It’s been 2 months since my last post wow. and i’ve posted 10 times this year, so this is the 11th time. (i should do this on 11/11/11, that would be cool) So much has happened!

EOYs was ugh disgusting. I was so unprepared, more so than for any other exam or test that we’ve done this year (or ever, actually). Not necessarily that I felt unprepared at that time, but now I realised that I could have done so much more. My results were unacceptable. For everything. It’s like I crashed suddenly because I was going too fast. ): well all i can do is take this holiday to bounce back and improve lots and lots. (mr loh said the scholars will definitely be studying! D:) It’s seriously really sad, the only part of my life I could be halfway confident about just blew up in front of me. ): And of course that cant be everything, CCA is killing me too, with all the busy-ness of the schedules.

And then I was thinking about trust. And how people I’ve always trusted, never doubted, and didn’t think twice before calling, could possibly have never really been there. That it had all been this fantasy world, an illusion that I wanted to believe in. I should actually have known. But I really needed someone who actually understood me, who wouldn’t judge me based on what I myself tell them about any of the problems I may have. Look at who that place has made you become. I thought you were still the same after all these years. [it's actually 11:11 now and I wish it was the same as before.] You were different all along.

It’s despicable.

Maybe it’s my fault to some extent. Well, lesson learnt. I won’t make the same mistake again.

Okay maybe it’s because I’m listening to sad reminiscent music now or something but I feel sad. :( So next sad topic, 2011:

Has been amazing. Full of new friends and new experiences and well, newness. This year has really changed my entire life, and me. I think I’ve grown in maturity (in some ways xP) and maybe experiences too. I don’t think I’m the quiet girl who’s too scared to do anything or to really go out into the world, not anymore. I’ve gotten a bit louder (hopefully!), a bit crazier. There’s still stuff I need to work on, but I’m pretty happy with this year. (:

We cleared our classroom last friday, and i was like OMGSH HAS IT BEEN A YEAR SINCE I FIRST STEPPED INTO CLASS? I still remember. I was so scared, because there were so few people I knew. I worried about the random seating arrangement will all the 2G people, worried about being forever alone, and I went down to 3T everyday for at least a month im pretty sure. Then suddenly I didn’t go down to 3T at all, then it was mas, syf!!, rmun, imun, sec 4 farewell, founder’s day, debate, eoys, and whooshhhh it’s the end of the year. Sec 2 had its fun times, Sec 1 had its fun times, but I really don’t think I would exchange this year for any other year. (:

AND EE TRIP COMING SOON YAY!

Sunday was sanjana’s birthday and she had a party but i didnt go. D: But last week was anmol’s party and that was FUNFUNFUNFUN. This girl from the US called Jessica came to our class for two weeks! It was fun. She has a nice accent :D But she’s gone back to SF now. ): And we’ve had 2 picnics this term in the trellis haha that was fun too!

Change.
Everything changes. Everyone changes. And sometimes when you look back at the pictures and all the memories of the past, you really wish they had never passed, and everything had stayed the same. Your situation today never seems to measure up to the past, like your whole life is just one mountain slope heading  for the ground. You miss the people, and you wonder why you aren’t friends/aren’t as good friends with them today. Why you can’t tell them everything like you used to be able to. But what about now? What about today? Someday in the future you’re going to look back at today and you’ll miss today like you now miss yesterday. So make the best of your situation and concentrate on now.

EOYS and I need to study so bad. Like really. I can’t get into a really good school if I don’t get like a 2/3 for O Levels and the best I can get is a 4, because i dont do HMT. So I need to do DSA. And what results are they going to look at? Sec 3 EOYS. Yup. So I HAVE to do well. But I really lack focus. (eg. what am I doing now?) I know people have already started studying, and sometimes it scares me that I don’t study as quickly/start as soon as some other people. I can’t get complacent or whatever, especially not now.
I’ve realised that I really am a perfectionist. And I have ridiculously high expectations that are pretty much impossible but I’ve seen sometimes that the impossible can be possible.

Today I will pack my room and I will start properly tomorrow.
byeeee till after EOYs!

