johansson is out. oh well. i guess he stands a greater chance at wimbledon. ganbatte!!


i went to school today to meet up with tkm. finally had a nice chat and lunch with him before he leaves for oxford by the end of this week. frankly speaking, i really dont know what i have done to deserve the confidence he has in me, but i can only be eternally grateful. it really helps when there is someone who believes in your abilities even though you dont really have much to show for yourself. the impact he has had on me for the past 4 years has really been immence. from tutor to lecturer to urops supervisor to honours thesis supervisor and now to my masters thesis supervisor. and at every step, when i faltered (and i faltered many a time), his confidence in me never seemed to wane. i guess this really is what i think i should strive to achieve in my comming days as an educator: to be someone who is a pillar of support for his students. to understand that failures of a student dont make him/her any less than another. and most importantly, to truly believe in the abilities and uniqueness of my students, whatever they may be. this i believe is perhaps is the most difficult and challenging thing in the life of an educator. so often, educators try to influence and change the way their students think and behave by altering likes and supressing dislikes. but every so often, when a student fails to react positively to the educator's plans, he/she loses hope in that student and the student becomes little more than a burden. one often has to come to decide whether to give up on that child or to press on. i say whatever the choice in this case, the outcome is just as bad.

i strongly admire individuality, and people who behave the way they want to, unfazed by the current trends, or by peer pressure (of course within the constraints of the law). and that is what i believe what an educator should strive to enforce rather than to impress his/her ideal upon his/her students. to be able to understand that every individual is different and should be given the same space to develop in the way that they want to. i mean, so what if my future students dislike math? is it necessary for me to rid them of such negative thoughts? in fact, is that dislike necessarily a bad thing? what i really hated most for a very long time is the way some people over-enthusiastically try to change your view on certain issues in life. in almost every case, the reasons are just. but i feel that every one of our preferences makes us more unique. it's almost as if each like or dislike forms a ridge on our thumb, all in all creating the thumbprint that really is truly ours. and as educators, we should strive to embrace such differences rather than to try and suppress them.

so what should a math teacher do when he/she has students who really dislike math? the way i would approach it would be to understand that some people take math because it is a stepping stone to their goals in life, like studying business or even engineering. rather than spending time trying to change their mindset towards math, i feel that it would be better time spent encouraging their like in their respective interest because in the end, an engineer who hates math isnt any lesser than an enginner who love math. so by drawing links in class to their respective interests or by dropping subtle hints that cetrain areas may be more important to certain individuals interested in say business, one would be able to create an enviroment where you could allow their interest to develop rather than to try and overhaul their preferences. maybe this sounds a bit hazy, but i like to think of it in something you would say/hint (subconsciously):

"hey i know you dont like math, and that is fine. i also know you would like to study business and you will need a small degree of math involved. for instance, this area of math has certain applications in business which you may want to take note of. and isnt it interesting that this area of business could be described using this set of mathematical tools? this is how you go about using them."

rather than saying:

"i realise you dont like math much. why is that? you know, math is very important in business, and in fact, in all of life. just look at how this can be used in describing this are of business. isnt it just amazing? you see math isnt so bad once you get the hang of it."

of course i'm not saying that this is the best way to educate an individual. if i did then it would be rather paradoxical wouldnt it? but i would just like, at some point in my life, to fully be able to appreciate and celebrate the choices that other poeple make and the preferences in their lives that truely make them a person. for i certainly do not need another 1000 people with the same likes and dislikes to converse with.

anyway it's time for roland garros viewing again! ciao!

{4:58 PM}

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thick sticky phlegm still there. very distracting. so a short post it will be.

some quotes from movies i chances upon:

my best friend's wedding:
George: "Maybe there won't be marriage, maybe there won't be sex, but by God, there will be dancing."

George: "I first met Julianne, (slight laugh) in a mental institution. She was there visiting some French chef she sent insane with a bad review, and I was there visiting Dionne Warwick---"
Kimmy's Mother: "Dionne Warwick?"
George: "Well, yes, he thought he was Dionne Warwick."
Scotty: "Who's Dionne Warwick?"
George: "Sacrilege darling!"
Kim's aunts: "She's Whitney Houston's aunt...she's very good on the psychic friends network."
Scotty: "Oh."
George: "Anyway, I was having one hell of a sing-song with Dionne--who's real name, by the way, is Jerry--and then suddenly, breezing through the doors of the electric shock therapy room, there she is, a vision, in pink."

dead poet's society:
Mr. Keating: "We're not laughing at you, we're laughing near you."

Mr. Keating: "We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, 'O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless--of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here - that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.' That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?"

