The Caffeinated Lifestyle;

FLASH! AAARGH!

And here we go!

Livvy smashed a nectarine at 6:02 PM

"Don't bother me any more, and don't call me sugar."

I am regressing, far back into my early childhood.

Olivia: As God is my witness, they're not going to lick me!
H2 Math: Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

Ah well. Tomorrow is another day.

Livvy smashed a nectarine at 12:00 AM

Monday, November 02, 2009

"A Breath-Takinge, Blocke-Bustinge Tale Sette Agenst The Backgrownde Of A Worlde Gonne Madde!"

In line with my goal to remove all potential distractions from the immediate vicinity, my internet connection has conveniently evaporated. So, much as I would love to recount at loquacious length my adventures and related events of the last two weeks, from Natalie Tai's Unfortunate Expedition(s) To Tiong Bahru, to my not-entirely-unenjoyable encounter with an Omnipotent Superior Being From Cambridge (you see, Mr. Burge may be part of a species), to Some Abysmally Retarded Things Olivia Did On Her Last French Paper - I doubt this stolen connection will permit.

I will strive to check my phone occasionally, in case some statutory board decides to offer me an unconditional scholarship to the university and discipline of my choice so long I reply within 24 hours of receiving the message.

If you feel you are languishing from lack of interaction with my good self, you can call my home number. Although since Fate is determined to crown me Queen of Uncontactability, I no longer actually have a home phone; the number redirects to my grandmother's mobile, as Michael has discovered several times to his grief. (This has cost us one of our favourite forms of family entertainment, which involves answering the phone with "House of Hos, which Ho do you want?" The finer joys of this practice are rather lost on my aged grandparents.) Otherwise, my entire family subsists on the cellular wave. Except me, of course.

For a more personal update: limited exposure to the sunlight and overexposure to past-year prelim packages has turned me into a vampire. In the sense that I am a pale, globby noodle endowed with permanently blue lips and a major breakout, the latter of which is not particularly vampiric. I would pick the sense that I look like Alexander Skarsgard any day, but this option is not open to students taking their A-levels, unless they are taking them from Sweden.

I trust everyone does well. Or at least, sufficiently.

Livvy smashed a nectarine at 10:05 PM

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Une histoire de son français dans dix et un demi chapitres

Un.

In Lyon, the air bites as of six-thirty in the a.m. I wake, sucking cold, and drag myself into the salle de bain , into turtleneck and jeans. On with boots, on with white coat; I pick my way through the sleeping bodies on the mattressed living room floor to the door. In the lift I check my hair, the corners of my eyes. The lobby doors stick in the morning; it takes a lot of pulling, sometimes help from the concierge if he is there, and then I am out on the pavement sucking more cold and shoving my hands into my deep pockets.

The boulangerie opens at seven. A boulangerie is not your average BreadTalk, your Four Seasons or Sweet Secrets; in boulangeries they take bread seriously. They are up at five to bake; they open their doors two hours later. One pain au chocolat costs an euro and a half. Two weeks into this routine and I am still marvelling: at how the order rolls off my tongue now, like a quick fish; how warm, how soft, how fresh this pastry is, as it will never be anywhere outside this country; how blue the sky begins at seven, the same blue as the fragment I saw when I stood in the dark well of the traboules and looked up, this is the part I can never get over, how blue the sky.

Deux.

"Teach me French," says the strange girl.

I am getting used to this, these odd requests from people who know I take a third language. "Say something in French," they will ask, laughing, these silly requests meant to humour me. I take her for one of these, even though I don't know her. I recognise her vaguely as the Cat from the Chinese New Year parade; their class attempted to borrow me to be chased across the stage (I was the Mouse). I declined. I was not going to be borrowed in such a presumptuous manner.

"Well," I say, a little irritated but determined to be polite anyway. "Where do you want me to start? Bonjour?"

She gives me this bof look. "I know that. We learnt that last month. It's last week's lesson that I missed."

I stare at her. "I'm in your class, remember?" she continues. "I'm Natalie."

"Okay," I say. I decide I don't like her. "Er, so where do we start?"

I am later to learn that the feeling is mutual.

Trois.

I am in the bibliothèque , browsing. On the spines of French books, the titles are spelled from bottom-up, which means that one has to twist one's neck in crazy positions just to browse. I don't see the point of this.