I think I should get tumblr, I love the pictures. :3 This post will be all about what I haven’t blogged about but are significant enough for me to want to record it so that I will never forget. (: Also, apparently blogs aren’t supposed to be like diaries, about what happens every day in life. You’re only supposed to blog when there’s something meaningful to blog about. (found out this year. i feel a bit stupid HAHA). and we had this talk about how everything you post is possibly something that could get you in jail so i will be more careful with my posts now. :X i’m not going to read through all of my old posts to see if i insulted people and i’m not going to delete it. (okay i will, in the future.)

Me and sanjana have decided to focus majorly on studies! EOYs are coming (HAHA, in october) but i already feel scared. Like i’ve gone forwards in time and skipped term 3 (haha). :( okay and things are definitely getting more busy (and i have my piano exam in september omgsh. :O it seemed like not long ago my teacher was telling me i had plenty of time.). Sec 3 is supposed to be the most fun year of my sec sch life (so far, IT HAS!) and i’m going to make the every day for the rest of the year worth a day. (: tumblr will have to wait till after CT3, or maybe after EOYs.

I realised im a lot closer to my history ES group now than i was with any of them last year. :3 all these MUNs have been fun, i will never regret joining history ES. thank goodness i wasnt chosen to join physics ES and andrea convinced me to join this hahaha. things would have turned out a lot differently if i hadn’t.

performing arts night was AWESOME we played shosty at 162 and a lot of people were impressed!! :D then stood around randomly in the meep room with some of the sec 4s (why? i dont know.). it’s se ern’s last concert. D: took a few pictures. it was a bit awkward. i know i shouldnt be but i was. D: okay i will make an effort not to be awkward next time! SHOSTY AT 162. (the judges at SYF thought it was too fast when we played it at like 138 but, here we go we can even play 162. IN SYNC. ;D) before performance we practiced a bit and we were slower and slowing down (definitely a drop from syf standard!) but we got it all together for the concert!!

i want to find a date to watch schindler’s list and all the other history movies. :3 love history. (i should obviously have taken full history).

got ANOTHER new timetable, FOUR recesses with 3T YAYYYY. :3

apparently my style is good and matter-of-fact. :D:D:D i hope i can still go.

okay i absolutely HAVE to complain about seating arrangements. since when did it not become random? since when did most of the class get to sit with their cliques? since when was it alright to have seating arrangements showing clear divides? not cool. ):< i am not happy. but the good parts about my seat, is that im sitting next to a nice person (okay most people in class are nice, but i would say some are more selective about who they are nice to), I GET SOME AIRCON, and im not to close to the front neither am i right at the back, and i can see quite well. 8)

POTC4
it was fun to meet up with ruru and elizabeth and sonico again (okay i see sonico nearly every day.) lunch at some japanese place and i ate udon and it was really good because this was the day after OBS (canned food+no japanese food for FIVE DAYS it’s amazing i lived) POTC4 was LOVE and i got the soundtrack when i went shopping with my mother about a week later (amazing stuff. :D) hahah i love jack sparrow.

RMUN
security council. portugal! AWESOMEEEE. i didnt speak a lot but it was extremely funny to watch people talk. (apparently it wasnt a debate, just a few debaters going up there and talking casually). I can’t describe it in much detail but i made a few friends and :D we were going to have an outing tomorrow but i couldnt go and other people couldnt go and it got cancelled. D: AFTER EOYS. first priority (well, first or second.)

IMUN
I would say, not as fun as RMUN. people mainly talked about the same things over and over and it was quite boring + i didnt know anyone so i couldnt send notes to them. ): no pic.

(okay the MGS thing wasnt a MUN, we basically had a presentation, ate lunch+tried to ally with countries, wrote and introduced 5 diff resos, did not debate, and voted individually. yes, individually. not by country. good part -> wrote a reso for the first time (with help from celine, jennifer, kar yeng)!! :D looking forward to SCMUN.)

