Weekly Update: Notre Dame, Playhouse, Running, and Pride
13.11.06 - -
(a round up of events 1 Nov - 12 Nov)

1st Nov Wednesday - Interactive: CNS 2. Professorial tutorial. Was feeling very tired and busy and a bit ill from overeating haha. VCF Council meeting later at night on "Tiredness and Busyness" hahaha! Was quite energised/uplifted by the session.

2nd Nov Thursday - A very slow lecture by a doctor on child psychology which made me and Dawn think a lot about our own childhoods, issues of trust/rejection/identity etc. The lecture didn't tell us anything new, but it reminded me of certain things I'd felt very strongly about when I was young, which made me want to cry at points. Seriously man. Why does thinking about my childhood childhood in general affect me so strongly? I must have been so dysfunctional as a child. Paeds is making me and Dawn get rather introspective heh... we have all these chats about life and things (the icky and the not-so-icky) all the time nowadays, sometimes in place of studying heh.

3rd Nov Friday - Interactive: HAEM 1. Went with Jan and Susan to borrow projector from YIH. Lunch at Science canteen. Last-minute-arranged tutorial by Dr Koh at 2pm - cerebral palsy. Later that day - Notre Dame de Paris with Viknesk and Faith (all of us got a lift to Kallang from a very kind Mong who dropped us at the only KFC in Singapore with free refill haha)! Meeting up with Faith again (all dressed up from a presentation) was great - plus Notre Dame de Paris was absolutely terrific! Followed by prolonged discussion with Viks (drily logical as always) on the subject of my ruinous love life as we made our way back to hall. :P Haha I told Steffy that Viks takes over her job when she's not around - of playing the role of the sarcastic/logical bystander who pours cold water on my sometimes raging idealism and keeps me down to earth. (She was highly approving and said, "Good! Good!") I got a message from Kok Wei telling me that we'd be the emcees for Playhouse the next day heh which led to me trying on Dawn's dresses when I got back to see if any were appropriate - but they were all much too long for me :P

4th Nov Saturday - Playhouse 2006. M3s deservingly won Best Play - full marks for class participation! Once I saw our play I knew we'd win even without seeing the M4 and M5 plays heh - it was just so good in itself, by any standard. What makes me proudest is that our class involvement increases each year and you can feel the class spirit so strong! :) Haha even lan duo chong David came down to help to move props I'm so proud of him :D :D We also won Best Costumes and Makeup and Best Props (as we would have if there were any justice at all in the world haha - considering the AMOUNT of effort Alvin and Jan and the rest of the props team put in!) We would have won Best Script too (thanks to Amanda's unbeatable flair for humour, plus the creativity of the whole cast!) if they hadn't had to give the other years something :D The Dean himself was impressed enough to seek out the scriptwriters afterwards to compliment them hee - how glorious! Someone's extreme insensitivity introduced a rather heartbreaking element into the whole day, but thankfully there were people around who went out of their way to show they cared, for which I'm very grateful :P

The M1s, M4s and M5s put up very good shows too so we had to earn our awards which makes it even better that we won them :) I was very impressed with the M1s' performance - despite it being their first year it was a good show with very high-quality acting and some future Ian Mathewses and Charles Gohs recognisable already heh (and quite a number of the cast was from KE7 hall yay :) Nick as the main character was very good haha he has a fan in me) - I forsee they'll be our greatest rivals for our remaining two years! The M5's play was very clever and well-acted as well as was the M4's - except that cos they were all set in dreary hospital settings after our zany props-laden flight of fantasy I didn't enjoy them as much as I might have otherwise heh heh.

That night Steffy called me! :) Much as the excitement of Playhouse had been, I think this was the event of the day that I enjoyed most, and it was very timely. Sigh I miss Steffy! The connection got cut off after a while though which led to us resuming it for a bit on MSN.

5th Nov Sunday - Church. Long nap. Spent most of the day languishing in melancholy and writing poetry (for which I have since been 'scolded' by Viknesk heh. "I don't know where all my time goes!" / "Argh! What did you spend Sunday doing?" / "Er...writing poetry?" / "See?!"). By the time I got down to preparing for the next day's debate it was quite late... Thank God for the usual Sunday prayer meeting at which we all shared about anything that was troubling us, which resulted in a lot of heart-to-heart discussion and lightening of gloom. Was really encouraged by Ching Mien who was the lone guy haha who explained certain things that made me feel better. I look forward to every KE CF meeting so much - no matter how despondent I am I always come away feeling very encouraged, both by God and by my 'family' in hall.

6th Nov Monday - Interactive: INFECT. I started the day dead tired. Thank God (and the coffee-giver :P) for the coffee! For the ethics debate (related to abortion) after that I think I sucked at 3rd speaker for the proposition (supporting a motion I didn't believe in personally) but we'd done our homework and I think the opposition was even less prepared than we were so proposition won...Since it was my first 'free' day after that in a long time I went to meet my mother to buy shoes. Was quite scandalised at the amount she was willing to pay for a brand her podiatrist friend had recommended heh but it's a 'health investment'. They'd better last for years and years! Dinner with parents and then back to hall. Oh yes - and Claire had a lovely surprise waiting for me in the mail! :D :D I've rarely been MORE excited over something!!

