Uni Woes
today’s my day off work. i didn’t have much to do, that isn’t work or school related, nor had i anything planned. i mean, i tried to do something unusual yesterday morning, and went for a 10 minute rollerblading around the parking lots infront. i think that was a big mistake. first, it was too fucking cold. i almost froze my leg hair off. secondly, i realised that such a long hiatus from rollerblading resulted me me having sore bones and muscles today. i could barely wake up, much less walk around.
but i did go out anyways, just because i was bored and trying to avoid obvious chores (read: clean my damn room). Had to sell some textbooks that i had been too lazy to bring to uni to sell. It was a wasted effort though. apparently uni doesn’t sell things for us till term starts. weird policy i say. in my little trip though, i got distracted by slovvy and ruby, who was as hyper as ever. we sat down and had a long gossip.
see, little miss cheater, who’s still undergoing the prep course, have somehow managed to progressed from the last few courses in general. i am not saying i doubt her intelligence, i believe she’s smart, but terribly lazy and a horrible plagiriser. however, when i met her on the bus yesterday, i discovered something really odd: she failed computing yet again. i understand people who have little to no interaction with computers before would have problems. that’s not hard to understand. she however, requested all kinds of help from the lecturer, and infact had TWO lecturers helping her with technology. to fail twice, and blaming it on the curriculum, the school timetable, and all her classmates (yes, she blames US for her failure), she takes the prize. slovvy said she won’t talk to anyone this term, and is terribly angry with the class. 
luckily, i am no longer with the class, otherwise i be in the path of her angst.
secondly, she suddenly and turned to ask me a few questions i know will spell trouble. “in uni, you don’t have to attend lectures right? it’s recorded right?” half her problems with coping with classes has NOTHING to do with the tight packed schedule. she has absolutly no work whatsoever. however, she’s terribly lazy. the first thing she ever does when she gets home is sleep. back during the ramadan month, she blames fasting for making her tired. now she blames the timetable for making her too tired to study.
but, i did warn her. yes you can skip classes. yes, some classes are recorded. this doesn’t mean you don’t attend classes either. the reason why there are less time for classes is because everyone’s too busy, and you have got tonnes of research and shit. she’s like “oh, don’t worry, i can handle it.” when i pointed out that lecturers would be too busy to attend to her questions as well, she was like, “i am a very independent student, i don’t ask teachers anything anyways.” yes woman, and that’s why you sat down with shaun for an hour after class every friday last term - to check out how his life is?
anyways, let’s ignore her. she annoys me even when i am not studying with her.
Ruby attends uni now, and ran into some problems. She’s in accounting (like most Asian students do), and while she got credit average for her electives, she failed her majors. O.o that poses a little problem. she’s fairly upset, not at the failure, but at the costs the failure is incurring. sigh. money is the root of all evil.
after i came home though, it appears my housemates were having a conference. one of those summer residers they had over when i first moved in, joey, was here to visit. he studies masters in accountancy in uni (asian again). after exchanging some courtesies, i queried after his exams. one of those days while i was looking for jordan and the uni admin peeps (to hurry up already with my app), i bumped into him finishing his exams with a look of consternation on his face. he was not happy, and felt he failed and was terribly worried.
and he did failed it.
He is terribly upset, and was over to discuss about his future plans. he doesn’t dare to go home, for the shame of his failure. but for another thing, he recognises now that accountancy perhaps isn’t the right course for him, and management might have been. he wants to stay on though, and decide on his next step in a more methodical manner, rather than being excluded from uni and having no particular choice. this is his second failure.
After warning him about dimia’s stance though, he has decided he will apply for CIT and then withdraw from UC altogether, so that he doesn’t have to explain his actions to DIMIA.
The thing about both cases though, isn’t about failure. hell, my failure is probably way more than theirs. It’s just, to gain some degree, ANY degree, that wouldn’t require them to use language skills, and being more practical as well, they chose paths that they know they are not meant for, or they just chose paths that look right. yes, interest might not be able to bring you money. but failures are just about as damaging to your cv too. think about it before venturing. and now joey’s so horribly broke too, he’s not sure how much he can hang on.
this is sounding a little familiar :p
at any rate though, joey said once he’s done with CIT, or whatever he does next, he might open a school in China when he goes back. an English school for people like him, but directed at kids generally. he said it’s good business. then, he asked if i would go over and teach. LOL?