I am new at this; I don't recognise half the words in these titles, just two months ago I learnt that the alphabet Y is called ygre , like an egret. I pick out some random books that look interesting, one about a vampire, one that seems to be Michael Jackson's biography and what seems to be a trilogy titled Le seigneur des anneaux.

I leaf through the last. Some things jump out at me from the incomprehensible chunks of text, character names, snatches of a language which even I at my rudimentary level know isn't French. I look at the title of the second book. I can't read the other two, but I know enough to recognise that deux is 'two' and tour is 'tower'.

I look at the three books again. An idea begins to form in my mind.

Quatre.

"I want to know why we're doing this again," demands Xin Tian.

She is asking this of me because while we are all guilty of the idea, I was the one who actually filled out the application form. Under 'nom de groupe' I wrote 'Antonym dit au revoir' , after which Xin Tian beat me up with her DELF file and has never forgiven me since.

Which is why we are sitting here in Rifle Range Road, the armpit of Singapore, me and Nat wearing matching black hats and Xin Tian holding a blue plastic bucket. Nat is singing to herself repeatedly mais c'est qui cette incrustée, mais c'est qui cette incrustée, rehearsing the pitch. Xin Tian is glaring at me narrowly. I say helpfully, "We could win the Ipod."

Xin Tian rolls her eyes.

We don't win the Ipod. We do, however, win two Skype phones and one French album which Xin Tian keeps on account of how "they're not your type of music, absolument pas."

Cinq.

Sec 3, the desert. Mme. Loy is going through the same dossier, the same one we went through weeks and weeks ago before I started translating Volume IV, St. Denis. None of us wants to be here.

I no longer recall the dossier we are doing, Dossier 5. I finished Dossier 12 last week and ran out of grammar exercises. Instead I am copying out Eponine's speech and translating the words I don't know yet - even though I already know this section from the English version, I know that Eponine "had bits of straw and hay in her hair, not like Ophelia through having gone mad from the contagion of Hamlet's madness, but because she had slept in the loft of some stable." Yet these are beautiful, incomprehensible words; they speak to me through the thick black ink of my G2-07, the subtle ache of my thumb joints from flipping through the dictionary under my desk. Translation cramp, I call it.

"Olivia," demands Mme. Loy in mid-lecture, "what exactly are you doing?"

"Nothing," I say. Je ne veux pas votre argent, dit-elle. In this desert I am making water with my bare hands.

Six.

First, always, the nightmares: from the very early version when I am chased through my dreams by a word, outre or outil I cannot tell which it is, and it kills me because both words are extremely different - to my recent one, where sometimes I wake up in the night trying to remember the eighth subjonctif exception, and I have to get up and find a dictionary and then I discover a) it's veuille and b) there aren't actually eight exceptions, there are nine. And then I go back upstairs and lie awake wondering what the hell subjonctif is for anyway, not even proper French people know all the time when it's to be used, sure it's kind of pretty but what the hell does it do, I should like to know.

Then the day comes, the actual day, the actual exam: written, spoken, heard, cold rooms, hot rooms, the MOELC foolscap with the faded blue lines, creaking grey plastic chairs and always the stale air and the vague pain centred between my eyes as I search for the words.

The exam I am speaking of is not in the MOELC; it is in a cold room, very far away. In the corridor outside I pass a poster of Maggie Cheung in a French movie and wonder, in the mess of my fear, was Maggie Cheung ever in a French movie? I enter the room, I look at the examiners - two women, after this I will not remember their faces but the one on the left has red glass earrings. I begin to speak.

I begin to speak. I jitter, dragging my hands desperately like nets through the sea of my mind, dredging up wet lumps of vocabulary, bright wriggling verbs and conjunctions. I think I've used the word 'recyclage' three times in a row. Their faces do not change. I falter, make a last snatch, the nets come up empty, I fall silent. Their faces do not change.

Later, in another year, I will open the envelope and see my B2 certificate, I will look under the oral component and clap a hand to my mouth and scream, 24/25, I do not think I will ever see that grade in my life again.

Sept.

I don't translate in M. Robert's class, because even though I don't learn much either, I like to listen to M. Robert a lot. So, I knit.

"I mean, I could not tell if she was hot or not," M. Robert is saying, "because in Quebec the women wear the big coats during winter, even in the clubs, how is anyone to tell if anyone is hot under all the clothing? But I got her number. A week later, she came with me to France to visit my parents."

