from across the earth

Ok after a day of flying and sleep depravation (due more to the uber-coolness that is KrisWorld on SQ than due to problems with sleeping while flying), am now in a Houston airport area hotel (the town is called, believe it or not, Humble), using the free wireless - hope everyone's exams are coming along fine! Will talk more about my own abrogated exam period and flight when am less tired and don't have a 6:15am flight to New Orleans the next day to wake up in time for. Currently my eyes are as red as they were just after i finished writing thesis - heh talk about same condition, totally different cause =p

Losing a (sorta) family member and gaining (sorta) another

Firstly, on a sad note, my bike of just under four and a half years (whom i had belatedly christened Big Blue - yup real imaginative i am i know), got stolen, from, of all places at the carpark under my building where it was chained. The latest in a series of annoyances i have with apartment living. The fact that it was stolen the weekend following our friend MSK's escape has brought forth the possibility that he was the evil dude who broke not one, but two chains in order to steal her. But ah well, its but an irrelevant conspiracy theory... Anyways, BB served me well, and she was sorta due for retirement (i was from time to time considering rubbing her all over with lemon juice in the interests of de-rusting), but even then, this is still rather abrupt. My only hope is that she proves useful to whoever took her (and i don't mean in the scrap metal sense...)

Me being boliao and taking a picture of hands-less bike-riding

BB at Changi Coast Park watching planes land

I know i've been meaning to talk more about my new sibling (i'm talking about the sis) but have not really had the time to do so - oh well, actually, it's been more than three weeks already since i handed it in (hist dept deadline being the earliest in the whole of nus to my knowledge), so i've kinda forgotten a lot about what actually went on. All that comes to mind at the moment is zao-ing an exco meeting early (in my defense, it already was close to 11pm) in order to trundle back to pgp to finish the last bits before sending for printing, sleeping about two hours in between getting back and leaving again for the business library to do whatever was left before printing it (since it's 20% cheaper to print there), and then finally getting it done but then fouling up on the formatting of content page and page numbers, necessitating an emergency call to more computer-adept folk to bail me out, and then finally printing it at around 5pm, while realizing that in my stress and saa-ness, i had both forgotten to bathe that night and had mistakenly printed two extra copies (thus negating any $ that may have been saved via the 20% cheapre printing prices). Well, after a short metamorphosizing period at gohbros, this is the result:

Yup i know the acknowledgements page doesn't begin to express my gratitude to all who have seen me through this process (without sounding too self-indulgent), so i'll just say another (inadequate) thank you to anyone who has in any way helped to see me through this... You are most welcome to look for me if you are actually interested in reading about the construction of a contemporary Filipino American identity, although chances are, you aren't =p

And in the meantime, it's reading week - last one ever!

Mediacrap, or the Modern Narcissus

Anyone who regularly watches this space will know that i have a special annoyance for most stuff to do with mediacrap, and that any mention of them here is to remark upon something bad (cos well i don't see anything good to remark upon).

Well, methinks that this time they've really outdone themselves in the narcissism and self-congratulatory department, as seen in this cna article. Imagine that - they all getting so proud about MediaCorp News "[sweeping] the lion's share of the annual in-house awards given to journalists" (pardon the formal quoting btw, occupational hazard of just having finished thesis). Well - let me analyze that statement a tad - "in-house" = only MediaCorp stuff is eligible, or at the least is heavily favored to win; "given to journalists" = the news department would obviously have the upper hand - i mean, which other department has journalists anyway? I dunno who won the two awards that MediaCorp News didn't win, but that's besides the point - the fact that they didn't win everything shows how poor their quality is (imho). In other words, i can't think of a more flawed set-up for an awards presentation than this one.

Maybe on second thoughts, this whole awards thingy isn't so bad, in the sense that i guess hard work deserves to be recognized. My beef though, is that (again, imho) the kind of nonsense that they produce doesn't even begin to warrant them splashing out such a long article to bask in their own perceived (not by me though) achievements. Get their act together, then maybe i will cease from being so critical. But alas, that day appears to be far from a-coming...

side note: this just turned three!

second side note: updates on how thesis went etc will come soon...

i read this halfway, and knew it had to be a joke - oh if only...

Go heels!