en route; 
"Once about 8pm hits on Sunday evening, it’s like somebody died. Everyone gets quiet, there’s high tension and emotion, we make eye contact with one another but nobody wants to speak the thought we’re all sharing. Nobody wants to say, that dreaded term. On Sunday evenings, the word ‘Monday’ is to us, what Voldemort is to Harry Potter — it-which-must-not-be-named."
- Christopher Hudspeth, 10 Pros & Cons of Sundays
so it's monday again.
and no, i honestly don't drag going to work. work is tiring, it gets rather crazy sometimes &sometimes my patience gets tested and pushed all the way to my limits, but thank God for really awesome colleagues. my awesome colleague, rachel, just bought me a pack of 8 (aka 16 pieces) kinder buenos!! it was the yummiest surprise everrrrr <3
happy monday, people!
i hope your recent weekend was far less tiring than mine (: 
had a very lovely home-cooked dinner at michtan's place on ystdy, and we killed time watching Howl's Moving Castle before heading to the airport to send sab off :( it was one of those rare fridays that we met up, chilled and had coffee, rather than the usual rounds of drinks (: it was also a rare friday that we were in the east rather than central or west. HAHA.
spent another saturday afternoon with coffee (again) with the two michelles, aaron, ben &ching, followed by dinner at basketball ramen (well the logo's a basketball, so basketball ramen it shall be) and now the saturday's already almost over, which is pretty depressing cos the days seem to be moving too quickly :/
on a lighter note,
i really need to find time to catch The Dark Knight Rises :/ everyone who has watched it says it's awesome &that i'm damn slow :/
happy weekend everyone!
july is almost over. "It’s easy to get hyped up, and say we’re going to start being more positive, turning the tide and valuing what really matters. A near death experience, an inspirational video, a stimulating moment — something triggers us to want that change. This is the struggle. It’s not difficult to sit here right now and be thankful for what we do have. The testing part comes when we finish that motivating thought, and go back to the real world. When the first thing doesn’t go our way. When we have an opportunity to be pessimistic, or optimistic. When we forget to maintain our forced happiness. When the conscious effort to be cheerful and encouraging wears off, and the natural complainer tries to rear its ugly head. It’s a personal battle that can take a lot of work. Just remember, as long as you’re still alive, it could be worse."
- Christopher Hudspeth, Let's Remember What's Really Important
i've been trying to be more thankful these days, because looking back on the past week &this week, i really have been pretty self-absorbed :/
so thank God for amazing friends who encouraged me, cheered me on &checked up on me first thing when i got back,
and for wonderful colleagues who messaged me, took over my duties &encouraged me to have faith <3
life is so much better with you guys around (: 
running some errands, dinner, being mistaken for being uni students again (hell YEAH), then being laughed at by bus drivers on the way home.
thank God for these girls who are here in these difficult times <3 "We will miss it all because, as with almost everything, it is so much easier to feel nostalgia than regret. We will see the good parts, no matter how unable we are to focus on them in the moment."
- Chelsea Fagan, One Day, We Will Miss This
forgive me for the negativeness,
but this week really hasn't been a good one. it feels like he's never left, and that he's still alive, yet seeing the whole thing as a reality unfold before my eyes was (and still is) really heart wrenching.
so i'd do what i'm used to doing. i'd bury myself in work, and hopefully, time will pass quickly &the feeling will fade. and when that happens, maybe everything will feel normal once again. 1931-2012
R.I.P. my beloved grandpa <3
to the only other in the family with asthma,
the only other in the family who hates durians,
the only other in the family who shared the same ambition as i did (except he achieved it),
the one who used to rear chickens for us because it was healthier,
the one who used to scold my dad &uncles who tried to wake us up early in the morning,
the one who used to ride out early in the morning just to get us breakfast,
and the one who i believe still loves us unconditionally, despite the mistakes we may make.
rest in peace, gong gong.
i love you <3
this is the part of me that you're never gonna ever take away from me. happy birthday, my best catfriend (:
i love youuuu <3
i started the day out pretty badly, considering the fact that i went to sleep in a not so fantastic mood, but the rest of the day turned out pretty good, &i hung out with dz &sab, just passing the time on sab's awesome birthday. also met the rest of the gang at house of seafood at yck (YES IT IS PRETTY DARN FAR) for an awesome seafood dinner (:
on a separate note, please let this week be a good week.
a few incidents of negativity &sadness really adds dents to my weekends.
