I just emailed my PI to tell him I need to go for another trip in March...quite worried about his reaction...

Loris' presentation went well! yay =)

Baking pineapple tarts this saturday...haha oh man tis gonna be interesting......when loris and I bake together................Not Good.............too many toes to step on.......

My eyes are tired...from compiling data...........

It's a ............. day.............

yawns.

I'd been waiting and waiting on the letters to nature paper to be accepted, but it's been almost three months since submission, and lav still hasn't got back to me. I'm guessing that the reviewers asked for more work to be done...

 

Slow. But one piece of good news is that a paper my current PI recently submitted (a few weeks ago) in which I am fourth author got accepted. And hence my first paper is going to be published, in JGH. Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology. I hadn't heard of it either, till now... Oh well...better than nothing.

 

I love being home...looking forward to kbox tomorrow. PI's away again for a week. Hope my clones grow.

 

Interviews are getting easier and easier, and I realized that the more at ease I am, the better a response I get from the interviewer, who's more interested in talking about Singapore weather and the A*STAR program than my research. haha. But I'm tired of socializing. I prefer to be alone for 90% of my day. 10% of interaction is just nice, and it has to happen when I feel like it. Forced social activity is just plain tiring. Even stressful. Especially when the students I'm interacting with are evaluating me for how well I'll fit into their program.

 

Rained today. Warm and humid. California was cold and humid. Why does it have to be humid everywhere I go?

people have told me i have morbid thoughts. But I never thought my thoughts were morbid until they said so..
I think about death a lot. Not really on what happens after you die, but what goes through the minds of loved ones when someone dies. I think the sadness would enrich you, and open up dimensions of your sentiment that you've never experienced before. little events may happen along the way that open you up more and more, but nothing hurts as bad as the realisation of a sudden and permanent loss. loss which is more often than not accompanied by regret...At not having said the last goodbyes, or i love yous, or even I hate you but I forgive you. Just not being able to rectify a mistake...the fact that any future opportunity to do so has been extinguished...

A consolation for people who believe in it is that their loved ones have left for a better place...heaven...a place more for the living than the dead...

I guess it is the same when you break up with someone you really really loved. You can make yourself feel better by imagining him in a happier place. At least he is happy...

pinot noir blended with a petite syrah. To make a full, happy wine.

I'm glad i'm going home. I need to hug a slow loris and tell him everything's fine and believe it cos he's right there next to me.

Does it really lie in my genes? No. I refuse..

or maybe i was before but the moment is gone...and i'll forever be one wild goose.

horrifying! ='(

lalalalala...I finished my second round of interviews!!!!!!!!!!!! weeee~! UCSF's a really chill environment to be in...if I do my PhD here, one good thing that will come out of it I think, is that I'll make a lot of friends of the PIs, who are the friendliest I've met so far among all the schools I visited. By friendliest, I don't mean coldly or awkwardly friendly...I mean a non-hierarchical type of friendly. The type of friendly that makes you feel worth their time to talk to...which I found refreshing.

Speaking of friends, it's nice to have a bunch around whom you can feel totally at ease. And it's not the amount of time you've spent with them or even how well you know them that determines your enjoyment of their company...it's more like a chemistry that's either there or it's not. A chemistry that may be affected by the conditions of the initial encounter, which may prove disastrous for some relationships that when you look back in hindsight seemed to have all the right ingredients to take off. But then in others, circumstance can help form unexpected ties and bring together the most unlikely of characters. Which makes me think that this world is really such a crazy but miraculous place. Miraculous as in wonderful.

I admire people who can truly say they live without regret. I have lots of regrets. But none which I can't fix. I'm lucky that way. One regret that's been weighing on my mind is my failure to let someone know that she is indeed important to me. She's a friend who's been close by for some time. I wouldn't say a very long time, but long enough to make me care about how she feels and long enough to make me want to be a part of her life, even if it's just playing the role of an occasional confidante, or punching bag even. Cos these are the things I take sometimes, unceremoniously, from the people I call my friends. And I don't feel like a true friend to others if they don't do the same to me. I dunno. Maybe this is demanding, but it's just the way it is for me.

decided to put up a profile pic, but i didn't want faces...decided on bryce's painting instead.

It's my last few days in the states before i head back to sg! I'm tired of interviewing, but at the same time it was different from going to the lab every day, and in that sense i'm recharged...ready to get back to work.

jon, i'm going to beat you at cards one day. Just you wait! ; )

wonder if i should make a third trip down just for UCSD in March...harvard and scripps haven't replied me yet. well, it depends on mr loris i guess...=')

i'm really sick of traveling. to the states. Still wana visit Italy and France though. maybe this coming July. Or australia, while my buddies are still there. Or the UK, to see olilim.

everyone's everywhere...i wonder what it would be like when we all finally settle back in singapore for good. maybe we won't even bother to meet up anymore, which is kinda ironic.

oh yea...hope i get to see dina today.

