before let me tell you

anyway a little note to my friends that i used to link -

please do not be offended that i am not linking you now! as seen, i am on a minimalistic approach, and yep i have only retained the links that my friend needs or those that i read regularly. uh ok. it does not mean that i don’t like you okay!

look at the flipping charts

i wanted to blog this some time ago, but i forgot.

okay if you have not been living under a rock, you would have realised that a certain “zi lin” has been crowned miss world 2007!

she’s 1.82m.

同人不同命…

caught you high up in the sky

tired.

i finally started work at pathlight today! okay it is not exactly work, cause we are currently undergoing training for classroom support next year (: haha the training today brought back many memories, and i have renewed passion for the kids! in fact, i think i will never tire of interacting with them.

i remember last year, i only managed to have an 1/2 hour briefing 2 days before i started work at pathlight as teacher aide (same job) and enrichment programs coordinator. everything i learnt about autism, i learnt on the job by trial and error. so it is quite cool that i finally have the opportunity this year to undergo an intensive 2 weeks training with the other new teachers. (:

there is a test tomorrow already! my gosh, just when i was weaning from the education system >< oh okay more like today.

i wish i could be honest like them.

but fly like the wind

oh i forgot about some other pictures too!

i will meet you in my dreams tonight.

okay i decided to just put up one wy picture in case she decides to kill me when i meet her tomorrow. not like she will see this before we meet though. haha!

anyway i just caught “i am legend” with my family + my sis’ bf + my bro’s gf. as you can imagine, there were 3 couples and me. it was kind of cute, and i am alright being the extra! haha. i love my family! we do cool activities like watching lots of movies together, and we even go karaoke together! (except that my pop refuses to sing, which is totally strange cause he always sings at home and in the car -.-”)
 

 yep anyway i thought it was quite a cool show – sorry i think all movies are cool no matter what others say. sigh. it was quite scary and sad. i always cry during movies. ): haha but i think everyone should catch the movie to judge for themselves. yep.

anyway what really got me thinking, and zr if you want to be specific, today was what green said on my tagboard – “would it matter who i am?”

well, i think yes. i believe that everyone communicates in a different way to people around them. more often than not, we try to put what we say into context, and speak in a way that would be appropriate/comfortable to the person we are speaking to, according to how much we know them. and this is not just a matter of style, i believe it has much to do about content as well.

it is almost certain that we speak differently to our parents and to our friends, so why not towards different friends as well? offhand, i already know who i speak differently to among my group of friends. and no, it is not just a matter of how close i am to the two people. it is almost as if i take on totally different personalities when i am with either of them.

is it hypocritical? i hardly think so. i think it is merely adapting to the situation, and in this case, to the people you are currently with. to me, i would feel that since i can make the other person feel good and continue the conversation by acting this way, then i will. furthermore, if i am willing to adapt to the situation, it means i am actually sincere in continuing to be friends with you, so how can i be considered as hypocritical? because i am not being myself?

but then again, i think there is more than just one side to a person. (no, i am not talking about good or bad!) people take on different personalities as required in different situations, so i believe it is just an inherent trait – and yes, that means i am being myself, just that i have many selves!

oh it is kind of interesting to note that if in every friendship, such things happen where people change and adapt to suit the other person, then things are seriously going strangely. A adapts to suit B, while B adapts to suit A. i think that kind of means that we will just be back at square one! maybe that is how friction arises in relationships. okay i think that is quite far-fetched, but whatever.

anyway, i guess therein lies the attractiveness of anonymity. it is like talking to a stranger, with no holds barred? are you more likely to act the way you are then? but then again, who said there is no self which was created just to talk to a stranger?

i think there is.

cats on fire

the long hiatus from blogging during my shift probably got to my head. or maybe it is the fact that i am starting at a new place “almost”, or maybe cause it is just a whole new experience! that’s why i am starting to blog more. come to think of it, i think i must be quite 厉害 to have stayed with the same layout on blogdrive for close to 3 years! i did not even tire of it. which is quite strange, especially since the entire layout is pink. oh wells.

anyway due to my massive shifting, i did not get the chance to blog about our prom night.

first things first - i didn’t go for the rj prom night! wy, js and i went for our alternative prom, which was planned way ahead in like, may i think! well at first we decided we shall bust the $98 bucks at some expensive buffet place (the prom night tickets are $98 bucks like wth!) so that we have good food and good company! i think the place wy suggested was the equinox.

