Krabi with the girls in May

On spontaneity earlier today, I agreed to an all-girls beach trip to Krabi. Ying must have known I wouldn't say no. Well, I couldn't. Ying's a great travelling companion and I know I'm in good company as I knew almost all the friends that's going. The fact that it's Krabi and I'm a beach girl at heart makes it incredibly easy for me to say yes.

Also, I happened to have already taken leave over the Labour Day weekend.  

We'll be staying in a beautiful villa with 3 bedrooms, shared amongst 5 girls. Wouldn't mind bunking alone actually as I'm already the odd one out. Pity Daffy couldn't join us but we know she'll be having a blast in US of A. 

Copped these pictures from the site off Ao Nang Paradise Resort. 

It's pretty modern looking. The place is huge. Looking forward to a really good time with the girlies. Woohoo!

I love Krabi. It's an amazing little island with clusters of smaller islands surrounding the peripheral. May is gonna be a hoot.

ASOT adventure

Good to be back in Singapore after 3 days of heavy partying at KL. I lived through alcohol poisoning, dirty toilets, glamourously purging my way to the party coupled with leg pain, back pain, hand pain (you get the drill) to tell the tale. 

Would have been more awesome only if this didn't happen. First, the MAS 370 disappearance. Now, this. Poor Malaysia under severe scrutiny for unforeseen circumstances. 

                

But we weren't affected. A few of them were gonna go for the last gig and obviously disappointed but we made up for it with our own kind of party. Club yo-ah-yo. At Movida, Scott's Garden, KL. 

Pre-drinks at Tom, Dick & Harry's bar. 

Almost broke my back running for our flight Amazing-Race-style. It was a funny chaotic scene for all 10 of us, racing against time to board our flight. Proud to say no men got left behind. 

I was first to reach the counter. People were seriously staring like I was a mad bitch, dashing towards the terminal gate. Only after I slammed my passport on the counter demanding to board the plane was I told the gate isn't open. Phew. Like delighted kids, we piled back up into a group laughing at our crazy journey across the whole airport. 

It was quite hilarious.

               

Too much had transpired in between that I probably wouldn't be able to catalogue the trip without any pictures. Some of the more memorable ones in my phone. 

Wrapped in toilet paper, Terence had no resistance at all. I'm surprised. 

               

Crazy Oh brothers. Crazier when they come in a pair. Shudders. 

               

Poor girlfriend had coffee stache smeared across the lips cos of a bet. Background: A stout lover, she joked about having a moustache. 

             

Stayed in a boutique hotel with theme rooms. Couples in the group get 'em. I bunked alone so I got the standard room but even then I was really pleased. 

               

Jo & RZ got the Beatles. 

               

Ling & Lucas got Monroe, the room I wanted. 

        

Because it comes with an open bathroom concept! Super cool. 

        

Happy party girls. 

               

Even though I came home with sore shoulders and a bad back, it was super worth it to catch the trance acts in action whom I major love - AVB & Markus Schultz. 

Reckon my bag pack was close to 10kg after filling it up with the cute mugs I bought at Sungei Wang. 

             

I'm petite. But hardy. Still, the running around and carrying for long hours had its trade off. 

        

Sigh. One bag pack did not rule the world. 

Anyway, here's a happy selfie and a crazy selfie to conclude my awesome trip!

             

             

Last two group photos for the road!

Birthday & Beef

Picked Gyu-Kaku for Nick's birthday and invited Alina & Ethan along. We went to the outlet at Holland V as Chijmes was under renovation. Food was pretty decent but overpriced. Surprised him with a chocolate cake. His favourite kind. 

               

               

Made & wrote a card for him. I love writing cards but haven't done so in a long time. My man-hunk of a boyfriend teared up at reading the card...got me all soft inside. He is such a silly little boy at heart. What a precious gift you are to me. 

My boyfriend turns 30

Cheers to value appreciation, charm & one proud ass! You're finally 30 and I love you so much more just the way you are. 

         

Not everyone turns 30 and is proud to be. Good on you baby!

And I insisted on a picture before bedtime to capture the milestone! :)

Convalescing Deux

Zzz. Second bout of tonsillitis. Round two of meds and antibiotics. Must be the haze. We need a giant fan to blow them away!

Craving for an iced cold beer to soothe my throat after dinner so we went to his parents' pub. Didn't want it to interact with my antibiotics and decided to go for a Radler. Best thing ever if you don't want to drink the real deal. I love Radler. 