"At the end of the day, maybe joy is in the Not-Okay. Maybe it isn’t to be found in cookie-cutter lives in sterile rooms behind white picket fences, but in the squidgy details, at the blurred edges of our lives that make us squint. Maybe the only position in which we can encounter the divine is with our backs against the wall.
Maybe it is only when we are blinded by tears that we can really see clearly at all."
- Donna Shute, It's Okay To Be Not-Okay
bon voyage, dear didi! :(
and while i wish to avoid sounding so negative,
my grandpa's back in hospital again, after being discharged on thursday. and when he's so far away, it really makes a person feel lost and helpless.
roars.
p.s. sadness is bad for the soul. and probably the wallet, when you feel like retail therapy should be involved. dear kindle,
please live again. i miss you :(
love,
your sad owner who now has to read off her laptop. "Underneath the outer layer we’re these coarse tangles of fears and mental blocks and sense memories and the older we get the more they just build and build. Sometimes we want nothing more than to be able to “let go” and leave the past in the past where it belongs, but these things imprint, in a way. They brand us. We can’t get rid of them and we wouldn’t be ourselves without them.
We promise ourselves we’re going to stop letting ourselves get hurt. We wrap ourselves in impenetrable cocoons, or we try to. But it doesn’t really work that way — as much as we want to become immune, become untouchable, we can’t be: the world still wants to play and we can’t really say no. We’re just as fragile and breakable as we’ve always been; we just have more layers on this time around."
- Mila Jaroniec, What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us Something
so it's graduation season now,
and it really feels like my graduation was just a few months ago. perhaps it's the whole idea of putting something behind and starting something new which always seems to make people cast aside their grudges, or perhaps it's merely to make things less awkward, but while everyone threw everything aside, i found it hard to do so myself. perhaps it's the whole snowballing effect of how it essentially affected me, or perhaps i'm just using it as a perfect underlying cause of one of the hardest years of my life. whatever it is, i'd just have to find a way to let go, because it's really tiring to be even a teeeeeeny bit unhappy.
on a small, happy note,
thank God for impromptu meetings with wonderful friends <3
we're all (finally) in the same country! (even though only for awhile) :P 
rayban 'harry potter' glasses!
we realized that it made all of us look really similar to each other. hahaha.
and, on a crazy, happier note,
HAPPY GRADUATION to zhen, kai, alvin, kristen, evon &a wholeeeee bunch of my other awesome friends, and welcome to the working world :P
<3 "My sister, Greta, and I were having our portrait painted by our uncle Finn that afternoon because he knew he was dying. This was after I understood that I wasn’t going to grow up and move into his apartment and live there with him for the rest of my life. After I stopped believing that the AIDS thing was all some kind of big mistake. When he first asked, my mother said no. She said there was something macabre about it. When she thought of the two of us sitting in Finn’s apartment with its huge windows and the scent of lavender and orange, when she thought of him looking at us like it might be the last time he would see us, she couldn’t bear it. And, she said, it was a long drive from northern Westchester all the way into Manhattan. She crossed her arms over her chest, looked right into Finn’s bird-blue eyes, and told him it was just hard to find the time these days."
- Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell The Wolves I'm Home
so far, this has been one amazing book.
but it remains uncompleted thanks to a dead kindle. i really need to call amazon.
on a separate note, i had another completely wonderful weekend packed with family dinners, random impromptu meet ups with the usual gang, after church lunch with my girls &the dictator at iluma aka the new bugis+! (:
have a great week people! (: 
my sunday lunch date: DADDY!
together with my sis, didi &lembu (: truffle fries, eggs benedict &apple juice after a crazily hearty mcdonalds breakfast. my stomach is getting too pampered on weekends :/
happy sunday! (: 
