Melbourne from a 737

Qantas. Why? Your planes tend towards old, but are still functional. Your food is good. Your stewardesses - okay, standards are falling everywhere, but you still have a few good ones working for you. Your flights are relatively cheap. If you were more organised, you would overtake Singapore Airlines easily!

I had a harrowing time getting to Australia. Two big traffic jams blocking both routes to Changi Airport, a long delay at check-in because Qantas forgot to deduct a fee, poor signage leading to us almost losing our luggage, and a flu plaguing me throughout the whole thing. You know how your ears pop as the aeroplane lands? Did you know that the pain is twenty times worse if you have viscous fluids blocking your sinuses? True facts!

Anyway I'm here, more or less. I suppose it's too much to expect these things to be easy.

Here, have a Bad Romance parody, Bad Project. It's the best lab-related one I know of. This is exactly what it's like doing a science-related PhD (having a good project is slightly better). It's subtle, but "Lady Science"'s costumes are made from common lab disposables.

The title of this post references a song. Internet cookie if you can identify it.

Going Somewhere

Scene: Kitchen, yesterday.

MOTHER: Are you going anywhere tomorrow?
ME: Yes, to Australia.
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Unbreakable Threads

I'm going back to Australia tomorrow. Already I feel the excitement, of meeting my colleagues again, of returning to my familiar bench with its pipettes and racks, of telling my favourite supervisor about all the things I got up to, of sitting down with my other favourite supervisor as we trim my progress report into something amazing (or at least dry and technical, given his preferred writing style). It's all very cruel considering I'm already at home.

Here's the thing. Home is where you spend most of your time while happy. By that definition, my lab at Monash is currently home. But I can feel Singapore itching, straining to become home again. There's that roti prata stall at ION Orchard that I love, the easy feel of the EZ-Link system (if myki was the system introduced in Singapore, it would already have several horrendous nicknames highlighting its inadequacy), the trees everywhere, the lower cost of pretty much everything...and twenty years of history that I can't ignore. This will be my home again someday, once I stop leaving. I can feel it.

Until then, I have to pull away, keep it at arm's length (or ocean's length, as the case may be). This will be home, but it can't be, yet, otherwise I won't survive being away from it for the better part of a year. I have to accept there as home, for as long as I have to be there.

I have to keep pretending to myself that there's someplace else I'd rather be. The pretense is so good that I readily believe it.

But I will come home, for good, someday.

And then I will pretend that my bench and my supervisors and all the things that belong to me and which I belong to there mean nothing to me.

Review: Google Chrome

This is the best browser ever. <3
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Update XXVIII: Food@Hawker Centre

It's surprising, the sort of things you can actually buy. Browsing a FairPrice Xpress outlet yielded bonito flakes (those delicious shavings used to garnish takoyaki and various other Japanese dishes), and starch balls which are most commonly found in bubble tea. Now that I think about it, takoyaki and bubble tea stall owners obviously get their ingredients from somewhere, but the general unavailability of these food preparations in the average grocery store makes them seem a little, well, magical.

And people wonder that while I subscribe to the traditionally feminine pursuit of shopping, my favoured retail therapy grounds are generally supermarkets. (I also like discount stores - there are always the strangest things.)

For most of the time I was home today (I also spent some time outside in the company of friends - even loners get lonely), I was at the center of a web, communication passing to me and from me and occasionally through me. I think I can honestly say that I have never sent so many emails in a single day. The heads of my lab would laugh, this must be business of usual for them, but for an underling like myself, such activity is rare. Usually I have, at most, two emails which require a response. Taking the position of some sort of operator is a strange, powerful feeling.

It is for this reason that I think I would enjoy being a secretary.

Lest I forget again, there is a very firm reason that I limit my consumption of ice kachang. Consuming the equivalent of a block of ice leaves one as equally cold as a person who just consumed a block of ice. Very, very cold. Air-conditioned food courts only make things worse.

On the subject of food courts, it occurs to me how superior they can be to restaurants. Cheaper, a wider variety of cuisines to choose from, and many of the newer ones are almost on par with a restaurant anyway. Take the Food Opera@ION Orchard (the at-sign modernhipcool thing is horrible why is it everywhere now). Excellent roti prata, even better fish curry, best Iced Milo made by a drinks stall, extremely reasonable price you'd have to go to Serangoon Road to match, elegant wooden furniture and decorative elements on the walls such that you can hardly believe you're eating in what amounts to a hawker centre. Robinsons doesn't give nearly as nice carrier bags as the ones they place your take-out in. And many of the newer shopping malls have comparable standards.

313@Somerset (the at-sign again why) also has a waitress who goes around in a Segway. Yes, around the food court. No, I don't know what she does that requires riding a Segway. Hopefully not delivery of drinks.

To change the subject completely, I have a new computer. My new personal assistant is a ThinkPad Edge, in sleek silver and glossy red. He's a last-season's Lenovo, but I have every confidence that he will handle the tasks I assign him, especially now that I engage in less gaming than I used to. He weighs a very portable 1.6 kg. His name is Magellan.

All I need is that (expensive!) laptop support I saw at IKEA, and my computing life will be complete.

This post has no point. But with this much verbosity, who needs Twitter?

Facebook

I have been persuaded to obtain an account. People who know me, you may proceed to look for me, because I'm having trouble finding you.

I feel awkwardly like one of these chickens.

EDIT: Thanks, everyone!
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Confirmation

... of Candidature. I just got an email telling me who my panel members are, and asking me to arrange a time to have a meeting with them, to decide if I'm fit to continue as a PhD student. Oral presentations and fierce questioning will be involved.

So my father just read in the newspaper that students tend to do better in exams if they've taken 10 minutes beforehand to write down all their worries on paper. Having articulated their concerns, they either realise how frivolous they are, or are able to prepare themselves to meet the challenge head-on. As the confirmation of candidature is a sort of exam for me, I'll have to try this out.

Of course I'm trying to distract myself from the terror of preparing for this thing. What do you think?

It doesn't help that my main supervisor, who will inevitably be on the panel, has THAT FACE. The one which convinces you that he doesn't approve of a word you are saying. He claims that he's just thinking and his face automatically does that without his knowledge, but given that he regularly tells fairly bad presenters that they've done a good job, I don't know if I should believe him.

What the heck. This isn't going to happen anytime soon. Time for thoughts of chicken rice and roti prata!

Back Again

I've returned for a short holiday to my home country. Which is an inherently wrong statement, but what can you do. My handphone is in my mother's possession and generally switched off, but I can be reached by email or home phone.

I look forward to seeing all of you.

Writer's Block

Best published journal article ever.

I think this even tops the article describing how to make an origami model of a DNA strand. There used to be all sorts of wonderful articles by people who not only worked in science, but also played in it.
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Payment or Else

I received a rather threatening invoice this afternoon informing me, in 26-point red Arial Black lettering, that this was my "final notice" to pay for my impromptu ambulance ride and that "payment of this outstanding amount" was "required immediately". Failure to do so, the sheet of paper informed me, would result in my "debt" being forwarded to their "collection agent" for "action". By the tone of the notice, there could be no doubt that "collection agent" was an euphemism for "hired mercenary" and that "action" would involve some manner of explosive.

This did not stop me from being pissed off that this so-called final notice was in fact the first I had heard of the matter.

I suppose I will yet again have to deal with other people's messes. Sometimes I hate my life with a passion that borders on tangible.

On a Different Note...

Casu marzu is a type of cheese, produced mostly in Sardinia, which contains live maggots.

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Happy New Year, everyone!
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