Game Plan

I'm sitting here in my bathrobe and a bright orange Apivita carrot mask. I found rocket and spinach leaves and organic tomatoes in the fridge. I have Yiruma scores by the piano. I have a threat from William to finish my section of the report by this afternoon.

Today is a day off from absolutely everything (by which I mean of course work and uni). So I've made a plan.

Task one. Complete my sections of the report. Finish part A first, then results and discussion of the experiment.

Task two. Make salad for lunch.

Task three. Make notes on findings and recommendations for tomorrow's tute.

Task four. Use whatever time left to write up PG notes.

Task five. Learn Love Me.

Active Moist

As I opened a sample pack of moisturiser, I was reminded of an ex.

This ex swore by Dermalogica Active Moist. He also swears by taking exasperatingly long showers and moisturising his entire body afterwards. I don't know exactly how long this routine takes but the fact that I began pondering whether he had to wash his hair strand by strand, and managed to finish a 500-gram packet of M&Ms while writing up 20 pages of notes should be some indication. Oh and before he stepped in the bathroom, the sun was still up.

Most disappointing of all was his lack of any appetising fragrances upon re-emergence. I'm guessing hypoallergenic products.

Another ex routinely treats his snail-trail to Nads, and asks me to pluck his stray eyebrow hairs. And uses his mother's concealer. I probably should have mentioned that one first. They don't even share the same skin tone.

Surprisingly, the boyfriend most frequently accused of being gay is actually the one that pampers himself the least. But then again he is known to study his own nudity in front of the mirror and incessantly moan about an invisible paunch. I have also inadvertently discovered photos of himself wearing a white button-up shirt, tie and black jeans, taken in front of his mirror and stored in his computer.

I just remembered that this boy uses Clinique eye contour gel. Well if he's gay the joke's on me.

I think it was Yves Saint Laurent that has a cosmetic line for men, consisting of eyeliner, blush, lipstick and more. The promo shoot featured perfectly sexy men turned transvestites. Attractive.

My question is, where do you draw the line? Everyday brands like L'Oreal, Natio and Clinique have a men's skincare range, which I think is great because without them we assume that men either don't wash, or still stash bottles of Clearasil from high school. Neither do I have anything against the vast range of hair-products saturating spikes and mohawks worldwide.

Cosmetics, on the other hand, definitely treads the line. The moderate use of concealers (provided the right shade) and anti-shadow sticks is understandable because bad skin is attractive on no-one, but using make-up to accetuate features I find a little odd.

As for all the boys moisurising their thighs as I speak - I don't even moisturise every night. Unless you have a dermatological condition you don't need 24-hourly hydration. We do it because we want to keep ourselves silky smooth. There is no point for you to be silky smooth because you're hairy. And if you're not hairy because you wax or shave, you're trapped inside a woman's body, and not in the way you'd want.

Midnight Highway

So go past the lights and all the excuses.

You could have left, sincerely yours.

Don't you think it's obvious that I want to say more?

But anything too daring to say to you,

Will be said in this letter, then burned away,

So you never realize, I'm here.

Influence of high levels of vitamin E on semen parameters of cocks.

Danikowski S, Sallmann HP, Halle I, Flachowsky G. Influence of high levels of vitamin E on semen parameters of cocks. Journal of Animal Physiology and Animal Nutrition (Berlin). 2002 Dec;86(11-12):376-82

This study was an attempt to find whether the reproductive performance of cocks would be influenced by oral administration of different amounts of dietary vitamin E over a long period of time. For that purpose 60 cocks were divided into five dietary groups of 12 animals each, and supplemented with 0 (control group), 100, 1,000, 10,000 or 20,000 IU alpha-tocopherol/kg diet, respectively, over a period of 12 months. The effect on semen parameters and biochemical parameters measured in pooled semen samples and the weight of the testes were determined. The weight of testes decreased with increasing amounts of supplemented vitamin E. Volume, pH, colour, consistency and motility were not influenced by the diets, but density of ejaculate (sperm/microl), total amount of spermatozoa and morphology of sperm were significantly lowered by increasing amounts of supplemented vitamin E. The alpha-tocopherol concentration in ejaculates increased significantly in relation to the diet whereas phospholipid content and thiobarbituric acid-reactive substances (TBARS) of the semen samples decreased significantly with increasing vitamin E supplementation. The reproductive performance of cocks was negatively influenced by high doses of vitamin E although decreased TBARS indicated rising oxidative defence.

