Guh. I should start learning how to identify commercial airplanes from afar, apart from just knowing if they're twin-engines or not.
I had been wanting to go to Changi Beach ever since I read about the NE-SW monsoon winds changing direction last month or so. From October/November to March it's the North-East monsoon wind, which means that planes landing at Changi Airport will be coming in from the South. It's not as fun watching planes take off compared to watching incoming planes with their powerful lights illuminating the water's surface at night.
Got the chance to do so today, although sadly not at night - but it's better than nothing! Brought along the binos, as usual, though my dad wants new ones with bigger lenses. Didn't see the massive A380s though, most of the planes were smaller Boeing planes. Saw SIA, Garuda Indonesia, SilkAir, Lufthansa, AirAsia, Lion Air, JetStar, KLM Royal Dutch and MAS. There was also what my dad called a training jet (my brother thought it was a Lear jet - maybe it is).
The trip wasn't limited to planespotting, though. Passing by was a cable-laying ship called the Subaru, belonging to NTT World Engineering Marine Corporation (NTT WE Marine). I don't think it was laying any cables then, though; it was moving too fast and no crew was seen doing such work. There was also what looked like a tanker, called the Arctic Breeze - port of registry: Valletta, Malta. The Subaru was registered at Tokyo. It was so cool seeing ships pass by that had been to places far away from Singapore!
Aw, if I could go to Changi Beach more often I'd love it. LOL, but after watching Red Eye on TV just now I got second thoughts being on a plane. The plane looked awfully claustrophobic and cramped.
Speaking of Red Eye, the movie was a great thriller. I spoilered myself by reading Wikipedia's summary beforehand (as usual), but knowing what would happen in the story still didn't stop me from feeling that rush of fear and excitement. Cillian Murphy was perfect as the villain Jackson Rippner (yeah sounds like Jack the Ripper - oddly enough I had that revelation in the bathroom). At the beginning of the movie he appeared to be a rather nice guy, but there was this creepy feel about him because of his eyes (they're seriously blue) and how he knows a lot about Lisa without letting on too much. The movie gets better once he finally reveals his true intentions on the flight and what he does to Lisa to make her do what he wants.
This is the second time in a week I wished I didn't wake up from my dreams. It's rather fuzzy now but in the morning I had hurriedly scribbled down whatever remnants of the dream I remembered.
Iraq? No, a refugee camp. Lined up for meagre food and drink, ladled from huge tubs.
I think I got here because I saw a poster advertising the refugee camp. =/ It had some paragraphs on the right half of the poster and a picture of a running guy that looked oddly like Osama on the left half. When I queued up for food there was another RGS girl in line in front of me. I do not know how an ad for a refugee camp got me to go there.
Had my phone with me. I could pick from a list of songs to play (there was a band named Diggilee?!) and from the band picked I could go to their 'place of origin'.
I bet all of the songs had Scandinavian origins. One of the bands sounded like a rock/metal band, and Diggilee reminds me of a Swedish ESC entry called 'Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley', as well as Diggiloo Thrush, the website containing lyrics for ESC songs. The band Diggilee looked like it belonged in the 80s. The band members were in pink and had those puffy Hairspray-like hairstyles.
They looked Scandinavian, but I ended up at a research station in ANTARCTICA. I was wearing my pajamas in Antarctica! I remember looking out to sea, the foamy waves crashing down on the beach, and thinking it would've been the worst winds in the Adriatic Sea. A huge freight ship passed by, dark silhouettes of cranes at the ports in the foreground and background.
Even though my brain told me it was Antarctica, I think I was actually in Iceland. Also, the Adriatic Sea really exists! I wonder where my brain heard THAT, thought it was just a random nice-sounding name it thought up. Even though the Adriatic Sea's a little off for Iceland and really far off the mark for Antarctica, if you applied Antarctic-force winds to the Adriatic it would still be the worst winds it would ever have experienced.
Contemplated sitting down and singing Emilie Simon's songs from La marche de l'empereur, but I was afraid cameras at the station would see me and hear me. I couldn't go out in the snowy wind, either.
Antarctica = March of the Penguins = Emilie Simon
Checked my phone, played around with it. It allowed me to view what was going on in the area through various cameras, like webcams. It showed me bright, grainy video feeds of the entrance to the shipyards/docks, the station itself...but when it showed me the research station it wasn't snowing in the video. Women, men and children interacted happily in the scene, walking around, talking. I got confused. Was this camera in real-time or was I seeing a recording of the past that happened here? I began to feel sad. I yearned to go where they were, I wanted to stay with them, and there was the realisation that if they were in the past I would never see them again. At all. Those lovely people at the lovely station only lived in the video on my phone. I didn't want to look away, didn't want to turn it off.