One Dream
We got into finals and wonn! (well all 8 finalist groups won.) but apparently the judges were impressed by our sincerity or something. :D it’s averagely exciting. we have the prize ceremony thing on the 30th!

now you would think this post is about POTC4 but it’s not. It’s about OBS. PotC4 post coming up next though! OBS was alright! I definitely expected it to be very fun but it wasn’t as fun as I thought it would be. High expectations isn’t very good. D:

Monday:
Went to Pulau Ubin, and got our groups. I thought it was going to be all random but they grouped it by index number and class, so by some wonderful streak of luck (okay, i think its supposed to be stroke of luck but streak sounds nicer) S and T were together!! So it was basically: Aly, Anmol, Me, Sanjana, Bev, Adeline, Andrea, Bern, and Liz. and that was only from the SBC. <3 BEST GROUP EVER, duh. then there were other people from the other classes, including Deirdre and Danielle (who i know!) and Charlene, Shalyn, Fang Rong, Cheryl, Hui Jie. so i was really really happy with my group. :D I had expected a completely different and.. less comfortable group! But of course I’m not complaining :D Took a group photo, went to base camp, did some kayaking basic exercises like how to paddle and walking into the seawater fully clothed, and capsize drill (purposely capsizing, more fun than i thought it would be). I was in a kayak with Flik and Liz, best boat ever, duh. :D Then we showered and did some random stuff, then cooked dinner watching the sunset (it was so pretty. (: ) and ate in the dark. :D funfunfunfun. we saw an owl too! then we pitched our tents and went to sleep in some field. (: i was with sanj,anmol,andrea. best tent ever, duh. ;)

Tuesday:
Trekked to the other base camp! Was so tiring :( The bag I was carrying was I think, the food bag with all the cans or something. And it wasn’t put in properly so I was so unbalanced! D: Okay so after we finished dying, we arrived at the other camp! Then we found out we were doing high elements wheeee :D Practiced the belaying thing a bit, then we went to climb a ship :D I wanted to do the highest one but i didnt because 1) I dont think i would have survived that hahaha and 2) there was no time. But it was fun anyway, spent the rest of the time sitting around and talking (or rather, listening) to people. dinner (fav time of the day, except for sleep) was yummy and we tented indoors! oh also on this day i heard one of the groups nearly got struck by lightning, it hit the tree in front of them. There was a brilliant flash of light: blinding, overpowering, and I instinctively fell to the ground and covered my head. At the same time, I heard the loudest crack- like my world was made of the white light and it was splitting apart, not without some anguish. In that moment it was just me and Death- whoever said death was black was wrong. It was white. White as snow, white as light. I struggled to keep on living, to not let my whole world disintegrate into nothingness. It went on and on until… after a while, I became aware of colour again. The brown of the earth and green of the leaves and yellow of the flowers. A tree had fallen in front of us, just footsteps away from what could have been the end. It was blackened and definitely dead, like death had come and swept it away, barely leaving us in our little world. I could still feel it in my bones though. A little tremor of physical fear of what had nearly happened and could have happened. HAHAHAHA i have no idea where that came from since I wasn’t actually there. Sonico was there though (okay so maybe she didnt exactly say all that) but.. after i got over the fear that like some of my friends could have dieddd (actually, lightning is smart. it would hit a tree because its taller, faster path to the ground or something like that. i read about it once.), i realised that it’s such a nice moment to write about (okay maybe not nearly dying- but the idea of the lightning and all).. a writer moment. :D awesome, i dont get those often anymore.

Wednesday:
Land Ex Day! Okay honestly I didn’t think I would survive this day. Like after the 30min trek from base camp 2 to base camp 1 I was already dying and I was actually considering running away and sailing back to Singapore so i wouldnt have to do the land trek. But it was too difficult to wake up in the middle of the night hahaha. Luckily andrea had stones. haha anyway land trek: i got a lighter backpack (luckily!) so yeah. :D but then i switched with sanj because hers was the really heavy one with half of my stuff inside too. and it wasnt exactly unbalanced but it was still heavy so i was lightheaded and all.. so then sanjana switched back with me <3. (: oh wait before that, we plotted the points where we were supposed to go on a map. i helped! glad I take geog now, it’s so useful :D but we didnt reach all the points because the sky decided to spill on us (basically, it rained. really heavily) so we were all wet and had to take shelter. i was kind of sad that we couldnt make it to all the points marked, because i knew we could have done it. we went back to base camp, but that was the day we weren’t supposed to shower so i didnt shower :D used the powder spray thing for hair, love that stuff. ^^ btw, pei lee (our instructor) said that the backpacks were about 15kg. :O i thought it was at least 50.