Conclusion: Vitamin E is bad for your cock!

20th May

Today is me and Jezebel's first anniversary.

Honestly, I didn't expect it to last this long. Especially when he tried to break up with me. Twice. Must be embarrassing to keep crawling back. I may have begged for it, but that's completely beside the point.

We joked that this year should be break-up free. Joking in the sense that this is such a ridiculously low standard for a relationship ... I hope.

Anyway, in hindsight most of the problems we've had were caused by me. I'm hesitant to mention any of them in case it sparks up any past resentment and I'll find myself sleeping on his doorstep tonight. I'm also hesitant to mention all his little wrongdoings, in case it sparks up any past resentment and he'll find himself locked out of his own room. Again.

I wonder if I'll take after my grandmother in the sense that I'll be bringing all of this up to support every one of my arguments in the years to come. "You promised your granddaughter you'll take her to school! It's like that time in '08 when you went on commerce camp and didn't call me".

On a totally mushy note, happy anniversary babe. <3

Craptastic

I'm painting my toenails for tomorrow, except I don't know why because I'll be wearing stockings and closed shoes. I'm also missing the nails completely because the lights are off and I don't see the point of painting them in the first place anyway. There's nothing remotely attractive about red toes. Or feet. Or knees. We'll see how badly the aiming is in a second.

I go through alternate phases with my nails. Not so much the ones on my toes because I'm not very particular about my feet and often neglect them at my own expense (i.e. when they find themselves in stilettos or on someone's shoulders). Fingernails, however, share with me a passionate love-hate relationship. I've been known to splash out up to $80 on a single visit to the nail salon. I've also been known to leave them growing jaggedly, yellowing at the tip and half-covered in chipped purple polish.

Nails are high maintenance beings. I can't believe I just called my nails "beings" but whatever.

I'd gladly sacrifice half a day's pay per month on rounded french powder gels if not for two major interfering factors:

• The speed at which nails grow when you least want them to
• The state of them after several acrylic or gel sessions

By the end of the second or third set my nails would be so weak that I once sliced the tip off with a business card. At this stage the only thing I can do is to wait about a month for them to strengthen before painting, filing, or running back to the salon for another acrylics set. During this waiting period I look like I have bits of thin grey bark growing from the tips of my fingers, and this doesn't sit well with me.

Dr. LeWinn has this supposedly award-winning nail treatment called Revitanail for this kind of thing. But that sets me back another $30 and I'll have to wait it out anyway.

This post serves purely the purpose of giving me something to do while waiting for the top coat to dry. I understand if you possess a penis you either have stroked out of boredom or are a flaming homosexual.

Emily Jo Cureton's NY Times Crosswords

Go here.

Living Doll Corset Jeans

For $80, I'm interested.

Image here. I'm sure that I've walked past stores that stock Living Doll, but I can't remember where they were. I thought they had boutiques but from the website it doesn't look like it.

Food

I've learnt an important lesson. Eating well results in feeling well. Not eating well results in burping, farting and general gastrointestinal malaise.

Jez and I woke up at 11:00 this morning. We raided the kitchen for breakfast, but since there were no Coco Pops I wasn't interested in much else. In the end, I ate a couple of jersey caramels and drank a cup of sickly sweet Chinese coffee while Jez had a bowl of canned soup.

Understandably we were hungry soon afterwards. So I had another cup of sickly sweet Chinese coffee and Jez microwaved some zong-zi - those sticky rice parcels wrapped in banana leaf. It was a bit rich and the meat inside was F-grade.

Before coming to my house for dinner we stopped by at Burwood and bought a scoop of ice-cream each. Then we had dumplings for dinner. Now my stomach is trying to strangle itself.

Love is ...

It's been a long time since I've seen this side of Yoza.

"Love is not negotiable. Love is a guessing game, and that's the beauty of it. There's no guarantees. It's like diving into a pool of water without knowing if it's shallow or deep. Sure, if it's shallow, you end up hurt and paralyzed from neck-down; but if it's deep, you know...

