'sup

Random guy on my floor: "Yo man, whassup?"

Moi: *soft mumbles of acknowledgement*

The preceeding is basically an exchange that occurs repeatedly, day after day on my floor whenever i bump into one of the guys. Up till now, i have no idea what i'm supposed to say, or even if i'm supposed to say anything at all anytime one of the guys say hi. Is it a rhetorical question, a matter of mere courtesy when they ask me what's up, or do they really want me to respond by saying what's really up with me? Well, until i find out the answer to that question, they're just gonna have to settle with more soft mumbles of acknowledgement (with a smile on my face, of course) from me...

Gosh, there have been several things happening over the past few days, and as usual i shall try and recap the more noteworthy ones.

Just now at one of my recitations (a poli sci class) they were talking in passing about the coup in Thailand, then my neighbor (who in his defence added the disclaimer that he didn't mean to be ignorant) turned and asked me "hey, that's not where you're from, is it?" Well i guess better one speculating whether Singapore's in Thailand than one placing us as the capital of Malaysia, or that all-time favourite, somewhere in China

When i called home a few days back, one of the pieces of news that i received was that my father has in the end decided to abandon his initial plan of extending the COE of his twenty-year-old 1 litre Suzuki Supercarry by another ten years and instead get around to new car shopping, something that he hasn't really done in, well, twenty years... And i can't for the life of me figure out why, but apparently my occasional semi-joking comments that i'd not get a driving license if he did not decide to buy a new car instead played a part in the decision to get a new car after all. This is by far the closest my parents have come to pushing me to get a license, which in part explains why i have not bothered to get one up till now, which does irk me so, especially when i am in a land where i'd be hard-pressed to find any college student, even those half a decade younger than me, who does not drive. So anyways, yes i promise to finally get down to at least taking basic theory once i get back home.

My left fingertips are very sore now after being roped in to play for some IV thingy just now - just a small thingy, nothing big. I think i in part agreed cos i wanted to have an excuse to borrow a guitar and practice something before i forget everything, but the overall experience was a good one for me - am starting to get a better feel of how IV works - it's definitely very different from VCF, that's for sure. It was an acoustic guitar, hence my fingertips, which even now complain as i type this...

And while we're on the topic of IV, i'm most probably going for Urbana now - starting to get quite excited about the whole thing actually - but i guess i've to keep praying about it cos right now think i'm only set on going cos it's Urbana after all, and everyone's telling me that i should go, and it's in a part of the US i've never been to before.

Which brings me to travelling - am getting a bit of a headache planning when to go where and whether to go where else, cos the time's really tight and i do want to go to as many places as possible. Have to take into account so-and-so and this-and-that, it gets rather troublesome, and furthermore i shouldn't be thinking about travelling so much, at least not at the expense of work, after all i'm primarily here for school, and not to gallavant around the country.

Have more or less settled on a church i want to regularly attend for the rest of the time i'm here. As of and including this upcoming Sunday, i would have spent every Sunday in the US so far (and for the record, the magic number is eight) in a different church. Of course, half of those were because i was in different cities, but the rest consisted of all the churches in the Chapel Hill/Durham area that i was considering going to, as well as to which i could hitch a ride to as well. I won't name names of churches cos don't think that would be very nice, but suffice to say over the past two months or so i've seen a broad range of service styles including worship and messages. Some had worship that i greatly enjoyed and was blessed by, but then would have a message that to me was basically a string of anecdotes with a Bible verse thrown in here or there for good measure, while others had a solid, Biblically-centred message, but had worship that resembled a rock concert of some sort more than a time of focus upon God. At the last church i went to however, there was a balance that to me was good - so what's left now i guess is to find a permanent ride there week by week.

But this weekend i'll be out of town, cos am going for another IV event - the new student retreat at this place in the Outer Banks (part of the North Carolina coastline) called Emerald Isle (and it's not Ireland just in case you were wondering that). Should be a good time methinks - well it is on the beach yet again, though with some of the weather that we've been having here recently (today it hit a low of 47 degrees - that's around 8 degrees celcius) i wonder how enjoyable the beach might be, though i'm sure it'll be warmer there than here...

And talking about weekends, and coming back to the idea of travelling, i must say that i've never been more tempted in my university career so far to skip classes than i've been while i'm here (for the record, i've not skipped a single class in NUS so far), not because the classes are boring (which they definitely aren't) but because i want to travel over the weekend, which only begins to make sense in a country of this size if you take a long weekend or else by the time you reach your destination, you may have all of a day to spend there before you have to make the long and arduous journey back to Chapel Hill. This here isn't exactly the best of transportation hubs so getting to and from places is far more confusing and troublesome than it would be in S'pore - it takes like millions of hours (ok, more like six) to go to Charleston, SC; and even further to get to Atlanta, two places that i'd really like to go to especially in the light of my class on American urbanization (think my latest craze is American architecture, so i want to see all the nice old buildings - particularly in Charleston).

So anyway, basically there's a lot going on here now, and i can't keep up with it all... What's rest assured is that i'm having a great time, in spite of all the work and the hiccups that come my way here and there - i wouldn't go as far as to say i've got a beautiful feeling, everything's going my way, oh what a beautiful day (Oklahoma), that wouldn't be the case by a mile, but i'll take what i've been given ya...