Level 69, Equinox Restaurant, Swissôtel The Stamford

in fact, i just realised that equinox is at the same place as the rj prom night! that would have been quite cute if we had actually ended up there. well equinox has “panramic floor-to-ceiling views of singapore, malaysia and indonesia” which probably implies that it is really expensive. i think we do not need any implying, it is really expensive. alright! but at first we kind of agreed that we shall bust our money there!

but in the end, we went to another place – not cause of the money though, but more cause of the ambience/feeling.

not too long ago, wyjsandi (we’re a unit! haha!) went for hiral’s birthday party on a boat. while waiting to board at marina bay pier, we spotted this floating restaurant in a ship. js’ mum thought we were going to have the party at that particular restaurant. but no, we were actually having the party on a boat that was actually going to sail. hm. wy js and i spent lots of time at the deck of the boat, so we talked about our prom night! (hiral’s party was before As) and we came to the unanimous decision that we shall have our alternative prom dinner at the ship!

my gosh. and that is what we did on rj prom night. but being the naturally wide-eyed curious kids that we are, we also agreed that we shall go to swissotel before rj prom night starts to “peoplewatch”. haha that way, we would not miss out on looking at people getting dressed up – and without busting $$$ to dress up ourselves! well the actual fact is that wy js and i were never really keen on getting dressed up. (it’s just like how we never understand how girls can go out and just shop for clothes. okay that is a topic for another entry.)

so come prom night day, we went to js’ house early in the morning to play! actually we wanted to go to lilliput to play minigolf but it was under renovation. we wanted to go kiteflying but wy insisted on a wet weather plan. we wanted to go escape but wy is scared of weird stuff. (js and i said, ok we will take the kiddy rides with you but she said no anyway.)

SO. we went to js’ house cause wy said she has never been there before. but being the really good friends that we are, we entertained ourselves at js’ house! uhm we taught js how to play mahjong with my tiny mahjong set, we played computer games (like gold miner and stupid yetilympics!) and we started our secret project

then it was time to go “prompeoplewatching!” we stood at the door of swissotel and looked like a bunch of stalkers with ice-cream. anyway the clothes were not really fantastic, but we got to catch a number of couples (it seemed that lots of rj people decided to announce their partners on prom night!) and some were pretty shocking. but i am not a gossip (lol!) so shan’t elaborate further! but cause we were so underdressed, we could only stand at the far side of the entrance. i expected everyone to arrive by car, so our positions were the best to see everyone. i mean seriously, if you are dressed up to the nines, why would you even attempt to take the mrt?! but alas, lots of people did take the mrt. so we only managed to catch about 50 people. but never mind! well the people who arrived in cars were probably the best dressers, so we got to see the 50 best out of 1197 rj students!

haha and then to the best part of alternative prom! we travelled to marine parade pier to have our dinner. it is probably a huge understatement to just say that it was the best part of the day. it was incredibly cool cause we had the entire open upper deck to ourselves. it was totally like – the wind, the sea, the forest everything. (:

evening, towards the sea.

 
dusk, towards to the sky.

night, towards the forest.

haha we also had a waiter to ourselves! (: okay that’s not a big deal, but oh wells. yay alright and we had good food too!

wy’s food!

my food!

js’ food!

yay anyway it was a great prom night – cause i got to spend it with wy and js without tons of flickering cameras and moving people and no good food.

ah wells, when i spoke to some of my friends who went to the rj prom night about my alternative prom, they agreed that it was quite cool. but they said that the rj prom night was a once in a lifetime thing and some sort of final goodbye. i could have gone for the dinner anytime with wy and js!

hm. i guess first, we seemed to have like maybe 10 final goodbyes in rj already. we had a final goodbye at the end of the school year when all the lectures ended, we had a final goodbye when we came back to rj for one week of prelim results, we had a final goodbye at farewell assembly etc. haha so basically, it is just the same thing all over again during farewell at prom night. haha anyway for the people i want to see, i will still continue seeing them after prom night!

plus the fact that i have never dressed up in my life and do not intend to do so anytime soon, made it so much easier to decide not to go for prom night after all. and i enjoyed my night out with wy and js too! and we had good reason to bust money. hahah!

yeah so it was a good prom night (:

lol and talking about prom night, i was quite surprised that even our juniors were looking around facebook for pictures of it! i was so shocked when one of my juniors asked, “eh zi lin how come you didn’t go for prom night?” i was totally like “huh! how you know!” haha. then she said, “oh cause i didn’t see any of your pictures!” and i was like -.-”"”".

like okayyyyy. basically somehow or other your photo will definitely be taken on prom night. so if there are no pictures of you, you did not turn up at rj prom night. cool.

a smiley js suggested i make with my leftovers. haha!