It's a leap of faith. It's like throwing yourself out there without any guarantees - and that's what life's about.

You know those carnival games? You know how some are really hard to win and some of them are super easy and everyone wins? That's the difference between love and sex. Sex is the game where everyone wins a little prize and noone goes home a loser. Love is the game that's really hard to win, but if you do and you get to take home that life sized stuffed rhinoceros, it feels a whole lot better than taking home that shitty little plastic key-chain."

Like it. Permalink.

:(

I did end up in front of the TV with my parents for awhile tonight. I admit that the earthquake hadn't really affected me until I saw its consequences for myself.

The most severely affected buildings were all schools. Tiny limp bodies were being pulled from the debris and laid on the ground for parents to identify. The surviving kids were covered in dust and blood, with their limbs broken or completely crushed.

There was a live feed at a crumbled hospital building where an elderly man was found to be firmly stuck beneath tons of concrete, with only his head and right arm visible. He was still able to talk and move the arm, but it was hard to tell whether the rest of his body was salvageable. In any case, he was so tightly crushed that the rescuers didn't know how to extract him without ripping him in half or causing more slabs of building material to fall onto him. The man was trapped for more than two days before a structural architect (or something) was summoned and directed the removal of crap from above.

Eventually they managed to free him. It turned out that he was a 67-year-old retired teacher from a primary school. When he was found by the rescue team he was clutching onto his wife, who was deeper inside the debris and had already died. As the man was pulled out he was barely alive, yet he didn't want to let her go. I think my heart broke right there and then.

Bye Base

Lab took a very long time indeed. Granted, I still finished 30 minutes ahead of time, but that 30 minutes could easily have been 90 had I not been obliged to prepare a total of over 20 dilutions, 10 of which served (as I found out only after I produced them) absolutely no purpose.

William had troubles of a much lesser degree. Our experiments were virtually identical, but once we began diluting our known I came across the problem of precipitates. William found it amusing and moved on to UV spectrophotometry while I fetched new flasks to recreate my secondary solutions. When his unknown samples produced absorbances way out of the accuray range, it was my turn to laugh, though that didn't last long as Effie examined mine and decided that I should start the entire experiment from beginning - using water instead of base. This renders not only everything I've done during today's prac, but also the pracs of the past two weeks completely useless.

I was relieved to leave at last. I caught the bus intending to seek out the expensive Pilgrim dress I tried on Wednesday, but decided that I couldn't justify spending that much money. On my way back to Central I found a dress in Sheike for half the price.

I had a slight tiff with my parents tonight. In the afternoon my mum called to very randomly berate me for not watching the Chinese channel coverage on the Sichuan earthquake. This is very, very random and I didn't know whether she was serious or she had spent her day off with a bottle of Bailey's.

When my parents picked me up tonight they asked whether I had just come from work. I said I was at uni. Funnily enough this resulted in an angry lecture on the stupidity of sacrificing education for shitkicker jobs. It was as if they had been rehearsing yelling at me, only my answer to their trigger quesion wasn't the trigger.

I wondered how I always manage to give them a reason to be angry with me. Even when I don't give a reason they're angry with me. I love my mum, but a lot of the time I'm scared of her. Her temper is less stable than technitium-99m. When she's happy with me (e.g. last night) she'd stroke my hair like I was a cat. When she's upset (e.g. this afternoon) she'd say she's ashamed to be my mother. Might I add that I neither gave her anything to be happy about last night nor anything to be upset about this afternoon.

My parents dropped me off at home tonight. I went inside. They slammed the gate and resumed their nightly stroll. I called Jez and cried over it.

Whatever vault-like qualities I initially display when I'm unhappy, after a certain amount of time I open up like a book. Sometimes we skip the whole vault thing altogether. In any case, I talk. I find the gritty bits of life easier to deal when they're discussed. And I've never met a non-talker before I met Jez.

Sometimes I overlook this quality of his. I'd forget that unlike me, Jez resolves problems alone. I didn't notice that he never felt the need to turn to me for anything. I might also be ignorant of the fact that being unwilling to talk doesn't imply being willing to listen.

