Disclaimer: I hate that song.

September has this knack of being the most emotionally draining month of the year. I never really know how to feel when it comes around, considering it’s the birthday month, but, true to form, something always does happen over the course of these 30 days.

This year, especially, I received word that I was likely to be receiving a present on my birthday, a present which I did not want to receive, and especially not from the person who was going to be giving it. The suckiest part was that I found this little nugget of information out early in the month, and so had about 3 weeks to agonize over what I was going to do, in the event of it coming true, when my day finally arrived.

A couple of times, earlier in the month, I found myself wishing I could fall asleep and be woken back up when September was over. Now that all this is happening (and has happened), I can’t help but wish even more so that I could have done that.

Anyhoo. Wishful thinking is about as useful as pondering over what-could-have-been’s or what-I-should-have-done’s. At least September’s ending (in about 3 hours), and then October will be upon us. Which reminds me, I’ve yet to order all the birthday presents for my darlings who are very far away. For the first time in many years, the 25th of September was not spent with you, nor will you spend the 26th of October with me.

Breakups, getting together, exams, scandals, new faces in old places and old faces in new places, birthdays, anniversaries, and everything else. September’s just something I always look forward to and dread at the same time. At least I’m not wishing that I hadn’t let it go by so quickly, now that it’s packing up and getting ready to leave me behind in its wake. Soon it’ll be October, then school lets out in November, Christmas and everyone coming back in December, and 2006 - and my 21st year - will come a-knockin’ on my door.

But that’s extrapolating too much, as I am wont to do. For now, I’m in the mood for a quiet night and my AntiPopIndieReflex playlist on repeat while waiting for next month to round the corner.

Now Playing: Lovesong by The Cure

The moral being inside me is screaming, “dodge it,” but we all know that’s easier said than done. I should know, I keep finding myself here, standing over this well-worn batting plate, over and over and over again.

It’ll work out, baby - one way or the other.

You’ve just gotta hang on tight for now - it’s gonna be one hell of a ride.

Now Playing: Narc by Interpol

For someone who spent the greater part of her childhood (read: until secondary school) living in this strange balance where I could never wake up on time for school, yet was always bounding around the house at the crack of dawn the moment the holidays appeared, I find myself faced with a rather peculiar predicament: I keep on waking up before my alarm clock goes off!

I suppose it’s a good thing - now I won’t be late for class anymore (for as long as this lasts, of course), I’ve actually got time to laze around in bed, poke around my phone/laptop and read a little before having to hurtle through the shower and to the bus stop to get my sorry ass down to class. Just one little problem, though - I keep waking up with a shock.

Don’t you hate it when you suddenly bolt upright for no apparent reason, fumble for your time-telling device of choice thinking, “Oh fuck I’m late I’m late I’m late!” only to find that it’s actually 830am and your class is only at 10? I hate it. It sets me on this very high-strung edge for the rest of the day, and it never takes longer than a couple of hours before a headache sets in from the tension, and whaddayaknow! I’m having a sucky day. :(

I was looking through some old(er) things I’d written previously, and it never fails to amaze me how one can ascertain the birth, death, and everything in between of previous relationships based on how [insert name]-centric my writing tends to be. I shall put an end to that.

It also kind of annoys me that some of my favourite pieces are of past loves, and how I never seem to be able to write that way about anything else. Hence, I’ve arrived at the brilliant conclusion that what I am in need of is a muse. If I can procure for myself a neutral muse (i.e. one that’s not subject to breakups and the suchlike), I should be set for life! Then again it’s boring writing about one person with whom you are not.. enamoured with. Unless of course they’re as entertaining as one particular little friend of mine who does and says the strangest things.

There are a couple of things at this current moment which seem to be doing their darnedest to piss the hell out of me. Aside from my waking up with a shock syndrome, various objects of annoyance have been floating around in my head. In particular, regarding this fine specimen of a school that I’m currently studying in (and it’s vapid enrollees/administration), and a couple of other things that are insisting on confounding me to no end. “Why” seems to be the most frequently asked question in this current stage, with “What the fuck must you be thinking to…” coming in a close second. And yet I continue asking, although the only answer I ever get out of my dogged questioning, from my friends and myself alike, is “I don’t know.”

