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Monday, November 24, 2014

Kitchen Troubles

Ah, student dormitories.

You get the odd quirk in your kitchen that you tend to get a little fond of, never mind how annoying you thought it at first.
In ours, we had a dented oven door that just wouldn't shut. It would creak open relentlessly and let all the heat out, and in the end we gave up trying and propped a chair against it.

It was annoying at first, definitely, and we complained about the 'shitty oven' whenever we used it.

It became a conversation starter for us too, when we were just standing about aimlessly waiting for things to cook.

I admit to using it a few times because I am a boring person and a complaint always gets the conversation going, then we could proceed to grumble about the state of the rooms, the dilapidated old building (I hear it will be knocked down soon), and conclude, in the end, that ours was better than the other buildings because of the en-suite facilities.

 We wrote in to the accommodation team, appealing for them to come in and get it fixed but somehow they never got about to doing it, and we gave up emailing them.

The chair became a handy place too, and I enjoyed sitting down there with a book and I could keep a very close eye on the pot instead of walking to and fro from the table to the stove/hob.

One morning, I was woken up by the accommodation staff for their routine health and safety inspection check (which took no more than 4 seconds, I swear I'm not exaggerating- they just marched into my room and took a look at my shower and probably gave the room a quick once-over during their march-in and out, because they thanked me and left immediately after)

And apparently they got the oven door fixed as well because my housemates were sitting about the table at lunch talking about it, and we each took turns to open and shut it, marvelling at how it was working again.

We kept the chair there for a few days, though, forgetting it was completely pointless until it was moved away during a late-night drinking session because there wasn't enough chairs.

Just today, one of my housemates commented that it felt a little weird having the oven door fixed. 

"I miss kicking the door shut and propping the chair against it, haha."

"Mmmm, same! I keep looking for the chair, and a couple of days back I dragged it over and propped it against the door because I forgot the oven's fixed now."

Well, at least the dent is still there.

Wonder if they can fix that too?

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Helplessness

So, my bumbling phone finally died on me a few days ago.

I was expecting it, really- I would use it at every waking moment aside from instances where I'm at class/ doing work/ or on my laptop. Even while I was not using it actively, I'd usually leave the screen on and forget about it, or take the time to download some ebooks.

I feel handicapped without my mobile phone.

I went grocery shopping with my cousin, but there was a miscommunication with the meetup location and I had to run back to my dorm to get on Facebook and contact him.

Me   : WHERE ARE YOU??!!
Him : I'm at the train station?!
         Didn't we say we should meet there?
         Where are you?
Me  : I'm in my room, my phone has died.
        See you in a minute
        DON'T MOVE FROM YOUR SPOT
        DON'T MOVE OK I CAN'T CONTACT YOU AFTER THIS

You can imagine my immense relief after I finally met him (after running about for 30min trying to find each other)

I complained to my parents over Skype and they were most unsympathetic.

"How do you think we met up before we had mobile phones, huh?"

... ummm... pagers?

I applaud people in the past for being able to magically find their significant other, after months years of not being able to see each other and only communicating by letters. I'd like to think that post was not as reliable back then, too, and what if the other party never got your message?

You'd be standing at the meeting spot, desolate, that's what it would be.

*cue dramatic music and a thunderstorm over my head*

Speaking of unreliable post, Royal Mail managed to lose my REGISTERED mail. Good lord. My mum paid 20 pounds to ship it all the way here and it never reached me.

I really appreciate SingPost's (Singapore Post) efficiency and cheap prices. I would often send parcels to the UK to my friend in London for the equivalent of 50p to 1 pound.

My mum tells me they've recently upped their prices, though.

Monday, November 17, 2014

Sleepless Nights

I've not been getting much sleep recently, due to my terrible habit of procrastinating, and an onset of a terrible cold.

I did my essay plan early, borrowing the necessary reference materials, marking out good examples in the books and wrote the introduction- but I just sat on it. There was no inspiration or motivation to continue, and I was dogged down by the pile of novels I had to finish reading. 


So what did I do about that?


Nothing.


I tend to run from responsibilities, adopting a strategy that would be best alluded to the ostrich. If I put it out of my sight, I can pretend it doesn't exist (and this continues until the tasks are literally up to my neck and I can't shirk it any longer)


Anyway- back to my sleepless troubles-


I stayed up till 5am the last two nights before the deadline, throwing out a huge chunk of my points because I felt they were irrelevant (and I had too many ideas), feverishly flipping through the reference books that had multicoloured post-its sticking out




That's just one book. Take that, multiplied by 4, and add other 18th Century novels I cross-referenced.

So as you can imagine, I felt very sorry for myself and consequently vowed to never shirk work and (more importantly) get more rest.

That didn't happen- as fate always likes to have it- because I woke up with the worst sore throat in months and that night, a blocked nose, itchy throat, and chills. I ran out of honey lemon tea, mints and I left my kettle in the kitchen.

Now, I know it sounds absolutely ridiculous (as it does to me as I am typing now) but at that moment I felt absolutely pathetic, weak and unloved.

All utterly ridiculous thoughts, to be sure, but you tend to wallow in your misery when you're not feeling well and hope someone says 'you poor darling'. You want that response. You want attention. You want someone to stay by you and fuss over the tiniest things.

When I started this blog post, I started it feeling very sorry for myself.

Let's write a long tale of woe, and maybe someone will feel sorry for me.

Two paragraphs into the post, I realised how stupid I looked but it's too late to stop now. I proceeded to plow through with the post, guzzling warm tea, sneezing repeatedly... but feeling a lot better about myself.

Sunday, November 2, 2014

Halloween

In retrospect, the best part of Halloween is dressing up- and becoming someone you would never be normally.

It's also a time for the shy ones to break out of their shell and wow us all in a very Taylor Swift-esque transformation from shy nerd to cool beauty (You Belong With Me, anyone?)

Or am I mixing that up with prom?
Hmmmm.

I went as Alice from Alice in Wonderland (can you spot me)



As you can tell, I'm not really one for the scary option XD

It was also a time of half-hearted costume options (I probably saw a million 'cats'), where people went as low-budget as possible or simply forgot about Halloween, or just couldn't be ars*d to spend time on a costume.

Some of my housemates eventually went to a Halloween-themed club event, while I bounced between the various house parties around the dorms- some of the Houses really put in a lot of effort in terms of decorating- with cobwebs, smoke machines, spiders and bloody handprints on the fridge (Security wasn't amused when they came 'round)- and some were magnificent zombies with guts spilling out of ripped shirts (all home-made) which made me quite ill.