So when I asked rheutorically who I'm supposed to go to when I have problems, Jez reminded me that it isn't him. I didn't really know what to say. He thinks I'm dependent. That I should be able to deal with things on my own, just like him. What if I didn't have him? He asked. How am I supposed to handle everything then? I never said I couldn't. I never said I'd be overwhelmed if I was alone. Walking in the rain doesn't hurt, but Jez was my umbrella.

Oh hey ... I just noticed Myer sent me a gift card. Win!

Virus Buster

I'm addicted to the only activity in Brain Training that doesn't actually train your brain.

Anyway, I showed up to work at 8:00 am this morning. I'm thinking people have an aversion to the young Asian pharmacist-wannabe who sits in the dispensary drinking strawberry tea and never wears her uniform, because there never seems to be any customers during my shifts, whereas on days I don't work Mirjana complains of being too busy.

In fact, it was so quiet today that by 12:00 pm we've only processed about 11 scripts. Just for your reference, at Alpha pharmacy the average number of scripts per day was around 300.

Nothing noteworthy happened except for Glenda showing off photos of her gob-smackingly good-looking children, and the brief but highly unwanted appearance of Smelly Man. I shall elaborate.

Smelly Man is a regular. He is tall, thin, in his 50's, has a bushy beard and always wears the same flannel shirt. Nothing remarkable, EXCEPT FOR THE SMELL. It is a highly disgusting mix of sweat, dirt, faeces and God-knows-what-else. I can honestly say that he emits the absolute worst smell my olfactory senses have ever had the misfortune of interpreting.

Usually he strolls around the store for about ten minutes. Half an hour after he leaves we'd still be holding perfumed napkins to our faces. Today he hovered around the front counter. Considering that our pharmacy is quite sizeable it was remarkable how the smell managed to penetrate even the dispensary.

Anyway, I left at around lunch-time torn between doing absolutely nothing at all and going to lectures. I picked up my skirt and lunch and walked around the plaza aimlessly trying to justify skipping more uni. Then when I realised it couldn't be justified I went to the lectures and slept through all of it.

Just because I felt like it, and because I don't know how many times Jez had told me about his school-girl fantasies, I wore my uniform. It was actually Strathfield Girls' uniform. I considered Fort St but if I could help it I'd rather not let maroon and blue touch me again.

It was actually quite troublesome to acquire. First of all I hadn't the slightest clue where you're supposed to buy uniform from outside school. Secondly, when I called Strathfield Girls' asking for stores that stock their uniform the woman at reception wanted to play twenty-questions. She asked when I was starting. I said it's for my little sister. I anticipated her asking for my imaginary sister's name, at which point I would have pretended to lose reception. But she didn't. Instead she asked why I couldn't buy it from school. I told her my sister shat all over her clothes and desperately needed new ones. Okay fine I didn't.

Anyway, the skirt was tragically long. So before I went to work on Monday I dropped it off at TLC to have it shortened. Same-day alterations my hat. I picked it up today and it was tragically short. Granted, I was the one who asked to have about 60% of the fabric snipped off, but I was banking on it still being long enough to hide my arse.

So I wore it tonight, feeling ridiculous that I was sitting at GJ's in a junior high-school student's clothes reading about anti-metabolites.

I bought Jez these funny sushi things that didn't taste like sushi at all. Then we went home.

There was once a time when I felt free to describe my sexual experiences at length. That ended when I discovered that my number of readers actually exceeds 2.

Dear Jez

Here is the highly anticipated blog entry you have been anticipating. I understand your obsession with me and anything to do with me but from your description of my blogging (and I quote) "desperately clings on to her once extraordinary lexicon, and refuses to admit she is not verbose anymore" I don't know why you are still sitting there refreshing this page.

Krispy Kreme donuts were excellent. Dinner was mediocre. Sex was delicious. Talk to you soon.

Love,
Annie

Mother's Day

Mirjana gave me a friendly yet suspicious reminder last week to keep Kirribilli Pharmacy clean and tidy on Sundays. I sensed something was up. Could it be because I ate all of Renata's Shapes, bought her a new box out of guilt, then ate the new box too?

Or probably just the fact the laziness of Eugene and me is finally beginning to be reflected in the state of the pharmacy on Monday mornings.