oh merry christmas!

pot scrapped

finally all the posts have been transferred, and i am starting on a new blog server, wordpress! initially i chose blogspot, but it so happened that someone already took “zilin.blogspot” so i was kind of sad. and later i found that “zilin.wordpress” was available, so how could i pass up the chance!

but anyway after playing with wordpress, i realised that wordpress is seriously a great blog server. the functions are pretty intuitive, and if any place is confusing, they would provide the FAQ link right away! plus it has cool uh shifting colours thing in the dashboard so yeah i’m totally falling in love with it. one thing strange is that they do not allow tagboards for security reasons, and youtube embed stuff also can’t be displayed here. but oh wells i’m fine with it since there are always ways out. oh and i love the snap-preview thing too!

well. i guess i wanted to shift from blogdrive because blogdrive was seriously too slow, and very limited. like the blog takes ages to load and cause they have paid accounts, some of the functions are disallowed. and just a week ago, blogdrive died! which totally freaked me out, cause i was only half done shifting the entries -.-”

 alright. selling wordpress is definitely not the point of the entry!

when i told my friends that i was shifting, so i couldn’t blog for a while, lots of them asked “why?”. then i said, cause i have to transfer all the previous entries! and they asked “why?” again. come to think of it, i believe it is a valid question. well if you shift, then you shift! you don’t exactly have to bring all the previous entries along, do you?

hm. i thought about the question too. at the start, it came naturally. like i decided, yes, i’m going to shift. so let me transfer all the previous entries one by one! (cause blogdrive is really bad.) in fact, i decided that i was going to shift way before the A levels, and decided that i would have lots of time after the As to do all the massive shifting. despite of all the trouble of copying and pasting 400+ entries with the correct dates and time, i never did once think of just starting anew on another blog. until my friends came along and said that.

but if you think about it, when people shift houses, they also bring their old stuff along, don’t they? of course some stuff will be dumped and replaced by new stuff, but important things will still be brought along. so it is the same way with my blog: i brought along all my entries, but i made changes to the layout, and the links and how things look in general.

then again, when people shift houses, the previous house is gone and totally inaccessible to them. that’s another reason why they would bring their old stuff along. and in this case, shifting blogs is a different situation since in cyberworld, your previous blog address will still be present. (though i am still in the process of considering about deleting the blogdrive blog.) but to me, i would definitely choose to bring my important stuff along to where i would be spending the next phase of my life.

so i guess this means that somehow, my blog entries have become a extension of who i am. i believe if wordpress did a diary-x, i would probably cry my eyes out. it is quite strange, don’t you think? that entries like these can become so important to a person.

i used to believe that if the memories are important enough, you do not need physical recording to hold on to them. but as i shifted my entries one by one, i think i proved myself wrong. one of the good things about bringing my entries along was that i got to go through many of the old entries, and relive my memories. i think if i didn’t do this shifting, i probably would not have bothered to read through like the 2005 & 2006 entries until maybe when i am 30 and bored. as i read through them, i just could not help feeling glad that i did record all these small things down. like how funny zr’s first truth or dare was, how i told wy that “we aren’t jaywalking, it’s just that the traffic light didn’t change!” and how i felt when i cooked for the first time in my life.

when i read those entries, i found that i had almost completely no impression of what happened then and why! perhaps they weren’t really as important as like my first dislocation or my first 10 stitches, but they are still little things that are worth remembering 20 years down the road. well so i am glad i was born into the age of blogs! i seriously doubt i would even bother to record my thoughts and events in a diary, even if it was a computer diary. well, i do not deny that i like my friends to read my thoughts, as i am more of a discussive and think aloud person, so it makes sense that if i get to share my thoughts, i would be more inclined to blog about them. so yes. i am glad.

but still, this reminds me of a book i once read when i was young. it was a novel speculating about the future – it wrote about how in the future, everyone will know about everyone else due to like an open database, and people will have their own reality shows for random people to watch. in short, everyone is overexposed. (… in the information way.) strange as it seems, i think things are really going that way. i wonder if it is a good thing though. i would think it awkward if strangers know intimate details about me, especially like what my thoughts are and how i think!

 oh wells. but i doubt i am interesting enough for strangers to read about me! haha.

but yeah, i think it’s an interesting thought, how life would be like if everyone knew things about everyone else.

oh! but thanks to this blog, i managed to meet a few nice people (hi suoreg! i’ll write to you like really soon. sorry!) so i guess i will still continue to blog!

hello world.

bubbling over circle

so much stuff to write.

but in the midst of shifting my blog.