the world of warcraft server seemed to hang on me while i was playing, so i just quit and have decided to turn in a good one hour earlier than i usually do. slept at what, 4.30am yesterday? madness lah. i need to retune my body clock back to normal hours or else the wrinkles around my eyes will never go away.

the parents are both trying to get me to stop bumming around this hols and take up an internship or something. prolly gonna be trying for sph cos dad emailed his friend who works there and i was told to submit my cv and then sit for a written test thereafter. or something like that. Chelsa said that En's supremely stressed out interning there. i do hope i don't die prematurely if i do manage to nab that internship. am not looking forward to spending my hols tearing my hair out over article datelines, actually. AND. i do hope i get paid slightly more than 3 dollars an hour. Carine said that the last time she interned there, that was what she got. 3 dollars an hour is child labour, period. it's what McDonald's pay their part-timers. which is why i haven't ever tried to work at Macs over the hols, incidentally. no way Jose.

i think i'm worth more than 3 bucks an hour. even the last brainless job i did at the Eunos place paid me 6.50 an hour, and that was after the agency deducted their fees. if they hadn't, my pay would have been 8.50 an hour. not too bad for such a brainless, mind-numbing admin job. it's not that i'm condescendingly pronouncing admin jobs as brainless or anything - i'm just stating a fact. my brain felt like it was turning into mush the 3 months i was there. no challenges at all; i had to challenge myself to type faster and faster and file faster and faster, just to keep myself awake and on my two feet.

what else have i been doing this hols? oh, i've been taking Housework 1101, it seems. i've been learning the art of Housewifeship - washing endless rounds of laundry, mopping my room floor everytime the dust from the shelves fly out and make me sneeze until i want to die, folding clothes, cleaning out my room, cooking lunch for myself every single day i'm home, making my bed and keeping my room clean, washing the dishes and scrubbing pots and frying pans - i hate it all but i figure i ought to do them without complaining. it's not fair for other people to have to clean up my mess, i just realised. nor is it fair to expect my parents to do the laundry at night when they've come back from work tired out like anything.

maybe i'm learning how to be a better daughter through this all.

i guess the past few months have jolted me out of my little fluffy fairytale world where people wait on me hand and feet. i'm not better than anyone, i don't deserve more attention or more pampering just because i like it, i'm not so supremely enchanting that people can't bear to be away from me for more than a minute. i'm just me, not irresistible, not a princess - just me. i shouldn't expect people to be enchanted by my fabulous self all the time and feel crushed when that fails to transpire and the reverse happens instead. the actual fall back to reality is always so much more painful than peering through the clouds and thinking that reality hurts but hoho i'm happy up here where i am.

no more confusion, no more whining! :)

and seriously, i should like to give myself a slap or two if i could slap the me of a few months back. what was i doing, wallowing in pity and messing up my own life like that? things that made zero sense to me then make complete sense to me now, and rah i can't believe i was so hardheaded and difficult to shut up. i think we only truly understand someone else's perspective if we're made to go through a situation that forces us to see through that particular pair of glasses and experience for ourselves the entire thought-process and rationalization-process as we muddle our way out.

it's like how head knowledge about God becomes heart knowledge.

we can describe God, as we've learnt about him, in so many ways. we can describe his goodness, again, as we've learnt of it, in so many different instances in the bible. but there's that - all we've described is what we've learnt about God by other sources, there's no first-hand experience in all we've said. therein lies the crux of it all, the first hand experience is crucial in really understanding God and being convicted of his presence. without that first-hand experience, God becomes a faraway entity we worship because he's supposed to be good and all that, not because we truly know why and because we know he's great and worthy of all praise.

similarly, i realise that understanding things from someone else's point of view, understanding the reasons for the person doing or saying certain things - if you've never experienced a situation where you are in a position similar to the person, you're very unlikely to be able to truly and fully grasp where he or she is coming from. oh sure, i can parrot his explanation back to him if he asks me if i understand where he's coming from and why he's doing certain things or thinks a certain way - anyone with a decent memory and half a brain can parrot. but it stops there. i don't understand why, i just reiterate what he says and take it as fact-truth until i can make it my truth. the first-hand experience where i'm made to think and feel like the person is what changes my mindset entirely; thereafter i'm totally able to see why he said and did things that i raged against and spat fury and sulphur and brimstone at out of sheer frustration at my inability to understand why he was doing such un-understandable, stupid, hurtful things.

after every episode where we make mistakes and we look back, we always tend to say: "i'm never gonna make the same mistake again."

i guess with the past, nasty experience behind us and under our belts, we expect ourselves to rid ourselves of the very same character traits that gave birth to our mistakes in the first place. after all, if i attack someone out of anger cos my temper just flew off the handle, it's because i'm supremely hot-tempered at that trait is probably so deeply ingrained in me or i wouldn't allow myself to lose my temper cos i know i'll lose it all. and blahblahblah. round-table argument.

so i won't make lofty proclamations that i'm never gonna make the same mistakes again. never is such a bloody long time and it's so final. i know i'm gonna make the same mistakes over and over again, precisely cos i know very well who i am and what are the traits in me that give rise to certain actions. like my inability to exist peacefully in a middleground that i don't like - i like extremes, even if it's a nasty one. my impulsiveness, my sheer stubbornness - all these traits i'm very well-aware of now. but i can try to temper them, i can ask God to send his sweet spirit down and make me a more gentle girl than i was made, i can do all these to try to avert myself from making the same silly mistakes over and over again.

i try and i try.

my mother keeps telling me i'm not demure, sweet, gentle etcetc enough. i used to roll my eyes in total annoyance whenever she started on that, cos i knew she was on her "oh you're never gonna get married like that, boo-hoo, poor me - i'm never gonna be a grandma" rant. i know what she means now, though. it's not a purely feminine endeavour to make oneself more gentle, as i once thought. make the fire more gentle, temper the fieriness a little to make it manageable - that's what i think gentle is now.

i think why i do more housework now is also to make me a better person. doing things you don't like always ends up changing you somewhat, cos it's a constant struggle. the more you hate it and the more you tell yourself to keep at it even though you would rather climb Mount Everest than keep doing things like that - the more it knocks you into shape and moulds you as a person. knocks some sense into you also, i think, as it has into me.

plus, my mother seems to have stopped her "you're never gonna get married the way you are" thing ever since i started being more house-friendly.


i'm hungry. i'm gonna miss suppers next sem cos the parents will never let me out to Geylang to eat those suppers during term time. my mother thinks girls who stay out till late are loose (ah pal, that's where i heard the "loose" reference! - girls who stay out late are loose, bah.) and my dad thinks that girls who stay out late are likely to get knocked over the head by a spade and raped and left by the drain to cry their eyes out or die. those optimistic views my parents hold don't bode well for my future attempts to try to wrangle one or two late night suppers at delicious food places. gastric! i shall sleep now and hopefully my stomach will get the hint and stop churning and trying to digest itself from inside out.