here’s my tiny contribution to jake’s 4th of July…. albeit it’s a virtual contribution! (no stop staring at the name dammit)
technorati tags:failures, school, university, life, woes, problems, asian, choices, personal, blog, exams
bullies
It’s hard to get local news from home when the more officious papers decided to go pay-to-read. still, thanks to a few bloggers, i have been getting random news from home, albeit sometimes late.
it seems of late, videos of people bullying each other have been surfacing (search for miri girls bullies in youtube), and they seem to involve lots of girls. funnily, i actually found that surprising. i guess, when i read “bullies” i always expect both the victims and the perpertrator to be guys rather than girls. i came from an all girls’ school. while we didn’t have any outright bullying (threats were called out, but… nothing usually happens), everything were settled in sports, verbal matches, psychological abuse, but nothing obviously physically violent.
i don’t know what to say, except perhaps while physical abuse can be painful, and obviously scarring, but psychological abuse can be a pain to bear as well.
What made it sadder to watch these videos were:
1) The victims remain quiet, in general. sometimes, they don’t even dare to sob, or cry.
it reminded me of the times when i kept quiet when i dad canes me. the only reason i could give behind such a silence is so “as not to incite further reaction from the beater”. i mean, if you check out the miri girls video, whether she said yes or no, they have already concluded that she ratted out on them anyways. so either ways, you still get the same amount of beating, may as well keep quiet.
then again, since it is my peers, i might have fought back anyways and bitten them to death. the few times my dad made me snap, or my mum, i actually fought back. that kinda resulted in a few pained gums though, lotsa fist fights, and obviously lotsa pain. but i fought back, and they now have scars for trying to beat me up (caning became something i got used to, dad decided that caning was no longer enough).
2) the guys obviously bo lan ji (no balls)
li na eh, you watch girls kena punched, slapped, kicked, pulled at, and all you do is just hold the damn camera, and tell them to stop it? or even one last slap? bo gei ga, what happened to chivalry? oh yer, i forgot, if it’s girls’ fight, you just watch and jack off to girls fighting it out aye? or you too scared to get caught in between? kan ni na.
3) girls who wana act tough.
this was somethng, i guess, i picked up from secondary school. throughout my 11 years in St Marg’s, i realised that those “popular” girls, or “tough” girls, are only so because they have an audience, a clique, a bunch of supporters. but at the end of the day, if i throw you outside of that comfort zone, how tough are you? can you survive with no mum, no dad, no easy way to get money, no easy way to survive?
you can beat people up now, to get your way done, to threaten people not to rat on you. in the working world, sans obviously a few people in a few countries (read: the mafia), there’s only so much you can do, so far you can progress.
would be funny though, when 10 years down the road, they go to their customers, “chee bye, you better buy this product or i fuck your head up” lol…
4) the victim looked like she could do with a hug.
what would i do to be able to know who she is, so she gets a hug from me 
everything will be all right… eventually. memories of it will eventually serve to be lessons for us in the future. funnily, someone once told me, “it’s funny what made us outcasts in the past now serves to make us well liked.”
i must admit, i lived a luckier life than that girl, and few other kids, in the videos. because of the way i was brought up, school bullies were the least of my concerns. while i did not really have much friends from those 11 years of my life, those 11 years taught me to treasure what friends i have, to be what they are not, and how to be a real friend. admittedly, now some of them are firm and good friends with each other though, but those years were a horror in “materialism”.
girls were just being friends with each other because 1) they are rich, 2) they are pretty, 3) they are popular.
how far a road i have travelled.
i love you rosie! and sheetle… and yj, and ah ma… and… you all know who you are.
interestingly, i just realised, those 4 “hyperventilators”… we all learned piano at one stage didn’t we? :O
technorati tags:bullies, school, girls, life, growing, maturing, friends, fights, personal, abuse
Calculations
i have so many things on my mind now, i am not sure where to begin.
Firstly, i have just filed tax returns. well i did that on saturday actually but i was working alot of plans out in my head. it got pretty bad though, because while i did do my tax returns online, they have a disclaimer stating that “it will only be an estimate of your actual returns because it depends on blah blah blah blah blah.” and this morning i woke up in the middle of a nightmare whereby i got back 100 bux instead of the 2700 i was expecting.
needless to say, i didn’t pop back to bed straight after.
What it did showed me though, was that every year, i can possibly save up to 3000 bux (after tax returns as well) from my pay. i have since set my tax rates right, but if i save properly on my own, that would be my end of financial year savings. i can do a few things with that.
1) give dad some money
2) buy myself a volunteer work trip (a la STA travels)
3) study some courses via distance learning that has nothng to do with my degree at all.
obviously there are reasons and arguments behind all those pointers as well, which is why my mind’s all warped up.