In any case, there were two full A4 pages full of notes. How to clean the carpet if coffee spills, why we must take out the bins, instructions on bringing shelf-stock forward, vacuuming, and it goes on. I thought it was rather sneaky of them to make it look like notices for all staff, except for the fact that they decided to leave the notes in the most obvious and obstructive place in the dispensary - on a Saturday afternoon.

As a result I spent about 3 out of 4 hours doing my job, which I found distinctly unfair. Eugene was also served a pharmacist duty-roster listing all number of tasks which he completely ignored in favour of checking NRL scores or whatever the hell he was doing.

After work Jez and I watched Iron Man at Rhodes. It was awesometastic.

Today is Mother's Day. I said in another post that I've decided to take her out for dinner. It's taking both my parents out for dinner, really. Wouldn't be fair to leave dad at home just because it's Mother's Day. Well actually, that sounds pretty reasonable, but it's still better to have the whole family together.

I was deciding between George's, Sahara and Bello. I asked my parents and they didn't mind. Then we walk past Prego on Burwood St and my mum commented on the ambience of the place. Yes, Prego is the sexiest. Yes, Prego is also the most expensive. But like hell I was going to refuse my mother the restaurant she picked just because I'm cheap.

Dad ordered the mediterranean mix plate, which consisted of three gigantic skewers of chicken, lamb and beef, the most delicious side salad I've ever tasted and some sauces on the side. Mum picked the grilled chicken salad. Prego has a thing with salads. It's hard picking between what we had tonight and Umi's seasonal greens. I ordered bruchetta. It was very similar to those from George's, except the bread wasn't as hard or chewy, and they seem to be more generous with the garlic butter. Jez wouldn't have touched them as they were lightly sprinkled with ricotta.

They loved it. Possibly because dining out somewhere that isn't a Chinese restaurant is very, very rare for them. I thought the salads were beyond delicious, but the meat component was disappointingly bland. Anyway, it wasn't cheap, but it was worth it. We also received a decent-sized box of handmade chocolates for the occasion.

Not a good spending day. Apart from dinner I also bought a pair of sexy Verali heels partly for the compliment costume and partly because all my other sexy black heels have gone to a better place.

:o

What I would give to be in her place ... :(

ZOMG!

Zomg we is not originals!

http://www.jeremyandannie.com/
http://www.annielovesjeremy.com/
http://ww2.annieandjeremy.com:8080/aboutus.php

And then I find this Asian film called Autumn Leaves which has this synopsis: "Sisters Sharon and Annie are joined on a camping trip by Annie's boyfirend Jeremy. Jeremy proposes to Annie on the trip. Sharon, who is mentally unstable and attracted to Jeremy, stabs him and claims it was for her to exorcise the imaginery friend Janet."

At the moment I'm trying not to wake my parents with my laugh.

Fine. FINE. I've been typing lame keywords into Google. Don't act like you've never done it.

o_o

Remember Me Right

Do you know the way people say when they break up that they'll always remember each other? Hellooooo, does consolation get any smaller?

Forgetting someone you've been intimate with is a longshot, isn't it? Then again the definition of "remember" is a bit iffy, anyway.

Like, "I remember on April the 23rd in 2003 we fell asleep in the park and it started to rain", as opposed to "I went out with this guy. His name was Jim".

I guess it probably depends on individual memory. I remember some things to intricate detail, while others I forget altogether.

For example, I can name at least five kids in my class I've never spoken to from the two weeks I spent at West Ryde primary school when I was eleven; yet when Jez tells me that he was at my 13th birthday party in Ashfield I could swear to God that it wasn't true. Then again this is Jez we're talking about. If I may say so, my boy can sometimes be a bit, dare I say it - senile goldfish.

Remembering things is fun. Year 7 was like, 8 years ago and I still remember all the stupid things I did with my best friend. Her name was Vivien and I met her on the bus on the first day of school. She had a crush on a boy called Raymond who she nicknamed "Pip". She made fun of a pastry I was eating that very vaguely resembled a penis. She was the only witness to my fabulous tumble down the lengthiest set of stairs in the school. She loved M2M. She also made fun of my eyebrows, but who hasn't.

