For everyone around the world who is missing someone…
You don’t have to love someone to miss him/her.
:: Mixed Media (on postcard) - Created on 11th July 2008 ::
We all know that most actors are better off being actors only (note: Lindsay Lohan and Scarlett Johansson). There are of course exceptions. Here, I present three of my favourite onscreen dueting moments in romantic comedy flicks I really enjoyed watching.
#1 Amanda Peet and Ashton Kutcher belting out Chicago’s If You Leave Me Now
…in A Lot Like Love
I had a great time watching Oliver and Emily evolve throughout the show. Their impromptu mini road trip is spontaneously romantic… and the song came at the right time with very apt lyrics indeed, for this couple took long enough — chasing and waiting on each other before they finally got together.
#2 Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant warbling Way Back Into Love
…in Music and Lyrics
Drew and Hugh are almost veterans at the romantic comedy genre, and of course putting them together is a sure-win formula. Who knew they sounded so good together?
#3 Cameron Diaz and Ethan Hawke singing Elton John’s Bennie and The Jets
…in A Life Less Ordinary
This movie is simply ridiculous and borders very much on insanity, but nevertheless it is a lovely treat to watch Cameron and Ethan together. Their drunken duet is hilarious and makes you want to jump in, knock back a few tequila shots and join them in their shenanigans.
I have to admit it, I always wondered what it would be like to a divorcee (even before I am anywhere near marriage!), abandoned, used and quite very lost. It has something to do with how deranged our society has become these days. With divorce rates rocketing up, up and beyond nowadays, it *almost* seemed inevitable that marriage will end up in divorce and made people lose faith in what is also a holy union, an institution everyone used to believe whole-heartedly in.
Emmy winning The Starter Wife, starring gorgeous Debra Messing (gawd I love her), a print-to-screen HBO miniseries, about Molly Kagan who split with her director husband and has to live with the humiliation and alienation thrown at her by the stylish, flashy and mercenary social circle that she and her husband used to rub shoulders with. Along the way, she’s forced to face the annoying prick aka her ex’s new girlfriend, dates a man who is totally way below her league, enjoys the relentless pursuit of a rather charming older man and lends a shoulder to her friends with equally distressing life crises of their own.
Molly is real. Molly is klutzy. Molly is emotionally vulnerable.
She jumps at you from the screen with her bubbly laughter and her endearing idiosyncrasies. She has great hair, flawless skin and impeccable fashion sense. I love her accent, and that wide-eyed look she has when she hears of something utterly unbelievable. You want to be her friend. You want to help her kick her ex in the balls, and laugh with her when he came running back to her because of reasons you can find out for yourself when you watch the series!
Best of all, they are filming a complete new series following the miniseries’ success! May misadventures, cheer and lots of hot men follow Molly wherever she goes! Can’t wait to see how her romance department unfolds… meanwhile if you haven’t seen The Starter Wife, get crackin’!
To celebrate my thirtieth College Diaries post, I shall divulge the secret of having a great college social life, aside from the apparent reasons such as possessing stunningly attractive bodily features, unlimited financial resources or an already well-established social network, or you lucky SOB, all of the above. Since I don’t particularly boast any of the above qualities, settling for the next best thing is the only viable option available to me, and everyone else…for example: YOU.
We all have access to this one thing called our very own personal timetable. Almost all of us have a love-hate relationship with ours. Our timetable is unique to every college-going individual, from the ungodly morning econometrics lectures (where besides a few suck-ups, nobody shows up until the few weeks leading up to the final exams) to the godly late night astronomy tutorials (where you get to cosy up to that cute Physics major guy sharing a telescope and observing Venus together).
I personally had the unfortunate experience of having lectures and tutorials back to back for eight hours, where lunch for me meant swallowing sandwiches at breakneck speed in between classes for one entire semester! Not fun at all, if you asked my stomach. I didn’t even have time to stop and stare at my cutie — I know exactly along which hallway he sits, at what time and in between which classes I have.
Some days, timetable-permitting and if I’m lucky enough, he’ll appear completely off schedule at the same place, and I’ll take a long, sweet moment pretending to grab a drink at the vending machine…admiring the way he runs his fingers over his head in a frustrated manner, thumbing through pages after pages of thick, intellectual-looking thread-bound books. After all the bitching about our timetable, you can’t deny that there are some nice moments we can thank our schedule for.