7th Nov Tuesday - Dr Ong tutorial. Pharmaco simulation. A nice long exploratory run with much-missed running buddy (first run in more than a month I think) - we took the route I used to run with Mohana last year to Kent Ridge Park and through all the science-park places back to KE. Very therapeutic!

8th Nov Wednesday - Interactive: ENDO 1. Professorial tutorial. Followed by ward assessment by Dr Ong - went surprisingly well. All parties were glad to get it over with "You don't think it's a torture for me to teach medical students is it? If not your batch then the next batch..." Heh. Evening tutorial with Dr Koh. By the time we ended we'd almost done a night call! Finally had the chance to sleep early.

9th Nov Thursday - Breakfast with the M1s in hall. Wards. 10.30 am tutorial with Dr Aw. In preparation for our ward assessment with Dr Koh, my CG anxously clerked the whole of ward 48 heh... it was a bit of an anticlimax to find out it'd been pushed to the next day. CG (led by Annie) on outreach, our responsibility - put what we already knew into the context of a system that runs throughs the Old and New Testaments - very interesting!

10th Nov Friday - Interactive: PULM 1. Bad finger day (the medical student's equivalent of bad hair days). My percussion skills, normally quite passable, completely failed me during Dr Koh's tutorial, and I made quite a fool of myself haha (probably deserved to cos my clinical skills ain't that great). Not to mention our ward assessment, for which we had actually prepared rather diligently, was a shambles, because her expectations were very different from what we thought they were. The perennial problem of looking stupid all the time because we don't know that the tutors want us to do something this way and we do it another way instead. Bad, bad, bad. Saw someone I didn't want to see. Even worse. Most terrible of all, fell out with Susan because of something tactless and teasing I said - but which I'd meant rather seriously as it was all bound up with some issues from my childhood, to which she retorted something that stung me a lot. Our first quarrel! Whoops. Heh I ended up avoiding both her and the other individual for the rest of the day. Finally printed out the b/w copies of Altitude with Viknesk, and had a long nap.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that I later ran 20 km!! Hah! This made me feel SO MUCH BETTER and completely exorcised the whole feeling of gloom and low self-esteem that had been kind of hanging over my week ever since Playhouse.

Coincidentally, Eleanor drove past me in her car as I was completing my fourth round of the A1 route (each round is 5 km - including the Law loop) and braked to chat. She almost did a double-take when she found out how far I was running (I'd been running since 7.30pm and when she met me it was 9.30pm heh) ...

Me: I'm running to let off steam!
Eleanor: Wah! That's damn-a-lot of steam!

Anyway I told her I was aiming to run each 5km in 30 min, at which she looked pretty impressed - but I didn't make it lah, I ended up doing 20 km in 2.5h instead of 2h. Most of my pace was lost in the last 5 km. By the actual half-marathon I hope I can whittle down my time to 2h or slightly over heh!

Running really makes me feel so much better. Oh dear but I think now my beloved running buddies (Jeremy - and Zichun, with whom I'm running the 21 km itself) are feeling pressurised! :D Please don't! In fact I would have been unable to run further than 10 km if I hadn't taken out my mp3 player at the 10 km mark heh because distances after 10 km get quite boring - you just can't run them without a running buddy.

Mp3 players are like steroids... they really make people run faster! I listened to worship songs which made me feel really joyful and made me run quite fast for my third round haha. In fact when I started I was only planning to run 15 km - but I was having such a good time listening to worship songs I decided to go on a fourth round after completing my third heh. It was a good way to spend time with God! :D

11th Nov Saturday - Woke up to the sight of a burger on my table ta-paued from breakfast by my very kind roommate Dawn :D Swept and mopped room (I enjoy Sat morning cleanings heh cos there're few things I'm good at these days!!). Went for lunch at the Arts canteen (which is going to be closed for renovation!) with some of the VCF hall chairs - Gillian, Hui-En, and Yanchang and Chien Huah. Went to youth group. Good session on worship.

12th Nov Sunday - Church. Back to hall after that and took long nap (this has been a week of long naps). Dinner. Read newspapers. Last prayer meeting for this sem - a good time of sharing at which we all shared one item of thanksgiving this sem as well as discussed anything at all that we wanted to talk about - I felt very blessed by the session and in fact talking to everyone - Zichun, Ching Mien, Annie (and later Dawn and Wai Kit) - removed some of the scales from my eyes and I realised that something I need to root out of my life is PRIDE. Tonight I had the revelation that all these childhood issues which have been bothering me so much all my life and especially over the last few weeks - and which caused this latest quarrel with Susan - at the root of them all is a very fierce and embittered pride. So much of why I felt that life was so hard for me is because I was just such a proud person - and there's so much unforgiveness and bitterness in me still for many things that happened during my childhood, which can be resolved by me just repenting of my pride - letting go of my offendedness and learning to love all the people who 'wronged' me when I was young. So I'm going to pray about this - spend this coming week talking to God about my pride and sorting it out before Him - giving up all the childhood hurt - and consciously rejecting negative pride from now on and seeking to live in a completely different way - a humble way. And I am quite sure that this will help me get over a LOT of issues - and that I'll be able to live life in a radically different way! :) From now on I'll try to live life in a new gear. There's little time to waste, after all. Thank God for speaking to me all the time and for showing me areas to change. I need His help so much :P And thank God for church and for KE CF!