Every once in awhile I pry Jez about his ex a little. The two of them dated for 1.5 years (which by the way is technically untrue due to the break-ups inbetween, but whatever) so I asked what they did on their first anniversary. He couldn't remember. I asked when the anniversary date was. He couldn't remember. I hit him on the arm. It didn't jog his memory. Then again he hates the girl so I guess his neurons might not be bothered firing any signals of reminiscence.

I remember my last anniversary date. I wish I didn't, because even now, on the 18th of every month I involuntarily make a mental note. On the other hand, I have absolutely no idea what I did on any of those three anniversaries. Jez is going to twitch, but look, twelve times three is thirty-six. If you were obliged to make the same day of each month special for thirty-six months, you'd remember it too.

Actually, something just occured to me. Jez has been to our apartment in Ashfield - but it wasn't on my birthday! I was so sure that he didn't come (or was invited) to my 13th and I stand by it. I have photos of everyone gathered around my birthday cake and there wasn't a single boy in the room. On top of that it was probably unlikely that we went swimming because my birthday is in cold, cold August.

And ... there was a photo taken of everyone outside the apartment block. Nobody would have been left out. Now this was the very photo that Jez and his little scheming friends published on Fort Conspiracy with unflattering descriptors on each of our heads. In fact, they called me a slut for the entire year.

Anyway, I think Jez and his friends came over on another occasion. I vaguely remember a PS2.

Meow

So I was reading my last post. I have an unhealthy attachment to cats. Not cats in general, but particular cats - the cat down the street, the fluffiest one in the pet store, etc etc. Once I identify one that appeals to me, I name it, regardless of whether or not it already has a name.

Jez claims that after dating me he has also become a cat-person. So now we're both cat-people. Frighteningly cat-loving people. And we both take great pleasure in naming random cats.

Pepper - a cat we haven't yet met, but plan to buy later when we've moved out. Pepper is grey, and at present nothing but a figment of our imagination.

Brûlée - a kitten we saw at Burwood Pets Paradise. It was mostly beige with its paws and the tip of its tail being brown. We called it Brûlée because it reminded us of the burnt topping of creme brûlée.

Tiger - a kitten from the pet store in Marketplace. Had pattern of a tiger, hence the highly unoriginal name.

Cookie - Jez's neighbour's cat who greatly resembles my Cookie, and whose name is most certainly not Cookie.

Anyway, enough about cats.

Jez is in his finance exam right now. 100% MCQs. What a joke.

Last night was his cram-session. Him, Philip and I spent a few hours in the comp labs nerding ourselves up, except I had the leisure of not worrying about regurgitating my study contents in 10 hours' time.

After coffee at Cador Jez and I went home and resumed studying. The boy plans to stay up every pre-exam night but never manages. Half an hour of study later he announced that he's going to take a 30-minute nap. I joined him. When the alarm rang we snoozed it. And again. And again. Nevertheless it seems that the morning-exam was an effective motivator because I snored my way through the rest of the night while unbeknownst to me Jez was up (studying hard or hardly studying I really don't know).

Tomorrow is Mother's Day. After racking my brain for ideas I decided on taking my mum out for dinner. And now I'm faced with the dilemma of where.

Jez and Philip should be back soon. I wonder if they'll be crying.

Whimper

Fate has it that it's 8:30 pm and I'm sharing the carriage with a pair of drunken men.

They're wasted, and giddy, and I'm playing Sudoku. The next moment Mr. X throws a punch at Mr. Y and they're rolling around like a couple of enraged gorillas.

I look up from Sudoku and gawk at them. Tiny mistake. Mr. Y (or X, whatever) catches me watching and rages. He lunges at me and I rack my brains trying to remember if there ever was a time I was taught how to deal with these situations. Blank. Most fortunately, his friend-turned-rival pulls him back and they resume their brawl. I flee to the next carriage and resume my Sudoku.

I call home before my train arrives and nobody answers. Busting from the bottle of Strongbow I ninja-sculled, I ran to the pub toilets to relieve myself before going home. I'm not exactly sure why I had just divulged this piece of useless information.