One friend commented, “At times like these, don’t you wish your head was detachable?” and I most certainly do. I can think of but one thing that I’d like right now, which would make me so much happier. Then again, with the whole slew of complications I tend to bring around with me wherever I go, I’m likely to fuck that up as well.

A lobotomy is in order.

I HATE IT WHEN I GET SO FUCKING WHINY.

Isn’t it interesting how music has so much power over our moods? Just a couple of days back, I was out with a friend of mine, and I’d started the day off pretty badly, arguing with my mom and the suchlike. Over lunch at Brewerkz, strains of Blame It On The Boogie-esque songs got me bopping, and I cheered right back up. (The beer had a small hand in that too, admittedly.)

Things were going steadily uphill, moodwise. After lunch, we managed to find a pair of yummilicious jeans for her in all of 5 minutes (okay the jeans weren’t yummy - they just had the cutest bright yellow buttons - but I think they made her look pretty damn fine), and finally collapsed at Starfucks to nua over a cup of coffee (I’ve never been much of a shopper, and apparently her stamina’s waning too). Within the span of the first 2 or 3 songs we were listening to on her iPod, the transient chirpiness had been lost to what would stretch into a good two hours of brooding. (Note: Anyone else facing a similar predicament, I recommend the orange flavoured lollipops sold at the counter - they make a pretty good, albeit temporary, distraction.)

I am firmly convinced that music is the blood of life. What pains me most is that this lyricism is often lost in the troughs of the recondite melodies of today’s synthetic music world, and it is this loss that we honour with a minute’s silence.

Now Playing: Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd

It’s definitely not a good idea to surf through sites like this when you’re already kinda hungry, and not going to get the Siam Reap House Salad you were looking forward to about 3 hours ago.

These are the times I’m glad I have a keyboard protector for my PowerBook. Excuse me while I go wash my drool off it.

To be brutally honest, I wouldn’t mind seeing this either. :) Though my list of women featured would probably look a little different. But let’s not go into the details. :p

At the risk of sounding like an overgrown child (which I’m often told I am), I hate nightmares. As a child, I was well-accustomed to that all too familiar feeling of waking up in cold sweat - either startled awake by a particularly painful scene my overimaginative mind conjured up, or slipping, excruciatingly slowly, back into consciousness from a horrifyingly real, yet devastatingly dreaded alternate universe.

It’s not a secret that I’m scared of the dark. In actual fact, the truth meanders somewhat closer to my morbid fear of the unknown. It’s not even like I’m some sort of control freak - most will attest to my being one of the most (and often far too excessively) laid back people they know, at least until it comes to something stupid like how my music is arranged in my computer, in which case I get disturbingly anal. But while I don’t actually need to be in control of whatever situation I’m going through, I do like to at least be aware of what’s going on. Hence my vapid dislike for surprise parties, being kept waiting and the suchlike.

I once had a conversation with a friend discussing what exactly dreams were. She said it always bugged her how sometimes they could be premonitions of sorts, foretelling likely outcomes - usually the worst case scenarios - of situations you were just getting yourself into; at times, they taunted you with how you often wished you were; at others completely ridiculous figments of your imagination that you knew couldn’t possibly materialize; and at others yet a vividly drawn out recap of significant events that managed to weasel their way into your subconscious, amalgating into a long drawn episode that wears you down and breaks you till you have no energy left to fall back asleep. Back then, I flippantly told her, “Why bother stressing yourself out over dreams when you’ll never even be able to tell (for sure) which category they fall into? They could be your hopes, your fears, or some ludicrous notion that your restless mind cooked up, and you’d never be able to differentiate them from the premonitions until the event actually took place.”

