big Splash, which was where we took our one star course (actually we took the course in the sea, DUH!) and where we would set off from. As I was walking to the Big Splash from the Amber Road bus stop I alighted at, I kinda remembered wondering if it would rain. Then I thought to myself, who gives a rat's a**, 'cos 1) I was gonna get totally wet in a while anyway and 2) cos everything was water-proofed in my bag. Haha. I somehow managed to fit everything into ziploc bags, which were then stuffed into that pathetic green army haversack which I broght to ACE camp in sec 2. Ahhh ACE camp... fond memories. Anyways, so I met up at Big Splash with all the familiar faces from the One-Star Course. Mat ching donovan joy eddie, etc. Saw a few fresh faces there too, some of whom had already taken the one-star course previously, like Natalie and a few others. We walked to Macs at ECP to have our brakfast. On the way there Eddie was trying to hop onto a moving truck to secure a ride to Macs. But alas, the driver saw him in his rear view mirror and accelerated away. Met Tang Wing Kee at Macs, the whole lot of us SJI guys. He looked distinctly disturbed, to me. Haha. Must have been thinking 'Can't I even go to ECP on a quiet monday morning without being harassed by these crazy josephians?' -.-
We were split into pairs of one canoeist from the canoeing club and one non-canoeist. And guess what, just my luck I was paired with a fellow non-canoeist, Huiting. Sigh. Throughout the whole journey from ECP to St John's Island we were struggling like crazy to keep up the pace. Worst was, we couldnt really coordinate well and kept veering off course. Sigh. I was dead tired by the time we beached on St John's Island (or SJI, as we christened it for the night), but my poor arms were just dead. I bet huiting's arms were too.
We unloaded our stuff from the Kayaks and soon night fell and we started preparing dinner in the dark. To be truthful that was the worst Spaghetti I have tasted in a long while. But hey, I was tired and hungry, we were on an island and there was nothing else to eat. I even took a second serving. Blargh.
Yah so basically we bummed around and soon we were really tired and looked for a place to sleep. There was this shelter next to the toilets and we settled there.
Day Two
Woke up sweating lah. The Shelter was really stuffy. Went for a bath. Had Breakfast, did strectches, whole gang went for a slow jog. I led the pack. Now you understand the need for the italics.
Set off for Pulau Jong, this time partnering with Ching. Basically Pulau Jong was this little pimple jutting out of the sea, with a rocky beach. After hardly half an hour into the expedition changed partners to HeJia. Row row row row row row row row. Could see Pulau Jong all the while, had to just keep on course for it. More difficult as it seemed haha.
Reached the pimple, had lunch. Set off. Row row row row row row. Row. Row. Hit Pulau Hantu. When we rowed in between the two breakwaters, it was sheer relief that cascaded over my body, not the huge wave that I thought it was. There it was, Land, a nice shallow lagoon, and in the distance i could seea PUBLIC TOILET! Haha. You kinda take some things for granted after an afternoon out at sea, your legs cramped up in a kayak just a tad too small for you. Yah. From the time we arrived, about 3 pm, to 6.30 pm was lying and lazing around in the lagoon. At first it was with Ching and Eddie, then later NAt joined us. Just sat there talking about a lotta things, playing stupid games and then we finally got back to land.
Unpacked stuff from kayak, found a shelter, bathed, had dinner, went to the pier, saw a huge group telling ghost stories and the like, slept on a bench near them, woke up feeling really wonked up, gazed at the stars through the amazingly clear sky (the nightsky never looked so good on mainland), saw some constellations thingamajigs with the help of ching and mat. Went back to our shelter, went to sleep, sharing the same sleeping bag with Ching for the second night in a row. =o Oh wait, the sleeping bag was opened, not zipped up, mind you. 0_o Drifted off into sleep almost instantly, depsite the hard ground. Woken up about an hour later by Daniel the expedition commandant. Apparently there were big-ass centipedes running around scaring hairy apes like, a hundred times their size. So we all were evacuated to the Jetty. Blargh. i was like sleeping on the edge of the jetty,with nothing but a 10 cm thin strip of concrete between me and some threateningly hard-looking rocks.