Thursday:
SEA EXPEDITION DAY. (: best day out of the whole week! (title of post is dedicated to this). so we woke up as early as ever and left at around 7 (i think)! Non-stop kayaking for 7h, around the whole island of pulau ubin. O: i mean we only actually had one official break. I was in the sweeper boat with andrea and liz (liz was one of the sea ex leaders! :D) (andrea and liz swapped places so it was: andrea at the front, me in the middle, liz at the back) so it was really really tiring. like we had to purposely remain behind everyone else so everytime we got a bit of momentum, we had to stop and wait for the other kayaks to go ahead of us. so every time they had a break, it was basically just time for the back of the fleet to catch up with the front, then we had to go again, that’s why it was non-stop. ): peed in the sea. it was strange. XD and for some reason we had to pee more than usual, i guess something about sea water and osmosis? :X idk. i remember there was some point during the journey that all 3 of us had to pee. okay so you know one of the best feelings in the world? lying in a kayak in the sun (with a hat), in the middle of the sea. I mean i dont know why people got seasick (okay stupid comment, i know), i loved the currents on the sea. (: and i really really wanted to eat lunch out at sea but some people thought they would get seasick and they didnt want to waste time (since when did eating lunch become a waste of time?) so we just.. kayaked on. so i really really loved the sea expedition and my kayak and the people and the happy food (snacks!) and everything. :D when we got back we did JETTY JUMP. YESYESYES. :D been looking forward to this for a long time! it wasnt just a spectacular leap of a cliff, just take one step off this jumping plank thing into the sea. it was fun. i went twice. :D and for some reason i was thinking of physics when i was falling. (it was kind of free fall but with the air resistance!).. then like just before i hit the water, i could feel all the acceleration and stuff it was cool :D and i randomly became physically capable of screaming for a few seconds before i decided to close my mouth (sea water is disgusting to taste).
when we finished showering we prepared a feast or something from random ingredients. it was fun and the food was okay-ish, but then washing everything + pitching the tents took a really long time, plus we had run overtime for showers and cleaning up the kayaks too (did i mention my group was late for everything? literally everything. we had to keep asking for extensions and then went overtime for the extensions too).
okay then some idiot stole our tents (or more like, they got mixed up) so at first we had 1 tent.. for 16 people. o_0 but luckily we found another 2, so that was 3. so one tent had to split (we had 4 tents of 4 ppl for the past few nights). and okay for some reason that was my tent. ):< so obviously bern wanted anmol to join the rest of abba in their tent, and anmol wanted andrea too, so that left me and sanj to go split ourselves up into the remaining 2 tents! i was NOT HAPPY. i mean it wasnt really fair of them to decide without us right! ):< then deirdre decided to switch tents so that me and sanj could be in the same tent.. awww. (: she’s nicer than people give her credit for. okay so then i still wasnt happy about the tent thing (not only that, also because the whole them-in-a-group-leaving-us-out thing had been going on for the whole 4 days) but it ended up okay in the end i suppose. :) sleep is always okay. so thursday was like my highest AND lowest point of obs.

friday:
nothing much, just packed up, cleaned everything, and found all the camp stuff. we only lost 3 whistles in the end (: thats like $2.10 we have to pay altogether, compared to the >20 that some groups had to pay! (i heard). oh wait then pei lee asked us all to get in a circle and talk about the lowest point in our life. then everyone was talking about everyone dying and stuff it was so sad, nearly everyone was crying. D: yup then we went back to school (glad to be with 3S again actually :D)

hmm so i dont think i socialised much during OBS. with so many loud and well, popular people, there wasnt much of a need to talk and stuff >< okay so that isnt a good excuse. i’ll try to be more talkative and stuff in school and in class! i dont like the “should speak out more in class” on my report card ): and okay actually i dont feel that bonded with my group. i mean as a group. it was still the best group ever, but everyone was just so bonded and in their cliques already, i dont feel that anything changed but those cliques became stronger. so that was probably why we didnt bond as a group. but it was still an awesome week. <3 COLUMBUS forever!

woah this is a really long post. (congrats if youre still reading!). but i also wanted to say, i got sunburnt! on my ankles and wrists. okay i thought i couldnt get tanned, but i actually got sunburnt. hahaha. it hurt a bit for some time, but then it just got annoying because it was so ugly (oh i got sandfly bites too. they arent itching- just look disgusting). then after a while it started to peel (EWWW) then i just put moisturiser and it was okay. :) but seriously i did actually put a lot of sunblock during the kayaking.