You may disagree with me, but I am undoubtedly certain that everyone’s favourite part of the timetable is, yes you guess it, the parts where it’s blank, says nothing, and could only mean one thing: endless ridiculous gossipy conversations, lunching with buddies plus scoping out cuties in the cafeteria, curling up with a book in your corner in the library, doing the dirty with your latest conquest in your dorm room, catching much needed Zs…basically an extremely valuable add-on to your social calendar.
You have to make this work yourself, because like I said, everyone has their own classes, own schedules, own things-to-do (including secret rendezvouses with Miss X in the empty stairwell in between astrophysics and Descartes). Go through the classes that you want to take for the next semester carefully, making notes on when the lectures and tutorials are, and map them out. You may find a timetable builder program on your college website, or if you’re nifty enough, create your own program to plot out your schedule.
First things first, you’ve got to free up spacious prime real estate during lunchtime, that’s when everyone will flood the food court and you’d have learnt in probability that chances are higher for you to see and be seen.
If you’re much sneakier, try to source out where your eyecandy hangs out often and the watering holes of the cuties, and plan your routes between walking from the library to tutorial so that you’ll pass by those places. You know as well as I do that one peek at your crush instantly brightens up your day.
Leave the evenings open as much as possible. Or deliberately plan FOR evening classes so you can casually ask the girl/guy from your class to “grab a bite” for dinner “or something”…you don’t need me to teach you, you know how the game goes.
With that, I shall wish you guys good luck, and have fun planning your timetable for the new semester! 
Love, agentjade
I’ve decided that enough is enough when it comes to blogging about school. Come on, it’s the summer. Yes, I have an embarrassing confession, I do miss school a teeny bit (I was shopping around online for modules for next semester just the other day) but let’s throw the books away and think about other things for a change.
Single in the city, not like I am terribly worried, there are a bunch of pretty fun things you can do and it is strangely very enjoyable to be in the company of yours truly. (All the loners in the world, rejoice with me!) What with a whole stack of intellectual-sounding titles from the library stacking on my desk, and Obama on my bed (I WISH — No, he’s actually on the cover of June’s edition of Reader Digest Asia, which I’ve been happily devouring these days)
Working. And switching from one job to another…they all seemed like a summer staple. Excluding of course the lucky SOBs who get to travel the world, I’m sorry not everyone’s the illegitimate child of a billionaire or resides in the treasury. Not that I want to, really. My new obsession? Trying out different kinds of work in different industries until I’ve exhausted my options…admin, service, sales, tutoring, industry, education, tourism, fashion (abit)… I’m just short of being a waitress/barista (oh wait that’s service too).
I really wish I could be a lifeguard though — prancing up and down a beach in red and yellow and scouting out topless boys sound like a really sweet idea — but I think getting saved (instead of saving others) would be a faster option for me.
Shopping. AHH. I can really get used to not shopping at all, considering my very worrisome conversation with my folks the other day about how I’m going to pay my college debts back to them (hey, cut me some slack, I still have three-ish years to go!!)
Reading..for fun! How I miss the feeling of reading something other than a textbook, lecture notes or some equally unpalatable disgustingly “oh-so-intellectual” journals blahblahblah. Give me a break and please get yourself a life along the way as well, pick up something that you actually read for fun! Ok, not everyone reads Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar (which incidentally has more Chanel/Tod’s/Marc Jacobs ads more than actual articles) for pleasure. I personally love non-fiction books that talk about hilarious travel stories and ideas about the climate and human evolution, and the occasional chick lit (of which I only flip to the saucy, sexy bits to read and proceed to chuck it aside)
Watching movies. Ok I can sense RIAA, FBI and every other global legal department zoning in on me now. Yes I watch them for free and online. There it’s out. What’s a near-broke debt-accumulating student to do? The guilty pleasure is mine. Now let me get that movie loading. And please, stop taking movies off the sites already. You can’t stop us. Ever. I will however pay for one in the theater when I find a film that’s worth my measly ten bucks.
Going to the museum. Did I mention that just by showing my matriculation card I can get into every museum in Singapore for free? It’s good to be a college student sometimes. The Asian Civilizations Museum boasts an amazing collection of exhibits and is very well-organized, with different geographical regions in Asia separated into various galleries. The Art Museum was however a bore, compared to the private galleries that dot the quaint streets of Bugis and in places like the Raffles Hotel. And the ceilings should be much much higher for a grander feel. I should probably have majored in Fine Arts instead because it looks as though they seriously need some avant garde, exciting artists around here.