Must've stemmed from my interest in international webcams. There's a novelty in viewing everyday life in other countries, especially since I have no means to go there. The people at the station in the webcam dressed as if they were in the 1940s. I don't know why I felt sad, but perhaps it was because it was such a stark contrast to the cold, white and sterile environment of the station now. Completely empty, devoid of people. I just wanted to stay with them, to stay with this large group of people where I wouldn't be lonely. Also, in my heart, I think I felt as if I was actually in another country, like Iceland, that I've always dreamed of going to but will never have the chance to for a very long time. It's the novelty of watching everyday life in other countries, imagining the time when I will be there in person to experience it for myself. If what I was watching was in the past...
My dad came to sit beside me, playing a rather dumb-looking game: a pixelated crossover between Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park. I remember Indy hopping over cactuses and avoiding foes, only to die hitting a platform while riding on the back of a flying pterodactyl.
I KNOW, RIGHT?
Then my dad asked me stuff. I can't remember what, but I do remember having a paper in my hand. I think he asked me stuff to do with the refugee camp? A commentary also appeared on the paper, trying to explain my dad's character's death. Well actually, the gist of the sentence that appeared was that Harry (as in Harry Potter) was being choked by Lord Voldemort, and Ron somehow interpreted his choking noises to mean "Go get some Galleons and buy the newspaper".
IRL, it was my mum shouting for my brother to wake up and go buy the newspaper. I do not know where this crack came from.
At the end my mum wanted me to study, so she was following me all over the place (the environment changed to that of my living room). To delay studying I tore up some corrugated plastic boards, the kind you use for projects, and then spent time poring over them to see which ones I could use to study (they still had projects on them when I tore them). Then my mum said I was actually a good girl, and I could do anything I wanted if I tried...
...and then I woke up to my mum scolding me and complaining about me not studying. That was when I wished I didn't wake up and was still back in my dream with my mum's kind tones.
That's it. I am totally going to go geohashing. Once I find a geohash that actually lands SOMEWHERE in Singapore and not Malaysia, because we have the misfortune of being too small to have a graticule all to ourselves. Have you seen the Singapore graticule before? We don't even make up A THIRD of it! I'd say Singapore takes up a mere twelfth of the graticule, as a best estimate. The other eleven-twelfths are shared between Malaysia and open water. =/ I am not going to drag my mum out to Malaysia with a printed satellite map in hand just to find a GPS coordinate, she'll think I have absolutely nothing to do with my time.
On the bright side, once I'm old and brave enough to cross the border on my own, most of my geohashes will have a Border Crossing Achievement. >_>;;
Out of curiosity I decided to key in my family members' birthdays and see where the geohashes lie. My dad's one is pretty cool, it's located somewhere near Changi Airport Terminal 3 and Changi Air Base. Pretty significant because he's into fighter jets and stuff, plays flight simulators all the time. In fact his birthday geohash is the only one that's located in Singapore, the rest are either out in open waters or on Malaysian soil.
I checked Jane's, Denise's and Jazlyn's birthdays too. None in Singapore. Although I think if I used the neighbouring graticule one of them might land somewhere in Changi Air Base. (LOL Restricted Area! Offtopic: I LOVE THE MESSAGES THEY LEAVE JUST OUTSIDE THE BASE'S ENTRANCE. It's pretty normal to others but to me it's just quirky! Like: "Please check your computers for viruses" and "Please do not do government work on personal computers", etc. NOT WORD FOR WORD, I can't remember what exactly they said but it's hilarious to me.)
...Got to get a math genius to tell me the odds of a geohash landing on Singaporean soil. SOIL AND NOT TERRITORIAL WATERS.
I think I'd rather get a GPS (the cheapest Garmin one is $189) and a digital camera at the end of the year. So I can go both geohashing and geocaching! Until then, I'll just have to rely on Google Maps printouts and good eyesight - can't really use a compass for peanuts, luckily I wasn't involved in orienteering two years ago! Luckily Singapore's mostly urban so the likelihood of a geohash being in urban areas is pretty high...IF ANY EVEN LAND IN SINGAPORE LOL.
I'll miss Starhub's June Holidays Preview. If I ever get cable TV, I'm definitely going to include the National Geographic Channel and the Discovery Channel in the program lineup, if you can pick what channels you want.
Also, my parents left for Kelantan on Saturday afternoon. They'll only be back on Thursday morning, and today's only Monday night so I've got about two-and-a-half more days without them.
