小姐

… 为何爱的那么辛苦…

glow biology

yesterday i made a sudden realization. 

typically, people would not like to sleep beside someone who snores, cause well the snoring would disrupt their sleep. at this point, i am utterly amazed by my mum’s ability to be a light sleeper beside my dad’s beyond decibel scale’s snoring. (that’s what it sounds like when you are trying to fall asleep beside him) but this is all very strange because there are people who listen to music while falling alseep – perhaps they are listening to enya, but i assume it should be equally possible that they may be listening to like, fall out boys – so why is snoring so disruptive? 

and so i realised that it was because one would have the uncontrollable urge to breathe at the same speed as the person’s snoring and therefore not be able to fall asleep. it’s a weird feeling.

but cool all the same.

on the fly to one

well. zi lin has gone fishing needs to remember that she is in america, at times. not that it is easy to forget, but i guess the mind does funny things to people. it is something like this one time when after i arrived home with my family some years back, the first thing i usually do is to go change my clothes. and i headed right towards my brother’s room instead of my own room, because it was where my closet used to be located. and the funny thing was, it was like 3 years after i got my own room. the mind is pretty amazing.

one. america is not singapore, it is not nice to peer at earrings at the roadside stand for 5 minutes and then look at the seller and say “how much does this cost?”. she certainly was not very friendly after i did that. i learnt that the first thing to do before you even start staring is to say, “how are you doing?” even though you have no intention in finding out or interest in how his/her day is. that is what everyone does. i cannot decide if she quoted me an astronomically high price because of my perceived rudeness or because it was made of some stone that i forgot the name of.

two. it is not nice to say “i’m good” when people ask you “how are you doing” and finish at that. i do that way too often. “how are you doing?” “i’m good and can i have this two bottles of water and a marble bread and a banana nut bread please” well at least i say please. but i still cringe the moment i finish because i realised i should have carroted a “and how are you” – “i’m good and how are you and can i have this two bottles of water and a marble bread and a banana nut bread please”. too bad real life conversations lack a backspace. 

three. the appropriate answer to “whazzup” or “what’s up” is not “i’m great” – even as much as that is my default answer, some people may not choose to ask the default question. darn them.

four. what the heck is “it” referring to in “how’s it going?” 

 

“how’s they going?”

i’m asking you about your week, duh.

mug shot

okay, who did a ’sim zilin blog’ google yesterday or 2 days ago? own up now!

must be someone who doesn’t know me well enough to know that my name is spelt zi[space]lin! and can’t be an ang moh cause then it would be ‘zilin sim blog’ search! i’m pretty sure i’m the only sim zi lin in the world too, so why are you sneakily looking for me!

haha anw you must have read the rashes entry which must have been pretty gross! oh wells.

but own up anyway!

crying over the spilt milk

if you lose your house,

would you live on the streets?

if you lose your job,

would you eat from the trash?

if you lose your money,

would you beg for pennies?

 

sometimes i wonder what i would do to preserve my life, would i cut off my own arm if it was stuck under a rock like Aron Ralston? if the homeless are not doing it out of choice, would it not be true that they live more dignified lives than i do? they have the will to hold on and live on, will i do the same if i were in the same situation?

what would make you tip over?

cyan washes over

been such a long time since i last blogged (this is getting to be a common starter for my posts huh.) and well it’s not original to talk about how i was waiting for my readership to fall 4-fold again – oh but i just did – so i guess this time i was waiting for my readership to fall 5-fold! (: but anyway i don’t know, perhaps it is true that i have not been inspired to blog much, which is certainly puzzling since there have been elections going on, california propositions voting going on, definitely tons of things to say. i guess maybe i just have been lazy.

home feels so far away, it is getting really cold over here in berkeley. in singapore, i always thought it would be a wonderful relief if the sun stop beating down, and air was just cold all the time, oh what a wondeful day! but over here, i’m like urghhhh i just want to have singapore weather. in singapore, the weather is predictable, it is well, either hot or rainy. here, it can be a multitude of combinations, from freaking hot and sunny, sunny and cold, cold, cold and rainy, cold and windy and i do not know what else. it is so much simpler in singapore. also, cold weather makes me feel gloomy and sad. and the sky turns dark like 9 pm when it is hardly even 6 pm. the days are so short. but maybe it has something to do with me waking up at 11 am everyday, but oh wells, you cannot blame someone who have classes at 12pm! my favourite weather here is sunny and cold, cause when you are cold, you can go out into the sun, and when you are hot, you can go into the shade. it is nice. 