My parents came home ten minutes after I did. With the sound of their arrival was the sound of meowing. Dad summoned me downstairs and showed me a little ginger kitty perched in front of our door. Apparently it had followed them for every bit of their half-hour long walk, and now apparently wants a new home.

They resumed watching the news while I went outside to play with the cat. She was small, completely ginger-coloured and very fluffy. She also had the biggest, furriest tail I've ever seen. I decided to call her Jaffa. Even though she wasn't my cat. And probably already had some stupid name like Fanta. O wait.

I walked around the frontyard and Jaffa followed. When a car drove by she would hide behind the fence. I bent down and scratched her ears. She rolled over on her back, sticking her legs in the air and letting me ruffle her tummy.

Admittedly I feel a little blue tonight. I wanted to go inside and sleep it through, but didn't want to leave Jaffa alone outside. It was cold and I couldn't figure anything out so I sat down on the front step and let it out of my system. Jaffa walked over and perched herself next to me the way cats always do, lifted her head and stared at my face. Then she meowed. She was like a little person. It was kind of creepy.

Then all of a sudden she takes off towards the bins. I stand up and squint to see what she was up to. She pawed the dirt, took a dump and buried it. And came back and sat next to me again.

After awhile my dad demanded I come back in before I catch a cold. I closed the door when Jaffa turned around to play with a bug and felt awful. She's still outside meowing. I want to keep her but there's no way. Nevertheless, my mum is also feeling some attachment to the kitty, because she decided to call the RSPCA to find out what happened to Fanta Dou.

God. I sound like a little girl.

I want my kitty. :(

If I was made in Japan, I'd be more efficient

I have once been told by two people who at the time were close to me that I'm Chinese-looking. Which means I have a Chinese face. Because two is like, so many people, I accepted this fact without question (though with some amount of disappointment because you'd usually imagine "Chinese face" as something along the lines of this).

Today, the umpteenth million person asked me where I came from. And today the umpteeth million person assumed the kind of surprised expression that I knew preceded the five words I don't know how many times I've heard. "I thought you were Japanese".

Yes. Japanese.

Anyway, I don't know what I look like. I don't really care.

It's funny what people assume from the exterior. Except you have a pretty slim chance of actually being right. Seriously though, we can never tell anymore.

I remember browsing profiles on a study-forum and came across a pretty girl. When I say pretty I mean if you're into that kind of thing. Bleached, waist-length white-blond hair. Heavy make-up. Skinny jeans (keeping in mind that it was '04 and she was way ahead of the trend). Chloé accessories. Frequents the Lifestyle & Fashion threads. So of course I assumed floozy. I assumed wrong. Apparently a friend of mine knew her through a friend of a friend and so on and so forth - at the time she had just graduated from NSG with an UAI of 99.60.

I admire that.

On the opposite end of the scale I've often expected large brains from some ultra nerdy looking people who turned out had lower averages than me.

Admittedly I didn't think Jez was too bright initially. Then I realised I was wrong. Then "certainly possible but not certain for a fact" happened and I figured my first impressions might not have been that far off.

It was lucky that I showed up for work this morning because I had completely forgotten that we had GSK training. In fact, I was the one who booked it for today.

Training was on Zantac, Cartia and Becoderm. Old news!

After lectures Jez and I went to Umi's for sushi and their gob-smackingly delicious green salad. It was gob-smackingly delicious.

Wow, it was like I just pulled sentences out of my arse tonight. This post doesn't make any chronological sense at all.

How smashing

So this morning at 9:00 am we had a pharmacogenetics quiz weighing 15%.

For someone who spent half of yesterday cooking curry and the other half with their head up the vagoo worrying about being pregnant, there wasn't much choice except set the alarm-slash-Jez to 5:00 am and cram two hours' worth.

Thirt minutes later I went back to bed.

Jen is a major exam stressor. I'm very laissez faire about exams. I'd say the ideal attitude would be the happy medium of us both.

She stays up late to revise. When I start yawning, I sleep. She writes up notes for everything. I used to type up my notes because it was less effort-consuming but admit that now that I've started handwriting my summaries my brain is a lot more willing to drink it up. She studies on the train. I insist on spending travelling time discussing Bulgarian Idol. She reads notes even when she's walking. I sneak out my iPod.