Day Three Woke up next morning A-okay, thankfully. Had breakfast, set off for mainland. If the last two days were tiring, the last day was going to wrench our arms off. Basically we were re-tracing the routes we had trudged the last two days. Gulp. in one day. Yah. So basically the whole day was row row row row row row row row row row row row row row row row row row row. There were a few exciting moments, like when me and Hejia were trying to cut across this HUGE ship which was cutting our path. My god, my adrenaline was pumping, or what! I had never paddled so hard in my life, or rather in those three days! Damn, when we cleared the ship I heaved a huge sigh of relief.
yah so soon we reached Sentosa. Then we had to cross this sorta channel were the waves were reallllly rough. And as lucky as we got, some patrol boat whizzed past us while we were making our way there. So basically the huge waves became huge-ass waves lah. Our Kayak so nearly capsized about 6 times, each time we managed to somehow tip the boat back in balance. Or maybe the waves gave us chance. Probably the latter. Then at last, the waves were too strong and we capsized. When I hit the water, first things running through my mind was keep the paddle, hang on to the canoe, hang on to the frickin water bottle for pete's sake and (courtesy of chow and chongying)'Hooo-leeee shit!'
Yah but after a while hanging on to the boat(which was quite a while since like at least 8 other boats capsized there), I realised that capsizing meant that we didnt have to kayak and could take the bumboat back! Yaay! Haha. But then somehow, we got back on to the kayak, capsized again, nearly drowned the bloody boat, and drifted out onto the rocks. The instructor had climb out of the kayak to push us out of the rocks. Yah then cos the bumboats were full, we paddled to an area near Sentosa Cove and waited for damn long for the bumboat. While we were waiting, these guys from Sentosa corp came and told us over their megaphone to get out of the area before they called the Coast Guard. After a bit of explaining, they allowed us to stay. So we had a bit of snacks while in the kayak, courtesy of Esther, the instructors and samuel, inamis friend from t7. Soon the bumboat came and ferried us and the kayaks back to ECP.
Jumped off the bumboat and back to ECP. Hauled the kayaks back. Washed them. Went to bathe. After collecting our valuables, went off to Macs at Parkway Parade with Donovan and Nat to get the Orange McFizz that me and Nat were craving and raving about. Haha. Throughout the kayak back, I kept thinking about an Orange McFizz waiting for me back on mainland. Lol, there were quite a few times were I swear the wind tasted like an Orange McFizz. See how kayaking expeditions can mess with ya mind? =D After trying some of Nat's disgusting concoction/vile mixture of Mayo and Chilli sauce, I couldnt take it anymore and we decided to go home. On the bus ride home, I fell asleep... while watching World Idol. Last thing I remembered was Kurt Nilsen singing 'Beautiful Day'... and next thing I know, I'm at the Bus Interchange, waking up just in time to soare me an embarassing waking from the Bus 'Captain'.
Went to Sleep, on my bed. Ah my sweet bed.
Pre-Exam
This is the period I was supposed to 'Chiong' History Lit and Econs. Maths? save it for later lol. 7 days, just nice if I went on N.E.R.D. mode.
Scenario: Gabriel Olsen sets study plan, determined to study well and hard over an extended period of time, more than 2 days before the start of his exam papers.
Outcome: As per normal, Gabriel Olsen slacks the first 6 days away, and then on the 7th day(whoa, this sounds a little familiar eh? unintentional...) actually gets around to....... arranging his notes and worksheets into files. Oh Great. Hip hip hoorah.
Lit Exam
So there goes Gabriel Olsen, walking into the exam hall unprepared. Unless you call reading the lecture notes for each text the night before 'preparing'. Did both context questions. Sigh. I think I'll pass... cos I've been paying attention in class and faithfully taking down notes at the margins of the book. But trust me , I will just pass. No more, no less.
So I go home, with about 10 hours to prepare and study for a History Exam. Somehow Miraculously study, and managed to cover quite a bit of content for one day.
History Exam
Blargh. When I looked at the paper, thank god, I could do 4 questions, just nice! But I'm really lucky that aljunied gave us hints. And that the outlines for one of the questions was found on the colac. So I guess there's a 50-50 for me to pass History. Gosh I dun wanna fail mannnn... =( But even if I do, there's only me to blame.