I miss them already. It felt great not having parents around to nag you, in the first 24 hours, but...
I wish I could watch Nat Geo and stuff, I think that'll take my mind off the loneliness a little, but the preview channel's over, so. I'm thinking, the next best thing is to watch a couple of working, live webcams of places in other countries, but unfortunately most of the webcams don't update as frequently as I'd like them to. Better than nothing, anyway. =/
WHAT THE FISH. THEY SHOWED IT. THEY SHOWED IT! AT THE SINGAPORE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL!
Flame and Citron! When I thought I'd never ever be given the chance to watch it at all! They actually showed it at the film festival!
Keyword being "showed", because the festival was from 14 April to 25 April. I missed it by nearly a good two months. Though even if I had known about the screening then, I wouldn't be able to watch the film anyway - it was given a rating of M18. But it actually came here to Singapore! AUGH. If I had been 18!
I wonder why the Singapore International Film Festival has ratings for its films, while the Seattle International Film Festival doesn't. You can watch anything you want there, I should think. I mean, I don't see any sign that they have age ratings for the films, perhaps advisories for certain themes, but no age restrictions. Kinda sucks. =/
ARGH. I must pay more attention to Singapore's own film/art festivals and the like, I might find interesting surprises in them.
Just finished reading The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. The ending was rather unexpected - DAMN YOU MORIARTY - and I felt compelled to hug the book tightly at the end, as if I was physically reassuring Holmes myself. Except that he wouldn't allow anyone to do that to him, though, especially not a woman, I should think. Perhaps a man. *coughWatsoncough*
The book proved to be quite a painful read - it's hard to read of his behaviour under the terrible influence of cocaine when all along, all I've read of him is that of a brilliant, questioning mind that's able to figure out the most obscure of cases from so little and observes minute details no one else sees. Actually, he still retains some of his faculties while influenced by cocaine, as seen in his meticulous tracking of Professor Moriarty, just that he's delusional.
So now that The Seven-Per-Cent Solution's done, I can get cracking on The Talented Mr. Ripley. I still haven't finished reading Angels and Demons, though. =/ I've put it off for quite some time now! Speaking of unfinished books, I have yet to re-borrow and finish reading The Worst Journey in the World. The problem with non-fiction books written in the style of the early 1900s is that the language is pretty heavy. Takes some time to process, so I end up taking twice as long to read such a book as compared to modern-era books. Took me over two months to finish reading Nansen's Farthest North which was 500 pages long, what more the 600-page-long The Worst Journey in the World. I have to reread paragraphs in the Sherlock Holmes stories, too.
Perhaps the further back in time the literature was written, the longer it takes for me to process it. >_>;; I should try reading medieval texts. It'll probably take me years to comprehend, if I do at all!
I have joined the legion of Twits Tweeters! I have my own Twitter account which I update rather regularly, I reckon. Nothing quite interesting, just little snippets of what happens in my day or interests me. Which is what Twitter's supposed to be about anyway. I think you can find me on Twitter, if you want.
Went to my dad's cousin's wedding yesterday in JB. Checkpoint jam was a fucking killer. I stood at the front of the bus throughout the whole journey, listening to my mum's voice (it's recognisable ANYWHERE) chatting away merrily at the back. I thought I'd go crazy in the bus (if that kid in the bus in front of us dares to make a face I'LL FLIP HIM THE FUCKING BIRD), but I kept myself from losing my sanity by reciting the entire snippets of dialogue from Team Fortress 2's Meet The Team videos.
Perhaps I did go crazy in the bus after all.
On the way back to Singapore at the SI CIQ Complex the immigration officer initiated some casual talk. It went something like this:
"Cik Munirah dari mana?" (Where are you from?) "Uh...Singapura." (Actually he probably meant where I went that day.) "Tadi pergi mana?" (Where did you go just now?) "Kampung Melayu." "Kenduri ke kahwin?" (For a feast or a wedding?) "Uh, kahwin." "Siapa yang kahwin?" (Who was getting married?) "Bapa saudara."
If you know Malay you might know where I went wrong. Earlier I said that I went for my dad's cousin's wedding, right? I suck at spontaneous conversation so when the officer asked me that question my brain literally translated "dad's cousin" word for word...
...when in fact I should've said "saudara bapa" (Malay's a little switched around). By saying "bapa saudara" I actually told him that my uncle was getting married - it was my aunt, actually, since she's related to my dad then she should be my aunt, no? So her husband would be my uncle anyway. Doesn't matter, but on retrospect that shows how bad my Malay is when I'm caught off-guard.