1) dad’s fine with his “investments” and stuff. however, mum always have the potential to ruin something, e.g right now she suddenly came up with this 10k bill from i don’t know where that she owed some government body. dad’s not very impressed. i just want to send something back though, because i know dad’s scrimping and saving for fear of a thousand calamities and “what if”s., which isn’t a bad thing to be doing, but that means he’s not enjoying his retirement like normal retirees are supposed to do.
2) STA travels’ ideas aren’t very bad. but for the same amount of money, i did alot more in myanmar and spent more time watching those developments than i would with STA. however, their programs are exactly what i want to do: provide education to needy kids. i just need to justify those costs to myself… but if i can really save those money up and shet, i can afford about one volunteer trip a year. and i think that’s awesome. i have been wanting to do something similar to that myanmar trip since i left myanmar, and this might be one of my last few remaining chances (before i grad that is).
3) this is obviously… too much work! 
but would be interesting on my cv, particularly if it includes languages AND computing stuff. this came into my head recently because… well jake said he wants to come here to study. partly to be with me, partly to help out coz i have crazy housemates and it’s driving him nuts. so i went to uni to ask if he could get advance standing for all the crap he studied (trust me he studied so much crap it’s not funny… i am just amused it didn’t include stuff like “how to make a stuff teddy”).
part of the reason why i went personally rather than email that convenor involved was cause that nutjob didn’t reply jake’s email. it’s the busy time of the year anyways, so fairly understandable. however, when the moment he laid his eyes on me, he went CRAZY! he was like “oh, why didn’t i see you before” and “you sure you don’t want to try computing?” and “we have things not related to maths!” the entire 2 hour conversation. yes TWO HOURS! he went crazy trying to convince me to join, change my degree, my life.
i am not saying IT is a bad degree, it just ISN’T my area of interest, because it contains maths. i told him that. and the furthest i am really interested in is how to make games and everything along that line - PROGRAMMING. but programming requires me to know algorithms. so no. no way.
but i don’t mind learning some c++. or c#.
right after all that crap, i was browsing through some sections in the bookshop as per normal (stalking books is a good habit), and something leaped out. it was probably there before, but… it said “GAMES PROGRAMMING’ and “MOBILE GAMES PROGRAMMING” with pictures of things that look like 2D Mario brothers in it. i wanted to eat that book. i took it as a sign from God i should eat that book one day. but otherwise, nar… maths isn’t my interest, especially when it is something that looks like some broken protons and electrons or something.
but languages… i would love to learn some languages. like swahili. *sigh*
maybe, if i pawn off my entire novel collection, i can do all of these things 
technorati tags:money, tax, returns, languages, studies, volunteer, programming, questions, ideas, personal, blog
sewing, patching and altering
Since i have started work, i have lost a wooping 15kg or so. or more. that meant alot of things for me. pants and clothes that i bought previously either started fitting me again (those that i bought thinking i was a certain size), or they start to drop off me (those that i bought that was definitely my size.). some of them have completely dropped of me, and i am feeling annoyed.
that’s a grand total of like, 5 pairs of jeans or so, and about 4 skirts or something, and that’s excluding those that i actually WANT TO WEAR.
include the fact that i am short as compared to the australian sizes, i have lotsa pants that are not only dropping off me, they are literally cleaning the floors.
i ignored those factors initially, because they were not affecting me very much other than the occassional uncomfortable airy feeling around my ass when the pants have dropped below a certain point.
but the rain the past few weeks resulted in me coming home like some wet furry animal, trudging both MUD and rainwater through the kitchens and my room.
then, on friday night, my pants was consistently dropping below my arse crack line. i spent most of the night at work trying to keep my ass away from viewing point, and pulling up my pants. then nicole came up to me, “oi, guess what.”
“what” i snapped a little while trying to concentrate on my gazillion orders.
“i walked in on table 25 checking out your arse” table 25’s literally situated right behind my arse “and they kept on talking and talking about it.”