Been busy doing interviews lately, and trouble getting my hands on internet...
Skype's the best. It does video between macs and pcs, and you can set it to automatically receive video calls...
love watching the loris in peaceful slumber...

been quite a stressful and tiring time. Upenn-->Emory-->Stanford where I am at now, and finally --> UCSF. I really can't wait to be done and head home. Meeting up with wenho was fun though...and the people at Stanford are a really nice and fun-loving bunch. Yeah, I think it'd be nice to do my PhD here. Astar's infiltrating all the top US universities! Just in the immuno dept alone (which I am interviewing with), 6 out of the 18 people offered an interview are from Astar/Singapore... Isn't that crazy??? seriously. there are too many of us.

it was nice visiting my aunt too. Baked a blueberry pie with my 14 yr old cousin who's the sweetest 14-yr old i've ever met. really. her brother's a terror though. Well at least according to my aunt...hah. But in a lot of ways he resembles me when I was younger... so I think he'll turn out fine in the end. We went to trader joe's where I bought lots of stuff to bring home. I really love trader joe's. I got macadamia nuts and organic cereal for my mum and dark chocolate for mr loris. Oh, a Singaporean recently set up Kopitiam near SF! With REAL CHICKEN RICE!!! can't tell you how big a draw that is to me...after a few months away from home, I start to crave for chicken rice. Good authentic chicken rice. So now I really like Stanford. There's chicken rice nearby. hahahaha. but the Kopitiam's not really the chain from sg la. It's just a small little eatery that serves real singaporean fare. you gotta tell them you're singaporean and they'll whip up the real thing, not the yucky american version. One of the bosses from boon tong kee came over to be their chef. how cool is that!

k lar...nuff of sg food...

i'm having lunch w one of the PIs soon...they say she's really nice. but i wish that they wouldn't do interviews over meals. Meals are sacred. I like my meal times quiet and relaxing. Either that or free and boisterous. And i can't have either while I'm an applicant for a school i like.

but yay, i'm really happy that the other astar people are coming over to SF soon. I'm staying with melissa at the hotel again haha...we stayed together in sweden too. coincidence...

Happy! =)))

At Penn

At Penn

It was a long flight...though I slept most of it away and watched 2 movies...service on NWA definitely beat United. The flight attendants were so cheery and helpful, unlike the grumpy ones I met during my last trip to the states.

I was so hungry in my hotel room and couldn't order food from anywhere (including the hotel kitchen!) at that time of day, so I opened one of two bottles of pineapple tarts I brought for wenho and my aunt...aiyar. I figure that my aunt can get her own from chinatown in SF...not like there aren't enough chinese people to make decent tarts there. Plus anyway, I'll have to buy more stuff for her kids. Their birthdays all fall in Jan. ack! I duno what to get. Or when to get...

I love the bath robes they provide at the hotel...I wana take one home but they'll slap me with a 95usd charge. oh wells...i'll just enjoy the luxury for 3 nights...=)

Something hit me in the middle of nowhere, although it is quite an over-quoted adage...nevertheless, in a moment of enlightenment, I felt the truth of the matter. That all the wealth in the world is meaningless without the ones you love.

hehe, today we managed to get down to holland village during lunch break to order the cake. It's tiramisu from Da Paolo. Mr loris chose the valrhona chocolate cake at first but then after we tried a small piece of tiramisu for our after-lunch dessert (a must), he decided it was too good not to have more. hahaha. it was indeed really good. Never really fancied tiramisu before but this one certainly changed my mind. It was expensive though. 10 bucks apiece =O

Then i went for part of the molecularfrontierssymposium for a nap...and when i woke up i stole mr loris' phone to set reminders in it for every day of the two weeks i'm gone (so he won't forget about me)...and it was supposed to be a surprise (or shock) for him to hear an alarm ringing on his phone at random times that he didn't set that says i miss him but then he found out already, hai. But oh wells I didn't try that hard to be discreet.