I wish I could so confidently buy back into that ideology now. From the past couple of weeks’ worth of my overactive subconscious, it seems like my childhood nighttime demons are back to haunt me, and in a big way. I know I’ve said that I wasn’t ready for a relationship now, but it’s at times like these when I really miss having someone I could awaken right next to me, just so I wouldn’t have to fall back asleep alone, without your arms to make me feel safe.

Now to attempt to fall back asleep.

Now Playing: Lonely Loney by Feist

I recently had to do a recording of my friends speaking informally for a sociolinguistics project. When I typed out the transcript and showed it to my group members, they didn’t believe that the conversation actually transpired as I related it to them. I have this feeling in my gut that it’s got something to do with how one of the participants is a particularly strange friend of mine, who finds it perfectly normal to say statements like the following:

I don’t get turned on by tigers. I just find them sexy. And if i had to choose between at 80 year old man and a tiger, i’d choose the tiger!

She also has a big problem with remembering nursery rhymes and which animated motion pictures certain Disney songs are from. (Actually, she just doesn’t know anything about Disney movies.) As far as she’s concerned, Kiss The Girl doesn’t exist in The Little Mermaid, the 7 dwarves’s song (the one that goes, “hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go”) didn’t come from Snow White - but she can’t remember where it’s from, When You Wish Upon A Star came from Sleeping Beauty, there were no horses in Cinderella, and Mowgli (from The Jungle Book) was actually a monkey who turned into a human being after getting chased by a lion.

(We later found out that she’s never watched any of the abovementioned films - she got her songs from a McDonald’s Disney Favourites CD.)

As if that’s not enough, she was trying to remember where the Fee Fi Fo Fum rhyme came from, decided it was the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood who said it, then changed her mind and said it was, “the wolf from the three blind mi… No wait. It wasn’t the Three Blind Mice. It was.. wait. What was it? The spiders? The rats? The.. I KNOW I KNOW! It was the pigs! How many were there ah? 5 is it?”

With friends like these a friend like this, you really don’t need TV or any other source of entertainment.

It’s official. I’ve given up quitting. Getting screamed at by one’s mother for reasons which I’m still unclear about and seeing my plan backfire are among the factors that chewed away at my willpower - which, incidentally, was already only hanging on by a thread.

And no, Poppy dear, my reason for quitting wasn’t because I was running out of money. ;p

Anyhoo, thanks to all of you for your words of encouragement and what not. Stay tuned - I just might attempt it again. ;p Perhaps over the holidays, when I’m at home and can’t really smoke much anyway.

LUCKY STRIKES HERE I COME!!!!!!

Now Playing: More Today Than Yesterday by Spiral Starecase

Spotted in lecture today, a baby computerlet! Add that to the list of strange things I’ve seen.

Somebody please get me out of NUS.

Now Playing: Get Me Outta Here by Jet

A friend of mine mentioned, on a particularly ranty day, that she loathes people who don’t remove price tags from the bottoms of their shoes. Yes, we know that it’s at the bottom of your shoe, but when you walk, you kick up your heels and it’s just plain unsightly! (I’m in full agreement with her on this one.)

On the way to class this morning, she revealed to me that this same person who inspired her price-tags-on-shoes rant - one of her tutors - traumatised her beyond repair yesterday morning. At 10am (an ungodly hour for anyone to be awake, as far as I’m concerned), she walked into the tutorial room, already drained from a test that she took at 8am, she found herself greeted with her tutor - an associate professor - clad in a sleeveless top, and a full bush poking out from either armpit.

GOOD GOD, WOMAN! REMOVE THY ARMPIT HAIR!

You’d think that in this day and age, no self-respecting grown woman would walk around - in a sleeveless top, at least - with all that undergrowth for all the world to see.

Geez. I guess some people really don’t believe in removing anything at all.

Edit: Someone once told me that 60% of patients admitted to mental institutes are teachers. With the amount of strange things that I see and hear, I’m quite willing to make a bet that the other 40% consists of students, students, and more students. :|