I have just eaten the best ice-cream flavour in the world: APPLE PIE, from the beloved Island Creamery. Oatmeal cookie bits ground to create the crust-like texture echoing last mouthfuls of every pie you've ever had, with sweet bursts of baked apple in every milky scoop. It instantly recalled Blyton-created worlds where the child could eat anything he wanted in one bowl of soup, one stick of gum - hey wait. I remember.

The ice-cream man was standing with his little cart, handing out ice-creams for nothing. They were enormous, and you could have any flavour you liked.
"You've only got to say 'Chocolate!' or 'Lemon!' or 'Pineapple!' and the man just dips his hand in and brings you out the right kind," said Moon-Face happily.
- Enid Blyton, The Folk of the Faraway Tree

No, I haven't rapidly lost 10 of my 18.5 years, but don't tell me you expressed no flash of child-like, Land-of-Treats delight at the Island Creamery counter!
I finished all the peanut-butter cookies from the jar I broke, pretending they were star-shaped, because Shlomi bakes them. In the course of last week, I helped paint a world map, realised, with mixed horror and delight,
a) the demise of Harry's world as we know it,
b) Huixin has been overheard gossiping on the phone about Boys, teenage-like,
Also made Gen exercise with long long walk from Jelita to Ghim Moh to her house to watch a parody of... burgers (i.e. Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle), felt disaster at the gaping holes in our history syllabus (has anyone noticed how we weren't taught what happened to Cuba? Or East Germany directly after WW2? Or I have simply suffered from reading about 1/18th of the history readings?).
There is something truly embarrassing about being seen buying line-dance VCDs, especially if you are under 40.
Being Informed can be a tedious process on the morning of July 16. Did you know that you are forbidden to lock any of your luggage if you are flying to the US, cos they are at liberty to rip into it for dangerous objects? The customs guy was from Texas, who despite stern title yahooed when a speaker said she was from Indiana U and jovially gave us all Immigration Special Agent pins.
Typing this, I noticed something alien. Han isn't around. She's at the SMU camp drowning in mud. That's something I have to get used to. The homesickness that could very well happen brushes the edges of my mind, but is there any point in getting homesick... before leaving home?

"I think I'm getting ideals."
- Theo, a creation of Elsha

No, I don't think I'm able to break the Monday curse, woosh and whatever.
I've had enough of hurricanes, spite wars, bomb explosions and waxing lyrical about human nature. It seems that whenever you think you've got a grip on the world, you get tangled in its dead knots, histories, fixed-face people and your own dirty laundry, and you have absofreakinglutely nothing to say to that.
I met my 24-year old second cousin for the first time since I was say, five, last weekend, and I can happily say I wish I were like him (because I can't say that a lot). Aside from fact that he is Princeton graduate and Harvard med school student, he is nice, nice, PC, but nice. Particularly since he let me steal Breakfast Club from his comp and get into his photos/vids from college, South Africa, India. He's going to Ecuador soon.
It's weird the way I feel Lee Min hasn't changed at all. You'd expect a touch of added glow, or edge, or layer, but there aren't any, which is exactly what I need, as we happily shoved banana crumble pie into our gobs.
(Forgot to mention that I have recently acquired knowledge of blatant British slang while reading Pip Granger. They are delightful, e.g.:
Gob - mouth
Bonce - head
Pork pie - lie
Hooter - nose
Toot sweet - with all due haste etc.)
Last night was strange, loving exodus to airport, Syn Min and Joel picking us up (where I learnt about the existence of plagarised TimTams - TamTims), and flying emotion and prayer, wishing I could stretch and shrink at the same time. Wall-painting project this weekend.

(It's Monday again. Why do I always post on Monday? It's freakin weird.)

"I thought of Rupert Brooke saying, 'I must love every greasy button...' But I soon stopped.
'It's no good loving,' I said to the horses on the floor. 'No good comes of loving.' I rolled the orange round and round, first into one eye-socket, then into the other. 'Actually,' I thought, 'it was a bit snobbish to pick out workmen. He meant everyone - he ought to have loved everyone's buttons. Clerks' buttons, schoolmasters' buttons, the old bird in the musquash coat's buttons. If you have to remind yourself to love dirty old workmen's buttons, then you don't really.' I wondered about the types of buttons that Dickens and poor old Thomas Hardy loved. Or maybe they didn't."
- Jane Gardam, A Long Way From Verona

"Mortals are half-Chaos naturally..."
- Tamora Pierce, The Realm of the Gods

I managed to wangle a driving test date. The campaign failed. But God has a sense of humour. See, I carried my folder of air-travel/uni documents to BBDC and then the testers' office, and this PSC scholarship girl was ahead of me being thrown out with the same appeal. The guy at the counter, in his starchy white pockety shirt that made him look smarter than the whole tub of them deserve to look, scowled and went on about how I should have Planned It (how was I supposed to know that I was going to UVA, and leaving in mid-August, in January?). So I trooped downstairs, steaming, logged in at a public computer and miracle! 2nd August was available.
It is my only chance, so I have to pass the first time. Me, Crash!Ning.
We're seeing off Daniel and Syn Min next week, and they are the first of the departures. Wait. Second. We are of such a range of ages, so why is 2005 the year for flying?
I do not appreciate the delay of my pay-cheque. But now, I think so much more about money. It's terrible, you know, the way the miserly fist clenches around your heart (and pocket). Especially now, when I have to stock up on everything from instant curry to little black suits for Interviews (when my mum brought this up today, I was annoyed, more about the idea of me in a black suit then anything else, but at least I kept that to myself).
I am a huge, huge, sucker for anything fantasy (draw thin line between sci-fi and fantasy, which Hallmark seems unable to do). So I watched Earthsea. It was dreadful. Be careful.