Mr. Keating: "...you must strive to find your own voice, because the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are to find it at all."

well i guess these quotes dont make much sense or are not funny if you havent watched. but i assure you one or two of these were truely classic scenes. ha!

too lazy to continue. i shall not be lazy tmr and type something more constrcutive. good nite everyone!

{11:42 PM}

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i'm officially down with a cold now. had a feeling i was going to be ill sometime sunday night when my throat started hurting. but still went out to meet dennis and jason for dinner yeesterday. had a great evening chatting about stuff. but as time went by, i could feel myself burning up. by the time i was on the train back with dennis, i started getting shivers. and then i knew, that that night would not be an easy one.

it's amazing how the night of the onset of flu is probably the most irritating of all the other nights subsequently. first, you have to deal with the very very sore throat, which is easy to deal with strepsils (which i must say, has really improved it's quality over the years). then comes the shivers, which i dealt with a comforter plus a blanket. but then after a few hours, you realise that your trusty ol'comforter is really doing its job of trapping heat and with the amount of heat youre emitting because of the fever, your bed now seems like a furnace. so off with the comforter (no shivers now, i havent a clue why) and it's tossing and turning in bed to find the relatively cooler spots which you havent been sleeping on.

once you make it through this night, a throat full of phlegm and nose dripping with mucus awaits you in the morning, which i really feel is much more comfortable and easier to deal with than any of the abovementioned.

so yes, now i'm stuck in bed with a nose that when pinched, ejects mucus with almost water like consistancy. well, better watery than thick i say. well since i cannot go out, i shoudl be planning my 1 year from now, dream trip to iceland. ha!! which reminds me. i distinctly remember catching a cold when i was in zurich and geneva last december. but somehow, perhaps because of the cold (weather), it didnt seem as bad. the fever in fact was practically unnoticable. i love cold weather, in fact, i'd pretty much prefer living in frigid sub zero temperatures than having to bear with the at times intolerable heat of countries along the equator. so i can look at my future trips as being surveying trips trageted at perhaps locating nice places to perhaps work for a few years in the future. roon once joked that i should apply to work for ikea. which i should say here is pronounced by the swedes as ee-kay-ah, and not eye-key-ah which is how the americans do.

examination results are out this week, not that i really care because it aint gonna affect me one bit. in fact, the only interesting bit about getting results back is in getting to know how everyone ELSE did. HAHA!! and considering this is possibly one of the most if not THE most important semester for my fellow classmates, i've already set my spies in place to collect information. muahahahaha! well i'm pretty sure everything will happen according to what i predicted so i'm predicting (again) that it will be an anti-climatic afternoon.

oh well, good luck to whoever is reading this and whose results actually matter this semester. but for now, the call of nature beckons. ta! *cough cough*

{1:55 PM}

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ha... coincidentally, i'm at the 1st phase of the process now. throat's sore, head heavy... just feel a sense of impending doom...
haaiii... hope u're better!

By  Gerri, at 9:31 PM  

aiyoh take care ah... i'm in the thick sticky mucus and phlegm phase... stuck in my chest... hard to breathe man... luckily no wheezing yet... haha

u guys can take MC one rite? do u have to get it from someone else or can u write one urself? haha

By  20 sec interval... fire!!, at 11:07 PM  

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elliot's out as expected. johansson's out as expected. the frat boys were 1 single flag swap away from 1 million bucks in the amazing race but decided to go change the oman flag. funny how so many things culminate this week.

anyway, there's much to look forward to in the coming days. first and foremost, roland garros!! which is due in 2 weeks time. hopefully davenport will be playing again. it's been ages since i last watchd her play. followed by the aviva singapore open where hopefully i'll have a small volunteering part. then a short hiatus ending off with the world cup and wimbledon!

speaking of the french open, i still havent gotten down to mailing claire and congratulating her on her impending marriage. i guess i'm still not to confident in typing an email in french! haha guess what? i actually dreamt in french last night! how absolutely amazing is that?!?!? i've never even dreamt in chinese before! but it was a weird dream all in all. ah but what a nice house i had in france in my dream. now this is really what i would call a DREAM house!! ha!!

gerri's really stressed at work. and i can totally understand why. i'd probably would have already broken down! anyway if ur ever feeling terrible again, drop me a call. i got about 3 lame jokes to help relief some pressure.

oh yes! should be meeting my ocs pals (not lt and yq) for coffee on monday evening! been a really long time since i last had a good chat with them. looking forward to that as well.

will blog more when i get back from tomorrow's dinner with shulin francis jamie and possibly others. ciao!