"Whoa," says Ram, "sir, you should write a dating book."

I drop a stitch and lose track of the conversation. Nat is propped on her elbows, eating almonds and doodling squares in the margins of my exercise book. The squares have legs and sometimes they talk to each other, they say things like "ALORS, J'AI FAIM." I chase my stitch, while M. Robert recounts his epic pursuit of the young lady in question to China, and then to Spain, and then back to China, where I believe they were finally married.

"His name is Lee," says M. Robert proudly of his son. "Lee Robert. If it was a girl, I wanted Julia, but it wasn't."

"Why Lee?" demands Yikai, bouncing on her chair.

"My wife's surname." M. Robert looks wistful. "I said it could be his middle name, and his first name could be Bruce. But she put her foot down."

Huit.

We are learning about religion in a white box with black bars on the window, like a prison. The air is stale, boxed air; the floor thin and artificial, so you can feel every vibration from the construction site next door through your shoes.

I am tired. These days, all I can remember is tiredness, zipping like an ion between LT5 and the MOELC, from Rachel's last "all right, that's it for today" to Mlle. Devi's French variations on the theme of "why so late again, Olivia?", nodding off on the 156, dragging myself across the burning field, oh god the heat, why am I here, why am I here. Beside me, Nat is already asleep, sunk in the depths of her hoodie. She is Puck in the RJC Midsummer's Night Dream, she has her own war to fight.

Mlle. is talking about religion, about sects, about God, I don't know, nothing goes in, lines of French clashing with lines of Ayckbourn, derailment, crash, explosion in the tunnel. Painfully I sketch a word in pencil on my worksheet, laïcité, it means secularity. I think it's the most beautiful thing I've seen today. No, that's the window, the window frames the rainy scenery outside, grey and blue and purple swirls, the wind-tossed trees in the half-light, framed by our black prison bars like an Impressionist painting.

(parenthèse)

I am typing this on the eve of my French compréhension orale, the eve of my A-levels for real. There will be a week of exams, and they will mark the end of six years of French, of the MOELC, of CO and CE and rédaction, of orals. Of staying back till 5.30, of long and aching bus rides on the 156, of crossing the field from J8 in the afternoon heat or the driving rain, yellow exercise books and traduction, sitting around the blue canteen benches, instant noodles, bad vending machine coffee.

People say this to me a lot: it must be so easy for you, you are so good at it. This is true, and it is not. I stuck with this subject for six years. I stuck with it as the hours got later, as the bus rides got expensive, as more and more of my friends quit till there was only a handful of us left. As I went to JC, had to choose 4 H2s, earned a very lonely subject combi. As it clashed with my commitment to LD - both LDs - with rehearsals, auditions, saikang, shows. As nobody around me spoke it any more. I sacrificed more than I think I know to keep this subject. Maybe they all study more, the geographers, the historians, but look at what we have given. You look at us, us students of French - you know we are for serious, you know we have to love what we do to still be doing it.

On the eve of my A-levels, this is why I am typing this: more than the stress, more than the fear, more than all that I am grieving for the loss of this language, which I will never practise in my adult life as I practise now. If I go to Cambridge, I will speak it no longer. I will not lie: it is not a useful language. I will not lie either: I love it more than I love my own mother tongue. Everyone knows the French for love letter; what is a love letter for French?

Neuf.

At half-past seven, it is either dark or there is a sunset. Nat and I walk along the cement path that cuts through the field. Today there is a sunset; red, rouging bands lacing the edge of the field, last sunlight brushing gold on every weed, every blade of grass. A faint moon in the sky, crescent, like the bronze one on the mosque next to the MOELC. It is good.

Nat is singing a Norah Jones song I cannot identify. It makes people stare, the ITE students passing us in their raucous crowds or the lone cyclist, her low, strong voice that I can feel reverberating in my bones, the sadness of it - wistful, like. She is singing this because she thinks I am sad. I am, maybe. (I don't remember why.)

The grassy slope across the drain is lined with birds, mynahs I think they are, they watch us beadily as they root for worms. Nat turns, suddenly, flinging her arms out like a scarecrow; the birds are startled, they take to flight. In a long black arc the flock of them wings across the sunset.

Nat pauses and stares after them. "Let's go," I say eventually.

We move on. Nat begins to sing again.

Dix.