Fuck, I still fear the dark. And other creepy, unexplained phenomena that could probably be easily explained yet I'm still scared of it anyway.
The last time it gave me a warning at least - it flickered once, leaving me wondering whether I had a tic in my right eye. I didn't wonder for long. I heard a 'pink' and my surroundings suddenly got much dimmer. I turned around, saw the light was dead, and immediately dove onto the floor to hide behind the couch near my two sleeping sisters. I trembled in shock until I finally gathered the courage to go back, exit all programs on my computer and shut it down before diving back to the same spot where I curled up and tried to sleep.
The next day the light was fine. I wondered if my mum changed the lightbulb after seeing it dead when she woke up (I left the lights on, not daring to switch them off).
Today I was using my brother's laptop in the living room, all alone again. I was watching a movie when I heard the familiar 'pink' sound and realised that my surroundings dimmed in exactly the same fashion as before. I stopped for a moment, shut the laptop, and waited for a bit before attempting to sleep, hoping whatever creepy thing that might potentially appear would go away. Realising it was futile I immediately put the laptop aside, threw the blanket off me, jumped off the couch, tried to run, slipped on the carpet, and after regaining my balance ran to hide in my brother's room. I stayed in there for one hour trying to convince him to go out to the living room with me to retrieve his laptop, all the while trying to ignore the funny 'pink' sounds coming from outside the door.
It was like a Schrödinger's Cat situation: either there's nothing out there, or there's something out there waiting for me. I wouldn't know at all which one it was, since it was dark outside and the door between me and the Other Side was closed.
After a while I heard the sound of a door opening. I braced myself, waiting for my brother's own door to open (it would either reveal my mum, one of my sisters, or an unknown thing). It did, and in popped my second sister, her face still showing vestiges of sleep. I sprang up, asking her if she was going outside, to which she replied in the affirmative, much to my relief and delight. I ran outside, gathered the laptop and all other necessary things, and quickly went back into the room where I am typing out this post now.
Well, more of a cross between a puffin and an albatross, it had a pretty long wingspan.
The teacher saw my work and was flabbergasted. How would it move around? The puffin responded by folding its wings in and rolled around. Oh god. How cute. I picked it up and hugged it.
I think I was having a lesson on evolutionary genetics, and each of us had to create an animal by crossing it with another species. In my dream I had no idea what species of bird it was that I was holding, other than the fact that it had albatross wings. Only after I woke up did I realise the bird looked very familiar to me, something I had seen very often the night before. Then I remembered what I was looking at last night: fanart of the Nordic Five on Pixiv.
Which included Iceland and his cute little puffin.
-----------
Went bowling today. I conclude that my brother tires after three games, while I am still improving by the fourth game.
The scores remind me of a ln x graph, if you plot it. Somewhat.
Game 1: 49; Game 2: 66; Game 3: 88; Game 4: 94
Still crappy compared to most people, I reckon, but at least I'm dropping an average of 7 - 8 pins per turn.
Great. It's going to fucking rain and I'm the only one stuck outside in the living room while everyone else gets to sleep with the comforts of air-conditioning. At least my brother has kindly lent me his laptop for the night. I'm rewatching K-19 at the moment since I missed the first part of the movie when it was on the telly.
The submarine is seriously damn suay.
Also, I've got a third of the Angels & Demons book left to finish. I wish Commander Olivetti and Maximilian Kohler didn't have to die. =/ Watching the movie first was perhaps a bad thing, I expected Olivetti's fate to be exactly the same as Commander Richter's in the movie. I mean, they both died, but it felt more dignified to die being shot by the Swiss Guard rather than having your neck twisted. Okay, so the Swiss Guard thought Richter was the mastermind behind the antimatter threat, but it's somewhat better than being left behind, broken, like trash at the back of the church.
Instead of Olivetti being shot by the Swiss Guard, it's Kohler. Who I totally didn't expect to die. (I spoilered myself again, reading Wikipedia. WTF, self.) Surprise hero of the book. Thought he was bad-tempered with a grudge against religion, which made everyone think he was Janus, the Illuminati master, when all along he was the one who knew and tried to expose the Camerlengo.
I can't believe there's fanart of Camerlengo Carlo Ventresca on Pixiv. But he looks like Ewan McGregor.
HETALIA!<33
mai OTP: Denmark/Norway
Nordic nations
Prussia <3
wishlist
TRAVEL THE WORLD, YO.
1. A GPS unit
2. A good pair of binos 3. Oh, the Places You'll Go by Dr. Seuss 4. Farthest North by Fridtjof Nansen 5. Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