Jen is also a post-exam stressor. We've both had our fair share of walking out of an exam feeling distinctly retarded, but she tends to stress over her incorrect answers while I sometimes forget which subject I probably just failed in gratitude of re-entering the outside world.

Today was a series of misfortunes. We were spotted over-collaborating and subsequently instructed to increase our interpersonal space. I grinned and beared several embarrassing moments when I looked up from my papers to check whether the coast was clear for a bit of x-ray, only to find the supervisor staring at me. Jen had similar luck and as a result we failed to obtain all of genius-Bao's answers.

In the end, sick of the post-exam discussion outside the lecture theatre, she stormed off mid-sentence. Someone else's sentence, that is. And it wasn't really storming. Just walking really fast. So fast that despite taking off after her pretty much immediately, I was almost asthmatic by the time I caught up.

I spent the afternoon studying at Jez's house, and summarised one week's worth of medchem. Jez finished his assignment.

Feeling particularly productive, we took his old PS2 out for a walk and smashed it to smithereens against the same concrete upon which we stood when we drunkenly shared our first kiss.

Smells

I think I've mentioned it quite a few times - the smell and memory thing. I think I have quite a sharp sense of smell, and equally sharp memory triggers associated with it. Maybe this has to do with my habit of sniffing everything. Not a great habit, but when I'm out on the pharmacy floor I can always confidently recommend products on their fragrance because I have literally opened and sniffed every last bottle and tube in the haircare isle.

Anyway, I was cleaning my room. My perfumes were cluttered around the wardrobe and I couldn't resist. They were all half-empty except for a little blue bottle with a silver lid. I sniffed it wondering whether time has robbed it of its ability to trigger a certain little memory. No such luck. Wasted gift. I could be seventy-years-old and when one of the other old dears in the nursing home clatters by on her walking frame wearing vintage Elizabeth Arden I'll grasp my chest at the thought of drunken sex and broken hearts and surely die.

Boo hoo

We had medchem lab this afternoon. I wasn't so much lab-queen today.

Our compound was chlorpromazine. A peculiar acidic drug that won't dissolve in base but does so extremely well in acid. Yeah I don't get it either.

So luck has it that while William and I are both performing UV spectrophotometry, he was given the acidic solvent, leaving me with beaker after beaker of precipitate as I stubbornly persisted in diluting the standard to satisfactory solubility. On top of that I had no literature values to serve as guides, because seeing as chlorpromazine dissolves so much more easily in acid, no previous studies had bothered using base.

It was a four-hour lab and William left after 45 minutes. Another hour later I managed to produce an acceptable but nevertheless funny-looking absorbance graph and was allowed to go home. Better than nothing, I suppose. If it really did go on for the full four hours I'd still be in there, probably bald from pulling out my hair.

I went home at the same time the school kids did. While sitting on the train watching them do all the horribly stupid things I once did a million years ago got me thinking about how different it is to be in uni. Mostly, to have that freedom associated with being a uni student.

Count the number of lectures you skipped this semester. Lost count? I know I did. I'm not good with flexibility. Completely rubbish at utilising my time. I like to be told what to do. If nobody tells me what to do I try to tell myself what to do and pretend that it's somebody else. I bludge like the next bludger and face the consequences during STUVAC, when I'd force myself to draw up elaborate timetables dictating what I need to have done by when. Then I survive. And I cry. And my skin succumbs to stress spots. Then I swear on a number of people's graves that I'd never let this happen again. They all should have dropped dead by now.

There were a few horrifying experiences I'd rather never be subjected to again. On the night before one of our second-year exams we sat around Derek's dining table with a bowl of chips and poured over our notes late into the night. Funnily enough I don't recall what subject it was, but I do remember the horrible panic associated with understanding less than 10% of the content. They were talking and I was trying to listen but it was like listening to the Spanish news.

Only days after that I was in Jenny's room with Mylinh at 8:00 pm, the night before microbio. After ten minutes Mylinh exclaimed "Annie, you don't know anything!". And that was true at the time. During the next five hours my brain gobbled up a whole semester's worth of lectures. It must have ate too fast because the next morning it had constipation and nothing came out.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is ... send me back to high school.