I am standing in the general office opposite the fish pond, filling out a form. My mother is watching me do this over my shoulder. On the first line I have written 'Raffles Girls' Secondary School'. I am twelve. My PSLE results were, in a way that I doubt will ever be repeated, very good.

My mother points at a section I have not yet touched. "You can take a third language, do you want to take a third language?"

I read the fine print. There are three options, F / G / J, and an additional (Malay/Chinese). I circle the F. I haven't actually thought about this, so I'm surprised at the decisiveness with which I do.

"I thought you'd take Japanese," remarks my mother.

I shrug. Years later, people will ask me - in class, interviews, in passing - why I did this. I will have a lot of answers - I want to go to France, I want to read the original version of Les Misérables, c'est une belle langue - and they will be true, actually. But right now I don't really have a reason.

"Maybe I'll like it," I say. I hand in the form.

Livvy smashed a nectarine at 5:32 PM

Saturday, October 24, 2009

LOOK WHAT I BOUGHT YESTERDAY!

SMILING CANDY!

I LOVE THE WORLD!

Livvy smashed a nectarine at 11:39 PM

Sunday, October 18, 2009

L'Hymne de Danse aux Années Quatre-Vingt

Today the car broke down on the CTE, the AA people said they'd only show after an hour tops so I sat in an engineless car and studied market failure in the middle of the expressway, until my aunt dropped by to get us. Quite a novelty, really, except it must have been like 35 degrees out or something. Also, very noisy. All those cars going by.

tu es si mignon
quand tu danses au rythme
il y a une boucherie dans le coin
les gars et les filles se regardent en mangeant

je me promène à travers la ville
comme un ivrogne, mais pas
en montant un peu mon jupon
comme un ivrogne, mais pas

et je suis un de vos gens
mais les voitures ne s'arrêtent pas
et je suis un de vos gens
mais les voitures ne s'arrêtent pas

et il y a longtemps
dès avant que j'étais touchée
aujourd'hui je suis touchée parfois
c'est seulement une question de qui
c'est seulement une question de quand

une dépendance aux mains et pieds
il y a une boucherie dans le coin
les gars et les filles se regardent en mangeant
mais ils veulent vraiment se regarder en dormant

Livvy smashed a nectarine at 10:07 PM

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Empire's 100 Sexiest Movie Stars...This Year, That Is:

Top 5, Men

5th: Christian Bale (...hokay.)
4th: Brad Pitt (seriously, that's three places down from last year! I hope it wasn't Inglourious.)
3rd: Robert Downey Jr. (nods approvingly)
2nd: Robert Pattinson (asl;kgj;aslkdhg;lskj)
1st: Johnny Depp (YAY. My vote.)

Top 5, Women

5th: Zoe Saldana (?!)
4th: Scarlett Johanssen (!!!!! "suited for noir", my dissolving breakfast cornflakes. Tosh.)
3rd: Emma Watson (which, in all fairness, can't exactly be refuted)
2nd: Angelina Jolie (one down from last year. Ah well, she fares better than Brad Pitt.)
1st: Megan Fox (WHAT. OH PLEASE.)

Unsurprisingly only half the people I voted for made it on, because I have weird tastes. Granted, nobody has ever heard of Leslie Howard and maybe Adrien Brody's nose turns people off, but Rita Hayworth nowhere on the list?! Well, at least I was right about my first male vote, ha.

Jason Isaacs and Sean Bean are curiously high on the list, although apparently the former is due to the diehard cult of Isaacs fans out there who attempt to derail this exercise annually by hacking and revoting. Freida Pinto ranks 14th! well, she is really gorgeous, if very recent. Haha, Alan Rickman at No. 8.

There are 5 Twilight people in the list! ~~What the hell is this?!~~...what was I expecting?

This is not the Icon of the Decade competition, Claire, my socks remain untouched.

Livvy smashed a nectarine at 10:46 PM

The Lamborghini Rant

Lamborghinis. Lamborghinis. I HATE LAMBORGHINIS. Christopher Nolan had the right idea, smashing them up in The Dark Knight. Ye gods, you'd think that inventing a luxury car would entail giving it a silent engine but NO, they got to have engines like the Millenium Falcon's hovering outside my bedroom window, it wouldn't be half as bad if they were only allowed out during working hours but at one in the morning we have lamborghinis revving on the red line like a Foreigner song, it is driving us BUGHOUSE and if my sister has to wake up again and stand barefoot on the tar shouting "WE NEED TO SLEEP, THANK YOU" I swear I will torch the goddamn machine, you want a flaming Lamborghini? I'LL SHOW YOU A FLAMING LAMBORGHINI. Seriously, why does anybody need four cars in this neighbourhood anyway, this is Serangoon not bloody Bukit Timah. Capitalism is ridiculous.

