I only feel like blogging because so far I only have three December posts, SO LITTLE right?
Okay I sound like Xiaxue, better stop now. I feel very drunk even though I had only three mouthfuls of very diluted vodka Coke, it must be the AO1C kicking in. Of course if I were THAT drunk I would not be SAYING SO right? I am lying, I just feel like writing about how happy I am to have these moments. Combine drunk Sean with Yi-San-on-a-roll, nonchalant Gen with Roger-and-Chun-Wee-are-sworn-enemies for explosions.
It is too American to keep talking about the joys of being drunk and let it be said that I have NEVER been drunk (except on life), or been anywhere near there, props to me.
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WHY AM I THE ONLY PERSON who finds the kid who plays Lucy in Narnia very stupid and annoying and uncute? I think this only REAFFIRMS my status as CHILD-HATER, which makes me quite UNHAPPY, because I DON'T WANT to hate children, it only makes me very SELFISH and UNABLE TO RECALL the past.
I caught myself saying "just chilling" today. Damn!
Clumsy description of YF activity at church on Christmas day: everyone gets a candle and writes a defining characteristic/prayer request on paper. Each person gets a piece, tries to find the person it belongs to, and lights that person's candle with the main candle at the middle of the room. Aim: everyone has a lit candle, and takes turns talking about what they are thankful for about the person whose candle they lit. I always forget how bitingly sincere folks like Angie can be, how Mingdao is the best speaker I've ever heard and he's only one year older than me. Why do I forget them? Because it is easy to pretend it is impossible to do what they are doing.
I am enjoying this Coffee-Club-conversation trend, and a friend who doesn't hesitate to call.
I am impossibly happy to be home, which would explain the irrepressible, irrepressible joy.

It is good to be back in Singapore mode, one sign of it being that I no longer have to manually change the time and date tags on this post. In a matter of days, I have had the beautiful opportunity to stay with a Puerto Rican family and attend one of their Christmas parties, glimpsed D.C. and love it already and foresee spending several hours at the Folger Shakespeare Library and Holocaust Museum, flown 13 hours to Tokyo and then 7 hours home and hearing if not recognizing the increasing number of Singaporeans along the way because of young, Singlish-spouting boys at the Narita Airport, seen two movies in two days, and feasted, including my apple-pie ice-cream from Serene Centre.
I have had first odd feeling of being on holiday in my own country, and have to keep pulling back from being attached to anything again because it will be only three weeks. When it would have been forever. My stomach hurts from the exertion. I can't wait to see all of you.
Rest of Virginia photos are here.

I have to wake up in about three hours to call a taxi to get to the Greyhound station and later Arlington, Virginia to crash with Jen's friend Natalia, and the reason would be frantic last-minute packing that would not have happened if I had not scintillated in post-exam sloth, trailing through ice with armfuls of laundry that came to such an alarming quantity that two round trips on the slippery Hereford steps were required, triggering accelerated fear of falling because the bulging basket obscured a clear view of my feet (and once I cannot see where my feet are I must fall down). Then deciding it would be nice to listen to never-will-be-afraid-to-be-selfish-bastard Robbie ("If you should die before I leave / What on earth becomes of me?") while I assembled my suitcase, the Devil Laptop sucked me in. I must and probably will not be able to touch the Internet for the next three days, at least, so this is the last note before I pull out the cables and stick it in my backpack for the crazyass flight home.
No one here believes that we will be literally in transit for two days. They do not understand the many things Singaporeans do to move off in trajectories towards their ideas but more importantly, somewhere off the island. I do not feel that way, but when travel becomes preciously familiar, it is easy to daydream about gathering the world within your reach.
My last final was Physics and it brought my worst academic experience, unrivalled, ever, to an abrupt and happy close. That is all that will be said about that, an end. That was Thursday, and while my tentative idea of catching the alter-raised Brokeback Mountain (not showing in too-small Charlottesville theatres) when we first considered stopping in DC from the 16th before our Dec 19 flight will have to die, I can only say all this ties in very neatly with the fact that I was still in school yesterday, because there was a major power failure. Sudden black, stunned silence, but all good because
- there were people on my floor resorting to hauling couches and foldable tables into the dorm halls to study because all the lights in our rooms had gone kaput, so thank God my exams were over,
- I would not have been able to pack in the dark, or do my laundry for that matter, because the weather was particularly slushy and I did not want snowy clothes (the sun reappeared today).
Helen will be frolicking in Anaheim by now with her boyfriend on true dream vacation which she totally deserves, I hope it will be fairytale-like. It was for me, even without the boyfriend :). Remembering California made me remember the whole May journey, and its wholeness, and the wildly beautiful drive to L.A., and sitting in the Penn Station at the bagel-and-coffee place during 9am Manhattan rush hour, thinking, "This is it," and that was the whole beginning of touching America. That was a holiday, blessed in its easing of length and responsibility, and that is perhaps how Singapore will become to me over the next four-or-so years, the stopover, while Virginia becomes concrete. America the ideal! In my favourite case study, even your enemies think that. But we have branched bewilderingly, nothing less, by being here.

Today, the first snowfall. I ran for my camera but it was unable to capture the fact that these are the FATTEST snowflakes I have ever seen.

Still an amazon.com whore who will soon be penniless, I have purchased the following items:
- Flight, volumes 1 and 2
- The Magic Christmas, or the one Sweet Valley volume you can still read without shame - I never got over lending this gem to primary school classmate who conveniently forgot to return it
- Mysterious Skin DVD - it's outttttttt!

Just got back from the annual Lighting of the Lawn, with about every acapella group on campus singing carols, and cider and hot chocolate outside the Lawn rooms. Exams during Christmas season are cardinally poor arrangements, particularly with these beautiful reminders, but I am not complaining today because everything is only due next week. A week is a long time.
I've been back from Thanksgiving break for a week now, and Canada is just as I remembered it, only quieter and fuller of Asian people than I ever remembered. It was odd getting there from white-majority DC with a stopover in Hispanic-dominated L.A., in dreamy spectator mode that punctuated the delicious feeling of travelling solo for the first time ever. We did not actually have any bang-up Thankgsiving dinner because Canada celebrates a month early, though on the night itself I found myself in a very New-Yawka style restaurant with waitresses in varying styles of LBDs, and all so gorgeous that I was heartily grateful to be female, else I might have left my bottom jaw somewhere on the polished floor. And cousins whose faces you've known your whole life and have barely spoken to, but suddenly see from fresh American-college perspective, and aunts who suffocate you with EAT EAT EAT, and Metrotown shopping with my mum, so whisk out all the sadness.
There was an unusual abundance of dudes at the World AIDS Day panel I attended with my Passport group, which Carla and I were suitably impressed by, until Lauren told us they were mostly from one of those frats that come up with beneficiary event quotas, not unlike CIP, which undoes it all, doesn't it?

Happy December, and I will see you, very, very soon.