{12:11 AM}

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thomas johansson's back on the courts. albeit still with a significant impairment. well at least rumours that he would miss roland garros and wimbledon are probably untrue!


oh yes! surprise surprise, elliot has made it to the final 3 in this season's AI. now that chris is gone, i can only hope taylor goes next so that elliot will probably win the finals! HAHA!


today, on impulse, i headed down to 7-11 again. and for the first time in quite a number of months, bought a pint of anti depressant elixir, haagen dazs strawberry ice cream. i'm not depressed though. just had an urge to reward myself for.. eh.. not doing anything wrong? haha!!

watched a documentary called "living with wolves" this afternoon. quitea nice show really. it kind of was an amalgam of a documentary and an autobiography of someone (i'm sorry i'm bad at remembering names). but what really struck me was how someone could, in effect, live in at times frigid and on occasion torrid temperatures with these wolves for more than half a decade! i'd love to do something like that! maybe it was the snow laced forests or the glisterning streams. it reminded me of sweden, and the life i dream of. oh well. there was a scene where the lady above described one of the omega wolves (the anti-thesis

of the alpha wolves, aka the submissive ones) placed his paw on her right shoulder and gazed into her eyes for what seemed like an eternity. sometimes i think that humans are too complex for their own good. such primal behaviours to me are really all that is really essential and what we really take for granted all the time.

last night, my sis decided to watch this movie called caché. as you can tell (ok, so not all of u can), it's a french movie. one fo those really arty farty movies. it was quite good but definately not for the sort that needs action or dialogue. however, even now, i still dont really catch the intrinsic meaning behind the show. i guess i'll need to watch it a few more times. there are shows where there is a plot and the audience doesnt really need to think much about progression through the movie. then there are those that try to leave some ends untied to arouse the viewer. some are successful but many simply leave too much dangling that it becomes anti-climatic and disappointing. caché

certainly left quite a bit up to your own perception of things but the ending was, for that split second, disapponting. but once one got over the fact that the credits were rolling, somehow it manages to invoke a desire in one to rewatch the entire movie again to reanalyse the show. oh there is a really shocking scene in the middle, not in the sense of "scream" or "final destination" kind of shocking. but it really happened so unexpectedly that it left the sour distasteful feel in my mouth like the time i watched "irreversible" (which i would like to watch again, but i doubt the dvd will ever be released uncensored here, for obvious reasons). but overall, it was a good watch.

the bottle of absolut apeach has finally been emptied. not it stands as a paper weight on my desk. there more i look at it now, the more i feel like having a drink. i'll just settle for my boisson de crysanthème. haha!

{11:39 PM}

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hmm china won both the thomas and uber cups again! as expected.

anyway here are a series of photos i recieved in a mail from qiang. i chose the best ones (imho).


it really doesnt get better than this right? i mean this is entirely chalk on pavement! i've never ever thought of chalk as being a very inspiring tool, even as a student who dabble in fine arts at the o levels. but wont you all agree is this beyond praise?


another similarly good piece. this time you can sort of tell it's chalk. but to achieve such depth and perspective? to really reinforce the sheer difficulty, here's the deal. try duplicating this on your flat roadside pavement with chalk!!





these 2 pictures show that really, as expected, these can only be appreciated from a set position. but even so, look at his foot! there is just no way i can convince myself that the pavement is totally flat!




these 2 are the best in my opinion. i guess i dont really have to say much. juast look and marvel!! i'd really love for one of my walls or floors to be done by someone of his calibre!

you know how in life, sometimes we just hope to be recognised for things that we do. like how well we ace our exams or how well we excel in our sports. and more often than not, when we dont get the praise or admiration we seek, we subconsciously try to maneouvre the other party into giving that which we seek? come on, i'm sure this is happened before. the disregarded straight A's report card or the disinterested look on your friends' faces when you show them the latest trophy youve just won. then something in you makes you say something like "the last match was against this formidable person and i could have lost but..." it's happened and probably with greater frequency in guys. but these pictures will always remind me, that if your work is really deserving of any praise at all, you really dont need to be "begging" for it.

going to try "the canteen" by les amis soon. hope it's good. got my $20 voucher and promised to treat lt and yq last year. to bad lapin is only available in their more expensive branch. dang!