Livvy smashed a nectarine at 8:13 PM

Monday, October 12, 2009

Voici: (Elle commence à parler.)

I FINISHED MY FRENCH TRANSLATION OF PROOF.

It's exactly forty pages long in Arial 10 - I've learned ~~more math in this week than I did in four years at grad school~~ more about tense imperatif in this exercise than anyone ever taught me about tense imperatif. Unfortunately I will never have to use imperatif in any of my written papers - it's a monster! It's also riddled with errors, but nevertheless I feel like all kinds of awesome.

I'm on some kind of traduction drug now, I can't stop. I'm dedicating this song to Hal, who has become my official favourite Proof character through this:

Si tu changes
Jamais ton avis
Sur me laisser
Rapporte tout chez moi
Rapporte tout de ton amour chez moi

Je te donnerai des bijoux
Et de l'argent aussi
Tout ce que tu veux
Je le donnerai à toi
Rapporte tout chez moi
Rapporte tout de ton amour chez moi

Tu sais que j'serai
Toujours ton esclave
Jusqu'à j'suis enterré dans ma tombe
Rapporte tout chez moi
Rapporte tout de ton amour chez moi

Thank goodness, B for Econs. I was actually scared for a moment there.

Livvy smashed a nectarine at 6:39 PM

Sunday, October 11, 2009

"Oh believe me, I don't like touching you."

MY HOUSE IS UNDER ATTACK FROM COCKROACHES. It's like Kafka meets Eight-Legged Freaks. The worst thing is that we're Buddhists, so we have to do our best not to kill them. Needless to say, they keep coming back. This is absolutely bizarre.

Yesterday was the slashiest True Blood episode ever, UST was oozing out of every pixel of my 42-inch television screen. I'm going to pretend that people actually know what I'm talking about and fangirl about the Eric/Godric, Eric/Bill, Bill/Jason, Eric/Jason heaped on our viewing platters yesterday (wow, I actually managed to find photographic evidence for all that). And believe me I am just waiting for Eric/Lafayette to fall into my lap sometime soon, count on it baby. What Twilight doesn't seem to have realised is that if there's anything more awesome than a bunch of hot vampires chasing after one girl, it's a bunch of hot vampires chasing after one girl and each other. And evidently the girl in question totally ships Goderic like it's the Port of Singapore Authority.

Sookie: He's your maker, isn't he?
Eric: Don't use words you don't understand.
Sookie: And you have a lot of love for him! A LOT LOT LOT LOT!
Eric: ...don't use words I don't understand.

...and that's probably why Twilight hasn't realised it.

SERIOUSLY I THINK WHEN HANNAH'S GAYDAR BROKE, ITS RESIDUE GOT SUCKED INTO MY VORTEX OR SOMETHING. I HAVE SLASH OOZING OUT OF MY EARS. AND I DON'T MEAN THE DUDE WITH THE TOP HAT, NEITHER.

Waiting with bated breath for Evan Rachel Wood's cameo as Sophie-Anne LeClerc, Vampire Queen of Louisiana. And her infamous line to Bill & Eric: "Why don't you just screw each other and get it out of your systems? I could watch!"

Stephen Moyer agrees with me.

Also, TV non sequitur of the week:

(in the county jail)
Sam: What are you in here for, Mike?
Mike: Sodomy.
Sam: Oh...with who?
Mike: A pine tree. I sodomized a pine tree.
Sam: ...why did you do that, Mike?
Mike: I don't remember. I bet you're in here for something worse.

On more important things, ~~my upcoming A-levels~~ the latest Empire election:

Empire says that I have the right to three votes for the Most Iconic Character of the Decade. I am having much difficulty narrowing this down to three! I already took out all characters from film with source material from another era (i.e. the Joker, everyone from the Fellowship + Gollum) and I still have a whole list left, this includes Jack Sparrow, the Bride, Hans Landa (there goes my language kink), Juno, Cherry Darling...I don't actually like Cherry Darling as a character, but there is nothing more iconic than a woman with a machine gun leg.