When ms Narindar told us to stop writing, I did so willingly. It was over! The most gruelling paper was over! Ovah! History! Kaput! Yeah, everyone was so relieved that it was over that we went for lunch at PS. Had a good time laughing a lot with Inami Sewei and Chris. About stupid things like history teachers and their profiles, watching people order bbq hot plate thingies and then getting steam blown all over their face, laughing rudely at them. haiyo, cjc students.. shameful. =)
Spent the saturday away watching Euro among other things. Spent most of Sunday lazing around. Did some last minute studying for Econs. Went to sleep resigned to mediocrity again. Maybe even failure.
Econs Exam
Section A essay. Disaster. Dont even wanna talk about it lah. Section B was bad too, DRQ. But at least I could answer the questions. Section C MCQ was the best, as per normal. I think I did pretty well for it. I need to, to pull up my first two sections.
Lit Paper 8 Exam
Biggest Catastrophe so far. Had totally no idea what I was doing at times. Had a sort of Mental Block. Did a measly three and a half pages in one and a half hours. Quite bad lah. Might not even pass that one. Sigh. The question was hard to answer.. had very little to talk about from the extract. Die.
Mathematics Exam
Wahoo! The Unofficial End of Exams. There was still Chinese lined up for Tuesday but ... ... ... you know. Yah. The Maths paper was average, I thought the Maths teachers were all going to to psycho on us, but they were surprisingly kind in setting such a paper. After the paper, we gathered outside the class to decided to watch Spiderman 2 at Great World City. Went back home, on on my way home saw Jieying from Pre U Sem at Amk Mrt. Her hair looked kinda messed up, and it figured when she told me that she had fallen asleep in the bus and missed her stop. Whoa, what a coincidence to meet her at amk man. Yeah so went home, then to Yishun to change my defective buspass. Then went down to Great World to meet Sewei. then we met up with Dhanesh, and then we went to meet with the girls who were shopping at GW. They were on a bit of a shopping spree, especially Joy, who looked maniacal, almost, after being deprived of retail therapy for too long a period of time. So me sewei and dhanesh went to play pool. fun. Went to watch Spiderman after that. Was good. Watch it if you can.
Played some pool with Gareth and Yangwei at amk. Beat Yangwei with the help of a few taiko shots. haha. Had Kopi with them. Talked about our respective lives.. and then we went home.
Chinese Exam
Yah la, you guessed it. Didnt study. Paper was tough. Esp zuo wen, mainly cos I suck at it. Was glad when it was over. NE exam was easy. lol there was this pic of this guy in a white turban.. then they asked who was it. Manmohan Singh. After the exam Khai was convinced that it was Pervez Musharraf. Said something about Pakistani terrorists and turbans and long hair. I walked away.. haha. History lecture. Got a chiding from Narindar, the whole cohort. She said something about a 60% failure rate. hurhur. Dead lah I tell you. GG, the whole of the cjc history cohort. GG lah, I say.
Euro 2004.
Opening Match Portugal vs Greeve. Finals Portugal vs Greece.
NEVER in my life would I have predicted the above. Haha now it's time to congratulate Alan on correctly predicting the Greeks to win the tournament. Oh man, the Greeks are the new Germany man.. thanks to the help of Otto der Kaiser. The thing that struck me about the greeks is their simple football. They were simple, yet effective in their atttack. And Leicester city reject Theo Zagorakis actually went on to become the Man of the Match in a Euro 2004 finals. What yobs Leicester were to let him go.
Argh! England! To Support you is a curse! Sigh. It looked like this year England could go all the way.. but alamak! Stupid Helder Postiga, the closest thing you can get to an anti-striker pops up and heads in a goal. and then Ricardo the Man U reject buries one pat David James. Oh my David James. The worst keeper in the whole championships. Woeful.
Sigh. Goodbye Euro, Hello Copa America!
WOOOOO! FINALLY FINISHED BLOGGING! Fingers almost cramping lol.
If I was in England, they'd call me a Yob. really! haha anyway I think that word has a damn cool ring to it. You bleedin' yob!
There! Short, Sweet, Streamlined, just like I promised. =O
Yobbin' off.
Murder, he wrote. At
7/01/2004 12:25:00 pm
.I AM
. Gabriel
. OUT of the Army
. Waiting to prove himself