Going to the beach. Melanoma here I come! Recently having developed a fear for sunlight thanks to all the medical journals reporting about different types of skin cancers and sun damage and whatnot, plus the fact that I’m enjoying a vampiristic lifestyle sleeping during daytime and prowling around after sundown, that’s not exactly a super appealing option. But I promise myself, some day this summer I will soak some rays…and risk cancer.
Exercising. Looking good has never felt so good. Enjoying a good swim in the summer heat and pounding on the sidewalk in my old and very seasoned track shoes and feeling a warm glow on my cheeks. Now that’s pure calorie-burning bliss. Let’s work to keep this high metabolic rate up!
Exploring the city. Or simply, being a tourist in my own country. Grab a map and start walking everywhere. But trust me, chuck the map and get moving in the city. I was beginning to be so reliant on maps that just the other day I forgot my way around the part of town that I was supposed to be most familiar with! Pretending to be a tourist is perfectly alright but turning into one is not! And let’s not get started on the time when I was shooed out of a temple in my very casual summer ensemble of tanktop and shorts.
Eating. Good food. Bad food. Yummy food. Fast food. Fried. High-end. Cheap. Roasted chicken. Dim sum. Indonesian. Sushi. Burgers! Bars and bars of delicious, runny milk chocolate. Resembling svelte-y Calista Flockhart has its perks. Chomp on… while I imagine (like any other weight-obsessed girl) the chocolate bar end up on my thigh. Just kidding, now keep the ice cream coming.
Sleeping! Zzzzzzzzzz. Having clocked a whopping (but not yet record-breaking) 14 hours last evening till this evening, I have indeed internalised and exercised the beauty of sleep. Sleep is as legitimate an activity as reading, eating, going to school, doing “useful” things and everything else. Whoever said sleeping is overrated need to seriously get their brains checked. Did I mention I was romping with a certain Mr. Wahlberg and Miss Johansson in my dreams? In full technicolor and dreamland glory. If only every sleep is so sweet.
More to come though, are things that I wish to do in the dwindling last weeks of summer…
- Trekking/Biking/Playing tennis/Skating (in other words expending my excess energy)
- Traveling (short day or weekend trips are spiffy enough for me)
- Making new friends (how I’m going to accomplish this, I’ve no idea)
- Get cooking (in more meanings than one)
- Make a decent amount of profit by the end of summer (Profit = Paycheck - Shopping Bills)
- Get a bit of tan despite all health warnings
- More dancing (whoo hoo, make Britney proud!)
- Catching up with friends
- Find out and grab people to go for my One-Star Kayaking certification
- Swim a lot more
- Quit caffeine addiction (until school begins, that is)
- Learn something new…(fill in the blanks here)
- Watch Sex and The City and Made of Honor (back to back! fwee!)
Now, back to watching more –ahem– movies online!
Someday, hell, you probably are already doing all of them, you will find yourself doing one (or all) of these things. Don’t say I didn’t warn you in advance. This one here is speaking from ongoing experience.
1. Cyberstalking that cutie (or those cuties) on Facebook.
Admit it. How are you going to get their vital stats as easily as plugging their names into the Search box and digging up their profiles and then proceed to scour and study them like your life depends on them? (Okay, as a matter of fact, your love life DOES depend on them.) So keep scouring.
2. Being emo, angsty and all the hungover, left over feelings from your very deprived adolescence.
It feels good to feel pathetic. Just lay there staring at the ceiling, or a topless ab-elicious Mark Wahlberg life size poster on it, generally wallowing in self-pity about anything and everything. Let out a sigh that sounds like a cross between a wailing emergency siren and an enraged walrus. There, didn’t that feel so good.
3. Deny, deny, deny.
No, it’s not me. I sure didn’t do that. It’s not MY fault. He did it. She does it allll the time. Lesson #1: Always deny, ’cause it’s always worth trying.
4. Overeat, then overexercise. Repeat.
You can never be too skinny in college. You have to admit this: it always looks better to be svelte and fit then jiggly and fiddly. And you know eventually, once you start working, have kids, or indulge in relationship/marital bliss and fall into the comfort trap, you will gain the extra pounds. Prevention is better than cure, so starve yourself eat less now. Sometimes, you overeat (like me today, again), then you embark on a rigorous exercise regime to shave the calories off.
