How quiet the house is! Coming through the main door this afternoon after returning from a spot of Christmas shopping alone, it felt as though it was 3 in the morning rather than 3 in the afternoon. Although, to be fair, the house is probably more lively during the wee hours of the morning when Lance and Yew Vern start gaming (and I am asleep). Alan and Melissa are still in Morocco – I’m so jealous they get to see camels! Just about everyone is travelling this winter, I can’t help but feel slightly resentful of my research project which didn’t allow me to join them in Morocco.

If and when I get round my aforementioned problem of erratic swaying between wanting to be alone and wanting to be surrounded by company, I’ll probably check out some jazz clubs in town. Do some spring-cleaning. More shopping. Give my books a little more lovin’ – oh yes, that Margaret Atwood book has been lying around collecting dust for nearly 2 months now.

I hope it has everything to do with my research project workload and job applications that I’m not “feeling” Christmas so much this year. And that it isn’t the beginning of a lurking cynicism in me. While walking down a crowded High Street Kensington today, I caught myself silently grumbling in my heart that Christmas has become a curse (and I mean the commercialised version of Christmas that the mass media sells) more than a blessing, and we’ve all unwittingly become victims. Stressing over getting addresses of this relative and that to send cards to. Joining with the mad throng of last-minute shoppers stripping the Sainsbury’s shelves of every last turkey, chicken, duck and pork leg. Trying to do all your Christmas gift shopping in one day without tearing your hairs out or getting trampled on in stores, and rushing to the post office to get it all mailed off, only to be told that it will only reach in the new year… Everywhere it screams at you “Spend, spend, spend!”. I’m suddenly beginning to wonder why it never used to bother me! And it scares me. I remember telling Eng last year that Christmas never fails to make me feel like an eight-year-old all over again. This year it seems to only serve to rub in the fact that I am getting old!

That each time I eventually do my laundry, I forget my socks, which inadvertently collect in a small heap under my desk.

How I erratically sway between wanting to be alone and wanting to be surrounded by company.

The frequency with which I chip or break my fingernails.

How I can never find it in me to throw used plastic bags away. Just. Throw. Them. Away!

How my hands don’t do what my mind tells them to. And do what my mind tells them not to.

That I do well keeping a tab on my emotions, only to inevitably fall into relapse.

is what my 4 housemates and I are going to be the moment we get back to London at the end of this month.

To summarise feedback I got from a Foxton agent (I emailed about a dozen of them, only one came back to me – gee thanks!), no landlord is going to be willing to let 5 people live in a place meant for 3. And we can’t afford a 5-bedroom place. So basically we’re in trouble, trouble, trouble. Cheap places offered by agents who cater to the student-crowd would’ve been snapped up long before the start of summer. Leaving us to the mercy of all these hoity-toity established estate agents…

Good news is that I’ll be getting an increase in my cost of living allowances from JPA, thank God for that. I am often tempted to complain about how the much-needed raise wasn’t given much earlier as flippantly promised by the officers.. but if God so chose to give it to me only now, then surely it is as timely as can be.

Thank God also for friends who are kind enough to put us up at their place whilst we search for a place of our own. (=

Meanwhile do pray for my housemates and I, that we’ll be able to find a not-too-expensive place with a favourable arrangement (TWO showers no less! I will not tolerate sharing the facilities with three sloppy boys… haha) and location.

1. Pole Huggers. People who claim ‘pole position’ all to themselves, wrapping their arms and legs around the handrail (the vertical type) with no regard for other passengers who are struggling to maintain balance with nothing to hold on to for support.

2. Traffic Stoppers. In KL, the right lane on the escalator is the fast lane (Yes, it says so on the signboards next to the escalators!!). Or not – if you’re unfortunate enough to get stuck behind someone who’s either inconsiderate or ignorant.

3. Bouncers. In the case of getting on/off LRTs, instead of stopping you from getting in, they stop you from getting out. I don’t understand why! It’s simple reasoning, really – people have to get out first before more people can get in – the carriage doesn’t have an infinite volume!
__________________________

On a separate note, my Spanish Word of the Day email today tells me that the Spanish word for ‘mosquito’ is… ‘mosquito‘!