“oh great.” i stopped my ordering, went behind the wall and pulled up my pants again.
i know i could get belts, but there’s only so much it can do vs lengthy pants and such. besides, i am STILL losing weight, since, as i told emma, i am being “qi shou de” (lose weight due to being pissed off).
i grabbed those handful of pants and skirts that i have, and went to malls over a span of 2 days. and seriously… they are charging me 28 bux for taking them in, and 16 bux for making them shorter.
it’s like a fucking penalty for being thin and short, or losing weight and being short. NOW i know why people can’t be bothered to lose weight here. YOU LOSE MONEY TOO! gah.
gah, i am going to find some sewing classes tomorrow. fuckers.
technorati tags:sewing, classes, jeans, clothes, alterations, ass, pants, losing, weightloss, short, personal
Cocooned
sorry for the sudden dearth of posts. i have been terribly busy at work and other issues with regards to uni studies that i couldn’t think of any time to write, much less anything that had sound anything coherent anyways.
Well, to put things simply, things between me and the “oriental express” (or so the kitchen calls those inseperable siamese chinese girls) have pretty much exploded beyond understanding. Mel felt i was blowing things a little out of proportions for the minor things, and i know somewhere inside me felt the same too. but i guess all those tiny things build up too. I walked outta work on monday night because they were just snubbing me, and then behaving as if i was the trainee there, and huffed and puffed at me with all their attitudes combined.
On other nights, they had pretend i don’t exist… they tried to create cliques in a corner and talk in their dialects, so as to make me feel excluded. on other nights, they had rather screw things up than listen to me teach them stuff, and resulted in a couple of complains. i sighed, told my managers that they are fucking retarded, and this was their response to my managers when they told them to get their act together, “CHERYL IS A BAD PERSON! I WON’T EVER TALK TO HER AGAIN! I HATE HER! SHE SHOULD BE NICER WHEN TALKING TO ME!!”
erm…
admittedly, my tone isn’t the best during busy nights, or when i am frustrated. let me try and explain this, and i doubt they realise it either. my bosses tells me to tell them shit. if they fuck up, i get fucked over too. so sometimes, when i have told them 20 times over to do something, and all they do is commit the same mistakes and they still tell me “i know i know!”, obviously i get annoyed. and on busy nights, i don’t have time for niceties. surely you are not so fucking princessy that i have to say all my “pleases,” and “thank yous” and what not bullshit. if i am going to pepper them so nice and fully, while having the biggest sections every night (i have been chucked on the 6th section for 3 weeks in a row now), i won’t get anything done.
honestly woman, i am not your damn servant. get over yourself. everyone knew that tones aren’t the best at times, people get over it. if you want me to go down on my knees and beg you to right your mistakes, you have alot of thinking coming. especially if i get yelled at cause you fucked up.
we had a company meeting today as well, so hopefully everything that they mentioned (which covers a major part of my concerns anyways) would actually be followed suit. because other than the siamese princesses, we also have the drama ditsys (yes, i seem to have colourful characters wherever i go).
See, we have this girl called Gemma at work. 2 months or something short ago, she brought in a cousin to work, and that cousin, Amy, brought in her step sister, Winnie, into the job. the three of them are… very generally all right. as in, if they are talking to customers or cleaning up, there isn’t much major problems. but all are like 16, boy crazy, each with their own personal problems (not that anyone is clear of it anyways), and 2 of the 3 are very obviously lazy, and another 2 of the 3 are very very ditsy.
last sunday, all 3 went to a guy’s home to watch some movie, and suddenly, the newest girl, Winnie, got up crying and weeping dramatically and called up the whole family. apparently Gemma was “flirting knowingly” with the guy, whom she apparently liked, and Gemma knew. and curiously, the whole family stood by Winnie’s side, just because Gemma ran away with her boyfriend last year. and it ended up making the workplace very tense amongst those three.
so for the last week, poor Winnie’s fragile heart was… very fragile. she got to do her first sections though, after finishing a 20 minute crash course. attached herself by my side for the whole night and was really careful with her orders. i didn’t have much time to look after her though, since i took over 4 bookings that night, spread over 2 sections as some girl called in sick. but like i said, she did them all right.
however, that meant she’s semi ready to keep on taking on sections. however, she didn’t felt that way. when we gave her her own section for a third time on friday, she didn’t want to do it because “we have enough girls on tonight.” she was SO adament that she WILL NOT do a section, she won’t even greet the customers when they say down. she just sat in the coffee machine area to chat. so finally, Mel told her if she doesn’t want to do her job, she can fuck off home. Winnie actually CRIED and STOMPED home.
how retarded.
tonight she came in, and started announcing everywhere loudly that what was good about tonight is that Mel is not working. erm…
Really girls, if you are not ready to join the workforce, please stay in your goddamn cradle. we aren’t kindergarten teachers trying to coodle you.
*sigh*
technorati tags:waitress, restaurant, job, work, girls, kids-at-work, bitch, personal, blog, work