{10:46 PM}

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there's a really bad stench permeating my room now. i have to find the source before i die of suffocation. it seems to be coming from ouside my room. it smells a bit like faeces (i like how faeces is very close in spelling to faces. cos some people deserve to have their's spelt that way! HAHA!). but i assure you, i did not defecate in my room.

ok now that air wick has temporarily masked the smell, i can continue. i was just thinking to myself that politics in any country, is quite a paradoxical ritual amongst humans. i mean you have grown men and women who fight (usually only with words) like kids. you have people who assure you of their integrity and then go on to lie cheat and steal behind your back. the list of contradictions goes on. i mean occasionally it's pretty interesting and shall i say amusing to watch it all unfold in front of you. but sometimes it gets a bit too ugly and loses its entertainment value. i'm a strong believer of the theory that you do not try to fix something unless it has already shown signs of failing. it's good to have change, provided the time is right as well. so i'll always be a fence hogger until my or my family's and friends' interests are at stake.

anyway, elliot was in the bottom 2 tonight. what can i say? the people i support always seem to drop out 4th. if he makes it past next week. it'll be a miracle.

haha amazing race down to 4 also. the team i supported was out long ago. so out of these 4. let's see if the next one will be out next, although i'm sure the enxt round is non-elmination again.

urrrgh speaking of which, korea has dropped out of both the thomas and uber cups. quite shocking that they did not even reach the semifinals! especially the korean girls. ah well. let's hope tomorrow will be a good day for me and my predicted finals will happen, much to jamie's displeasure fo course HAHA!! gonna volunteer for the singapore open later if RV wq confirms his availability soon.

anyway, my nearest goal is iceland for now. hope to go there next year. seeking fellow travel partners. but if all fails then i'll just be heading there myself. there are so many things to see in this world. i just cannot see myself living and working in singapore for the rest of my life. certainly i will be singaporean for good, i am probably one of the most nationalistic persons around (which explains alot of my preferences above HAHAHA!) but like doing anything for too long, it just becomes very mind numbing doesnt it? like mathematics. some people have their lives totally centred about mathematics. they eat drink and breath theorems. and personally i think it's not healthy. one becomes too myopic. they begin to see things from a very fixed perspective and find it difficult to grasp other opinions. also i think it's akin to eating food. can you imagine eating the exact same dish say in day out for the rest of your life? (yes gerri i cannot imagine myself doing that. frequent is ok but constant is errm not really feasible). so many cuisines so many styles to sample and u decide to stick to only one. sure maybe you'll get to experience all the different qualities of that food, but where's the fun in that? ok fine. if its fun for you, go ahead. there's more food elsewhere for me. HAHA!!

anyways, time to get some shut eye. thomas cup at 12 tomorrow. 12 seems like a real early time now. HAHA!! nitez!

{11:15 PM}

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great!! another enlightened one...
life's so much more interesting with variety. anyway, eating itself is a luxury for me these days. i have absolutely no TIME for it! aahhh!!

By  Gerri, at 8:54 PM  

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you know that you have had too much time to dabble in mathematics when you listen and love some of the songs sung by this acapella group called "The Klein Four Group". haha!

anyway here's a nice pic of them in a pose that only math people will comprehend.



still cant get it? it's the multiplication table for the Klein Four Group. Z2 x Z2 if you wanna break it down. still dun get it? never mind then.


thomas and uber cup on now. my 2 most disliked teams made it through today. oh well.

looking forward to the french open.

hmmm my thoughts are in a mess right now. i cant seem to string together any chain of sentences that would be of any coherent value. so i might as well stop here.

i hope all is well with everyone. especially those that i've not have the opportunity to speak to this week yet.

{8:25 PM}

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ive succumbed to the the omnipotent seductive powers of video games! haha! that explains my lack of presence online recently. it's been a while since i've indulged in such a persistant and intense gaming experience.

a few days ago, i just happened to be thinking about whining. you know how it is on days where u feel like everything that could possibly go wrong has gone wrong and that the gods (or God for the monotheists) seem to out to mock you that day. so at the end of one whole day of nonsense like that, and you meet your fried who goes "hey how are ya?" yo get this immense urge to start rattling of with whine after whine about the weather and the crowds and the public transport and the toilets et cetra. yeah, i had one of those days. but what was interesting when i thought about it, was why there was a need (or just simply the compulsion) to whine in the first place.

whining certainly doesnt change anything that has already happened, so why do we have this tendency to fill our dinners with stories about abyssmal luck or ill-fated events? i dont really know about others, but what i think urges me on is that i somehow feel slightly better when my friends agree that that was certainly the most unlucky experience ever. it assures me that there really wasnt anything i could have done and that it was purely bad luck.

other than that, i feel it provides good entertainment. who wants to have dinners with topics like how yesterday's surgical procedure went as planned or how quiet and lifelees school life now seems to be. we want the latest talk of the town, spicy scandals, and juicy gossips!!

anyway the grand slams have decided to bann adidas apparel from their competitions after finding out that the three stripes are a trademarked logo. and going by the rules that logos must only be a certain small size (a few inches by a fe inches i cant recall how much), adidas apparel do not meet this requirement. and now adidas has taken the first step in suing wimbledon. drama unfolds!

ok enough chatter for today, curry awaits me downstairs. ta!

{6:58 PM}

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