I’ve forgotten to bring my wallet to college on three out of four days so far this week. Monday, I borrowed one pound from Jin Rong to buy myself a pain au chocolat to assuage my misery, only for it to drop it on the floor and roll behind the vending machine out of my reach. Tuesday, as a result of reading my timetable wrongly and bringing in the wrong notes, I sat through all my lectures totally disoriented and at sea. Wednesday, I slammed the lid of the grand piano on my pinkie. And to top it all off, today I forgot my keys, and thus got locked out of my room for an hour or so. I’ve been such a klutz it’s not even funny.

Story of my life. Sigh!

Lipstick on my teeth
Perfume in my eyes

My hair out of place
My socks mismatched

Yesterday reverberates
Still in my head

Fuzzy wuzzy dizzy ditzy
Nippy in my skinny tee

I’m running late
Hot chocolate burns my tongue

But oh, it’s Monday morning
So tell me, now – what’s new?

5:55 am is the time I set my alarm clock to ring at every morning. Not because I actually want to get up at 5:55 but because it takes on average about 5 snoozes for me to actually get up. Each snooze lasts 9 minutes, so by the end of the fifth snooze it’s exactly 6:40 am. And I reluctantly (but a little less reluctant than I was 45 minutes ago) drag myself up out of bed.

And yes, Jenny, I SO agree with you that thinking of titles for blogposts can be quite tiresome.

yours groggily,
-may-

Perched on the toilet bowl early this morning with my eyes still semi-open, I made a dreadful discovery: I have five more weeks to go at GSK and not four weeks as I had initially calculated. Lesson learnt: Two months does not equal 8 weeks. )=

conned by her own self,
-may-

oh that i might drift off to sleep on my bed while getting a good back massage, and not have to bother setting my alarm clock to go to work the next morning

deskbound and dreading it,
-may-

Yesterday I sat for the last math paper of my entire life. Little did I know it would also turn out to be the worst math paper of my entire life. )= By the end of the paper, I knew my hopes for a first class in my second year were reduced to ashes, and that’s not me being pessimistic – it’s me being realistic. Maths carries the bulk of the examination marks – almost a quarter of the whole examination with five other papers. And I was banking on Maths to pull up my overall percentage so that I might just scrape by with a borderline first class overall. But no. )= If anything, at least the blow was softened by the fact that everyone else thought it was the killer too, (misery loves company? No lah… I’m not that selfish) meaning it wasn’t just me not performing up to standards, and that the paper WAS indeed a killer. Unless a miracle happens and they scale the marks soooo significantly that I somehow manage to get well above 60% for this math paper, I can kiss my hopes of a first-class goodbye…

In all this, I have but one consolation: I know I did my best, and I’m not regretting or blaming myself for not working hard enough. Because I did. I think I would have been less upset if it wasn’t because I was looking to Maths to help me redeem the first-class that I missed last year. But really, all I can do now is to continue working harder for the remaining papers, and pray for a miracle to happen.

Or maybe I shouldn’t place so much importance on getting a first class, some of you might be thinking. Not if you knew how I underperformed last year and how much I want to ‘redeem’ myself by getting that first class this year, not just for myself but to be really honest, for my parents too… although they aren’t really putting pressure on me in that way. And almost everyone (i.e. the Malaysians in my course) got a first class last year… Only last night did I find out that some people think anything below 65% is considered ‘bad for Malaysian standards‘. Harsh, but true.

And to think just last Sunday at church the international evangelist William ‘Gypsy’ Lee preached an entire sermon on miracles, and said something which hit home rightaway: “it is one thing to believe in miracles, and another thing altogether to expect miracles”.

Am I to expect a miracle? How? And why? Why do I even deserve a miracle? Deep in my heart I know I believe God is a miracle-maker, but dare I also say that I believe with all my heart that I have a share in all these miracles? Just like how you don’t expect extraordinarily bad things to happen to you – for example being zapped by lightning and dying on the spot – you also don’t expect extraordinarily good things to happen to you. Or maybe that’s just me…. Are miracles for me?