Sigh. Jason Bourne is going to win again, what does everyone see in the idea of a po-faced Matt Damon killing somebody with a ballpoint pen.

If Edward Cullen becomes Icon of the Decade I am going to eat a sock.

Livvy smashed a nectarine at 8:37 PM

Friday, October 09, 2009

PUTTING OUT FIRE WITH GASOLINE

I shattered a glass cabinet. Someone rang the doorbell so I ran to the window to see who it was, for some reason the floor was slippery so I slipped and hit the cabinet, and then the entire glass door mysteriously fell out. So there I was, sitting on the floor, giant bubbles of blood blooming all over my legs, absolutely not a jot of pain except for where my ankle was slightly twisted.

Everyone freaked out. I sat there self-consciously trying to pick glass shards out of my legs and felt slightly bad about this. The last time I'd shattered glass, it had had a much smaller surface area.

It was an omen if I ever saw one, although of what I am not sure. Presumably breaking glass is bad luck, but then again I broke that turpentine bottle onstage during an After Math run and bled quietly in between lines for the rest of the scene because we didn't want to stop the rehearsal. And then we had two full houses, so perhaps an entire glass door means 4As and a place in Girton, who knows.

Every night now I drink a bowl of muddy brown Chinese medicine, in the hopes that it will help my cramps when they arrive, if according to schedule, in the middle of my French As. (Like my Cambridge interview, which unfortunately no Chinese medicine exists for.) I'm not sure how this works. I suspect it involves spreading out my potential cramps over the entire month, so every day I experience approximately 1/30 original cramp pains.

This would explain the sudden recurring mood swings I am going through. Normally my mood is as steady as the kink in an oligopolistic demand curve, but recently I have been oscillating between Keyed Up, Totally Furious, and Utterly Exhausted, sometimes within the space of an hour. So on any hour of any given day I can be WHEEE GO GO GO EXPLORERS!/I'MMA BITCHSLAP THIS CASE STUDY INTO THE DIRT/I CAN'T DO THIS ANY MORE KK WDT.

Also I've been trying to hole up at home and hide from the world because
a) the moodswings seem to offend them.
b) they keep asking how my exams went. I know they do this because they care and all, but PLEASE DON'T MAKE ME RELIVE IT AGAIN.

And that song. That song. I predicted it would grow on me and it did. Four hours of tuition, four NIS essays, one song. Sneak attack, Mr. Bowie! What am I to do. The lyrics are even starting to seem very pertinent to the circumstances.

If anybody would like to get a ticket for the Perrys' play on the 14th, next Wed, drop me an SMS or post on the tagboard, so far confirmed parties are Phang and Dude, if you decide to go on another day figure that out yourself, not President any more so no longer have to collate for alternate days, ha, ha.

FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT'S ACADEMIC, WILL QT PLEASE TAKE HIS STUFF OUT OF MY HEAD I NEED TO STUDYYYYY.

Livvy smashed a nectarine at 1:48 PM

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

AND WE'RE RUSHING HEADLONG DOWN THE HIGHWAY

With the powerful fury of crushing disappointment, my day has been driven by productivity. I have woken up early to run, come home and filed my exam papers, made two new factsheets for BoP and Supply-Side, drawn up the blueprints for what will be the crowning glory of the Econs Wallpaper - a concept map of the entire syllabus confined onto one wall - provided I am able to find enough paper to do it - written a practice BoP essay, printed a new calendar and made a new mix CD. And so in conclusion I steal a line from Ilona Costa Bianchi of The Girl In Question: "Math prelims! Filthy creatures! (spits) We shall speak of them no more."

My Cambridge interview is right-smack-middle of my French As, how frustrating. However I'm just glad they're even talking to me in the first place, so we overlook the inconvenience.

While most of the tension in the house is due to my impending As, some of it has been given over to my father's imminent prosecution in a subordinate court of law.

Me: (hopefully) Maybe they'll just fine him some and tell him not to do it again.
Mipsy: You think? No, somehow I doubt they tracked him across three months' worth of speed camera footage, delivered a special summons to our house and put together a whole court hearing just so they can teach him lessons in humanity.
(beat)
Me: You haven't been to watch Inglourious Basterds in secret, have you?
Mipsy: What are you talking about?

I suddenly feel a lot like watching Inglourious again, this is the thing about Tarantino films, they weird you out and then grow on you in the interim until you're absolutely fond of them. Or maybe it's just me.