but now i wonder if i am missing singapore’s weather only because of its associations. like singapore weather reminds me of home, and good food, and clean streets, and regular buses, and nice smells of rain (when it rains here there is no nice smell – haha that reminds me of what chris said when i said it smells nice in singapore when it rains – ” what, you mean when the rain hits the ground it vapourises into perfume?” HAHAH yeah totally.) and convenience, and accessibility, oh shoot i just lost my train of thought. i meant to say that because of its associations, it makes me feel like the weather is the one that i am missing. 

but that is certainly not to say that i do not like it here in berkeley. you see, if you introduce all the things i mentioned above into berkeley, it would be just like singapore! (maybe not the perfume part. but then again, maybe yes.) haha no, i do like it here in berkeley. people are interesting and friendly, you see lots of interesting sights on the streets everyday, lessons (CLASSES WTH) are fun and well, you can do pretty much whatever you want to. not that that means much to me, but yeah. 

but anyway, i need to get an umbrella and windbreaker soon.

so in a quick update, obama is president! it was an interesting race, and i followed it pretty closely. what i didn’t really get was the singaporeans in singapore applauding on facebook the fact that obama won, cause well uhm it is not really relevant to singaporeans, is it? perhaps i am just a 井底之蛙 when i was back in singapore, because i certainly did not follow much of US politics. i did not even know the difference between the democrats and republicans when i was in singapore! 

ah i guess perhaps my friends are all much more politically savvy than i am. but but i attended the workers’ party rally during the Singapore General Election! the fact that it was a learning journey for the class should not matter okay. but no one in school ever talked about US politics, so maybe that is why i formed that misconception. oh wells. 

so. that was a really long introduction. actually there is still an appendix to the introduction, i wanted to talk about the day i threw my cal id (something like college identification card, similar to the NUS matriculation card) into the thrash chute. well obviously i am not that dumb to throw it in, but due to the lack of fine imba psychomotor skills (gross motor skills i can do very well – i’m a lion dance drummer wee!), the card fell in while moving at slow motion, and the lack of reflexes also meant that i was not fast enough to catch it. so that started an adventure of waking up at 4.30 am to look for the trash person, and transversing the entire basement of unit 1 with a old kindly custodial staff loki to look for gustavo who was on duty for clearing the trash chute. but since this happened such a long time ago, i cannot be bothered to write about it – oh but i already wrote an entire paragraph about it already oh wells. there was this dream part also, where i had a half dream of 2 characters – me and a really freaky woman. i was completely lucid during the dream, because i had complete control over my character, but i certainly did not conjure up the woman. so that was pretty strange.

but all that’s over now, and i got my id back thanks to the very nice loki and gustavo! (: 

anyway, so. the reason why i decided to blog today was cause of something i was thinking about yesterday. i was wondering to what extent are we able to shape our own personality… not internally, but externally. how far are you able to portray yourself to people in the way that you want to? 

i think people actually can create an entirely new persona for themselves. i think it is scary, but it does not detract from the fact that it can be done. it is like essentially, we are all actors. when i look at some of the people i knew, i realise that in a completely different place, they can create a personality that is something you have never known. sometimes i think it is because that part of them was already there, just that you saw a different aspect of them then. but now, i think it might also just be that once people is given the freedom (because of a new environment where no one knows you) to create a new persona, they might just be able to do it very well. 

but just like in hollywood, some are better actors than others. i remember when i first stepped into rgs, i wanted to be someone completely different from who i was in primary school. it was a new slate, a blank slate, where hardly anyone knew me and i could thus carve a different zi lin out there. i did do that for the first few weeks, but eventually i ran out of steam and i mostly reverted back to who i was in primary school. 

i don’t know if this is a good or bad thing. “emo” people always complain about wearing a mask around people, where no one knows you and everything, but eventually, the one who is choosing to wear a mask is yourself, no? you are the one who is choosing to be an actor, just like how everyone else is. but then again, i do not think i am any better of a person just because i think it is tiring to wear a mask – though it is really why working with autistic kids is so much fun, they don’t give a damn who the hell you are – in fact, i feel sad sometimes that i cannot be the person that i sometimes want to be. 

now, i wonder about why the “entire new environment” is so important to carving out a new persona. through intuitition, i would think it is expectation and embarrassment. like if everyone already knows you to be “someone”, then they expect you to be “someone” all the time. if you attempt to become “someone else”, you get snide comments, and you become “fake”, even though essentially everyone is too! well. i think i am overgeneralizing or being inaccurate here – hm. okay actually essentially everyone is carrying off their own selected persona, you just decided to use a different persona. so maybe that is why it is so much easier to do so in a complete new environment. 

and then there is the why question.

oh wells.

it feels just like creating a avatar.