Talking about handphones, they can be really handy as makeshift prank machines. Like that day when i took mr loris' phone and pretended to play with it while i was actually secretly changing my name to 'Dad'. Then I used his phone to send a very terrible message to myself and told him about it. And true enough when he checked his Sent Messages there it was, "Dad, I love you, kisses" or something like that and mr loris' eyes almost popped out and he got super worked up and started to call home to clarify that it wasn't him who sent that message cos guys just don't say things like that to their dads and all the while i was trying to stop him but to no avail cos he was so frantic about it but it was seriously very funny. Although it was a bit scary when i couldn't make him stop calling home. Parents should not get involved in pranks, nope.

anyway, today is another great day, yay =D! got to spend most of it with the slow loris and later i'm gonna meet my jc friends v,e and k. We used to sit right in front during class and be super nerdy together. Ok, actually i was the only nerdy one amongst them. hahaha.

ate too much today. before lunch i ate lots of milk and white chocolate panda bear faces that yd gave me while i was waiting for the stupid bus to come. I wonder if I consider him as one of my mails. See MAIL is pun for male and stands for Male Anchor In Life. Made that up with anniepannie who's sadly already back in australia. We were discussing frankly about whether our very close guy friends actually served as backup husbands and came to the conclusion that...NAH. There was no way we could imagine marrying those very close guy friends so we decided to call them our MAIL instead. hahahahahahahha.

okay, i think my chatty mood ran out, and most of the things I wrote today are not news to poor mr loris who is the most ardent fan of my blog. so i shall stop or risk becoming a garulous auntie before my time ; )

Today is a good day...all nicely planned. Lunch with Mr Loris, dinner with family, and then packing.

Had a welcome and brief encounter with P. It was even bordering on warm and made my trip down to Biopolis worthwhile. =')

Don't think I will go for the BII tour tomorrow...I was bored to tears today, and they wouldn't even have missed my absence.

Can't wait for mr loris' dad's bday dinner. Actually, I'm just excited about choosing his cake. And ok, about the dinner too. Am thinking of going down to Da Paolo on Friday during lunch to see what they have to offer, but that may be a little tricky...both the loris and I have prior lunch appts. Oh well, we'll see how it goes.

I'm bored...wondering what I am doing 'at work' these days. Truth is I am not doing anything at all. I have to wait for cells and peptides to arrive from another continent, and in the meantime I guess I could have worked on my clones but 1) everybody left during the holiday period so there was no one to take blood from- I need blood as feeders 2) the irradiator broke and is still down because the one and only old man who looks after it just got back from his holiday.

I am not a lazy person by nature and this lack of activity is driving me crazy. I want to be worth Big Brother's dollar. I don't want a bonus just because the economy is doing well.

I don't think I can survive being a full-time tai-tai in the future. I'd be too dependent and miserable and bored. Hah. Or maybe I will just start to get stressed out by what to cook next or which detergent is the best value for money. Oh my poor kids, they'll suffer too.

Dinner at home tonight with Grandma and Mr Loris, weee~!

My dad drove me to work today- it took 50 minutes in the jam. Touched by the hand he held out.

During lunch I saw myself in Y for a moment and wish I could've helped him more, but the truth is I am tired of his stories and irritated that he is not making much progress. Maybe I should have walked him to the bus stop, but I didn't feel like it.

i'm learning a lot of things from mr loris who surprises me sometimes with his wisdom. for example, it is so clear to him what is important in life. The safety and happiness of his family, to have someone he loves to share his every day with, and finally, his career, which I found to include a grander vision than just money or status. i've said before that i can only like guys who are admirable or respectable in some way. There were only two before mr loris who made me feel that way. P exuded a confidence that made me believe he was a born leader. Which girl can resist a guy who leads, and does so with humility? Then, Toes. Regrettably, toes was not my second bf. In fact, we only had 3 months to develop our relationship and then he had to leave. Our paths will probably not cross until much later in our working years. I admired him because of his family background and knowledge of current affairs and cultural issues. I guess I was blinded by the sheer absurdity of it all, that I, an average person, could ever get so close to someone born into a life of privilege. I guess it is wrong to approach the relationship from this angle. Perhaps it is also why things never worked out. But for mr loris it's different. Slowly but surely he proves to me that he is someone worthy of my love...but not in ways I could have fathomed from the start.

In my conversation with olilim, I came up with 4 important criteria the Ideal Husband should have.

In the order in which I invented them, they are

1) Looks
2) Character
3) Intellect
4) Ambition

In the order of importance to me,

1) Intellect
2) Character
3) Ambition
4) Looks

That's all. I don't think it's too much to ask.

It is the Year 2008! I just saw pasted outside of my sister's door a very colorful declaration of her new year's resolutions. Don't know when I actually stopped thinking about making up a list, it was probably 3 or 4 years back. I love my sister. She's got the heart of a child. I must think of some New Year Resolutions.

I want to become child-like again.

I want to be mature and understanding and reasonable and level-headed at all times, too.

Three's my favorite number. So 3) I will try to treat everyone as though they had the heart of my sister.

UnctuousToady just wished me a happy new year.

I decided, on a whim, to take a break. Just like me to make whimsical decisions. I have to stick with it now. No good changing tunes.
I said I was a war veteran and no one wins a war. Damit.