I need to ask a favour! If you've the time and willing, please send me a French song so I can carry out my grand plan of teaching myself to transcribe lyrics by ear before my CO. In my experience, everyone owns like one or two French songs even if they haven't the slightest idea what they're going on about. Je vous remercie et gros mimis!

Livvy smashed a nectarine at 6:49 PM

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

All the little angels rise up, rise up/ All the little angels rise up high

"You've had a nice long run, Aldo. Alas, you're now in the hands of the SS. My hands, to be exact. And they've been waiting a long time to touch you. Aha! Caught you flinching!"

So, we got back Math today. No, I wasn't exactly expecting an A - despite how the others kept attributing my run of luck to actual ability, I myself was under no illusions to the fact. Still, this - was rather sudden.

So I was upset. For quite a while after that. You might even say traumatised, because nothing of the ilk has happened since goddamn Sec 3, you know, and these things don't exactly taste well in the swallowing. And then I mulled it over a bit more, and then I decided, you know what, screw this. Screw the paper, screw the department, screw the method of differences, screw probability, screw limits and standard series and the undefined value of dy/dx, maybe it was stupid or unfair or flunkable by 40% of the cohort or whatever but feeling sorry for yourself does nothing, you understand, ineptitude is ineptitude whatever colour paint you decide to roller on. If there's anyone who deserves to be upset, it's those people who've been getting genuine As, not flukes like mine but the real McCoy, and ended up like a couple bands above my grade, now they are quite truly cut up about this so save your tears for them. I have been struck off and tossed back in the ballpool where I belong, so much for that, but we shall rise-up-rise-up like the little angels in the song, this is me coughing blood up in your face, o my Higher Mistress of the Pure and Impure, the Complex and the Real - write that this is no longer a test, THIS IS WAR, I will take everything you can throw at me and when I get across the border I will carve a goddamn A into your screaming face. Just watch me.

On other things, I have lost my water bottle, the one with the orange stripe, and my father has been summoned to court on account of him doing 102 on a 60km/h stretch, but ah. Minor tragedies, y'all.

Livvy smashed a nectarine at 5:08 PM

Monday, October 05, 2009

An update on my life

So Smithson did apparently just shed on my P4 class photo, on account of him turning all new-milk-coloured when I wasn't looking, and is now dialling for phone sex, or whatever it is lizards do when they palpitate their throats. What worries me is how I can't find his skin anywhere. He better have gone and buried it somewhere private, because this corkboard just got cleaned.

He's giving me this "and you think menstrual cramp is bad?" look.

I am not communing with a lizard. I so am not.

Livvy smashed a nectarine at 12:40 AM

Sunday, October 04, 2009

...

I seriously wonder what's wrong with Smithson. He's turning brown. I hope he's not going to shed on my P4 class photo.

Livvy smashed a nectarine at 11:59 PM

MOI;

Responds to Olivia, Livvy, 'you floozy' or 'Aaaagh! Sadako!'. Writes (prose), used to write (poetry, fanfiction), sings (in shower), dances (with poles), makes icons (with terrible texts), cuts regularly with penknife (not herself, other things) Will scream on mention of Lord of the Rings, Discworld, Sethos, or coffee. Fancies herself a Victorian Goth, but is a little too decent for that sort of thing. Suspected to be closet hooker. Tries very, very hard to maintain moral and innocent image of sweet, young thing; secretly goes flapper jazzing behind your back.

LES AMIS;

Me
Wordpress + Fanfiction + Ellejay
Potatoes
my sweet bean bag in the street + wrapped in your papoose your little fig newton + when she was crucified she wore Shiseido red + no matter what she's got in her right dresser + know some girls with the prettiest red ribbons + strike a deal make him feel like a congressman + does anyone know why you play with an orange rind
RGS
Michy + Yingxi + Valerie + Charlotte + Oceana + Sam + Kristen + Karishma + Violet + Victoria + Ashima + Xinyi + Hannah Jr. + Glen
Hwach Batchmates
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Seniors
Melo + Wenny + Joey + Sarah + Salima + Hong Ling + Rachel + Fo + Jianyang + Darrell
Others
Moffles + Eleanor + Ying + Mary + Siauxi
Communities
After Math Fanfiction + Cafe + CAPtitude + Cheesemongers + Frimmersion

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