5. Fall in Love with More Than Half a Dozen Guys in One Semester. Repeat.
So many boys! So little time! You know eventually you just need one guy to be your ever-after husband, but they all look too good to pass up. (The truth is, none of them scored enough points in your book to be husband-material). Before you get protective with any of the your guys, don’t worry, we all feel the same way too. At the end of the day, the universe will work itself out, and hopefully we all get one each to adore and abuse. So spread your love and start falling in love.
Inhibitions. Everyone has them. Some have more. Some have less. For me, it’s my past, my fears, my parents, my weaknesses, me. Social norms. Caring about what others think about you. More than once I tell myself that I’m beyond caring. I am taking off this heavy-as-lead coat called Inhibitions and I’m going on my own way, I’m doing this my way, I don’t care if I’m labelled, branded and stamped on the forehead with unthinkably ugly names, but I’m going anyway. Then I would swivel around faster than the time taken for me to conceive that immensely silly decision (as though it didn’t go through my brain at all) and start running again in the same direction that I’ve always been running. And the faster I run, the further I entrenched myself in everything I’ve always believed in, and they are not necessarily all black-and-white, right-versus-wrong.
As you grow older, you start to think (or so, you would like to think) that you have more power over your decisions, your life, your relationships, your beliefs, and it is far less easier now for someone to just walk over and take that away from you. You tell yourself lovely stories, conjure up beautiful lies and paint breathtakingly heartbreakingly perfect pictures…all in the hopes of burying your deepest darkest secrets and everything you hope time will wash away but as usual, it wouldn’t, and the process begins again. The fact is, as days, weeks and years pass by, the ashes settle and the rain comes down, and all the debris from your everyday life keeps coming in and adding on and everything just gets mixed up in a whole runny goo called Your Life.
There’s no way telling which part comes from where and definitely impossible to take up a scalpel and carve it right out of your heart. If only digging up the ghosts of your life is as clean-cut as amputation. I guess the only other way is breathe deep and try to let go, from deep within, bit by bit, even if it’s just a fraction of a nano-piece everyday.
Listen: Frou Frou’s Let Go
It’s freaking warm. It rains at the most inopportune times and you feel hot under the collar and there’s no-one cute within a ten-mile radius. It’s pathetic, but you deal. That’s summer for me. No lectures = no cute college boys to ogle (even if it’s the back of their heads most of the time) = bleah
1. Decided that I am probably the worst tutor in the world who’s best at being perky and cheery for no rhyme or reason at all.
2. Watched a pelican (ok, my bad, I just found out it’s actually not a pelican) spoonbill-like bird puke out two fish, and most of my friends who heard about this thought it especially hilarious. I just thought it was utterly disgusting.
3. Drank WAY too many cups of designer coffee. Beating myself up for spending good money on Starbucks. Total count this week so far: 3 tall cups (and I ought to stop)
4. No. of times I-stayed-out-late-and-folks-got-pissed-at-me this week: 2 and counting
5. No. of books currently reading (and will probably never finish reading): 3
6. Looking miserably at my electric pink toe nail polish and wondered why I even ever followed Lauren Conrad’s summer fashion advice.
7. No. of times being called skinny/too small this week: Countless as usual (I repeat, I am not undernourished!)
8. Thought that everyone (and I mean EVERYfreakingBODY) in my city walks slower than me and I feel like bashing them on the back of their heads everytime they block my way. And then I realised, I should just slow down myself. The world isn’t going anywhere and is still going to be here when I’m gone.
9. Being a vegan is only hot if you are Natalie Portman. I’ll stay a happy omnivore thankyouverymuch. Yowza!
(Note: Blogging at 3.30am is never a good idea!)
I love clothes. I really do. Cashmere, ruching, bootcut, monochrome, sequins, and hemlines that skim over the knees. But I could almost never find clothes that fit me just the way I want them to. It’s either the colour, the feel of the fabric or the way it doesn’t hug my skinny bitch waist snugly. And I swear, looking for something that I really want to bring home and that I can afford on my measly allowance is as easy as finding Mr. Perfect in a sea of mismatched personalities.
But I’m itching to buy something. Retail therapy takes on a whole new meaning when you don’t have steam to blow off from that last awkward encounter with Mr. Probably Right, or angsty emotions to kill from crushing on your already-attached best friend, or that you were ticked off at work by your apparently-not-so-brilliant boss. You just want to buy something, for reasons unknown. And when that happens, I find my feet steering in the direction of Borders, and then I buy something I like and live happily ever after for a few weeks with it…or until the right dress comes along.