Bedtime story

How is this for a pre-bedtime story? Makes me guilty for being on my phone at this hour.

What Actually Happens While You Sleep and How It Affects Your Every Waking Moment

by Maria Popova

“We are living in an age when sleep is more comfortable than ever and yet more elusive.”

The Ancient Greeks believed that one fell asleep when the brain filled with blood and awakened once it drained back out. Nineteenth-century philosophers contended that sleep happened when the brain was emptied of ambitions and stimulating thoughts. “If sleep doesn’t serve an absolutely vital function, it is the greatest mistake evolution ever made,” biologist Allan Rechtschaffen once remarked. Even today, sleep remains one of the most poorly understood human biological functions, despite some recent strides in understanding the “social jetlag” of our internal clocks and the relationship between dreaming and depression. In Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep (public library), journalist David K. Randall — who stumbled upon the idea after crashing violently into a wall while sleepwalking — explores “the largest overlooked part of your life and how it affects you even if you don’t have a sleep problem.” From gender differences to how come some people snore and others don’t to why we dream, he dives deep into this mysterious third of human existence to illuminate what happens when night falls and how it impacts every aspect of our days.

Most of us will spend a full third of our lives asleep, and yet we don’t have the faintest idea of what it does for our bodies and our brains. Research labs offer surprisingly few answers. Sleep is one of the dirty little secrets of science. My neurologist wasn’t kidding when he said there was a lot that we don’t know about sleep, starting with the most obvious question of all — why we, and every other animal, need to sleep in the first place.

But before we get too anthropocentrically arrogant in our assumptions, it turns out the quantitative requirement of sleep isn’t correlated with how high up the evolutionary chain an organism is:

Lions and gerbils sleep about thirteen hours a day. Tigers and squirrels nod off for about fifteen hours. At the other end of the spectrum, elephants typically sleep three and a half hours at a time, which seems lavish compared to the hour and a half of shut-eye that the average giraffe gets each night.

[…]

Humans need roughly one hour of sleep for every two hours they are awake, and the body innately knows when this ratio becomes out of whack. Each hour of missed sleep one night will result in deeper sleep the next, until the body’s sleep debt is wiped clean.

What, then, happens as we doze off, exactly? Like all science, our understanding of sleep seems to be a constant “revision in progress”:

Despite taking up so much of life, sleep is one of the youngest fields of science. Until the middle of the twentieth century, scientists thought that sleep was an unchanging condition during which time the brain was quiet. The discovery of rapid eye movements in the 1950s upended that. Researchers then realized that sleep is made up of five distinct stages that the body cycles through over roughly ninety-minute periods. The first is so light that if you wake up from it, you might not realize that you have been sleeping. The second is marked by the appearance of sleep-specific brain waves that last only a few seconds at a time. If you reach this point in the cycle, you will know you have been sleeping when you wake up. This stage marks the last drop before your brain takes a long ride away from consciousness. Stages three and four are considered deep sleep. In three, the brain sends out long, rhythmic bursts called delta waves. Stage four is known as slow-wave sleep for the speed of its accompanying brain waves. The deepest form of sleep, this is the farthest that your brain travels from conscious thought. If you are woken up while in stage four, you will be disoriented, unable to answer basic questions, and want nothing more than to go back to sleep, a condition that researchers call sleep drunkenness. The final stage is REM sleep, so named because of the rapid movements of your eyes dancing against your eyelids. In this stage of sleep, the brain is as active as it is when it is awake. This is when most dreams occur.

(Recall the role of REM sleep in regulating negative emotions.)

Randall’s most urgent point, however, echoes what we’ve already heard from German chronobiologistTill Roenneberg, who studies internal time — in our blind lust for the “luxuries” of modern life, with all its 24-hour news cycles, artificial lighting on demand, and expectations of round-the-clock telecommunications availability, we’ve thrown ourselves into a kind of circadian schizophrenia:

We are living in an age when sleep is more comfortable than ever and yet more elusive. Even the worst dorm-room mattress in America is luxurious compared to sleeping arrangements that were common not long ago. During the Victorian era, for instance, laborers living in workhouses slept sitting on benches, with their arms dangling over a taut rope in front of them. They paid for this privilege, implying that it was better than the alternatives. Families up to the time of the Industrial Revolution engaged in the nightly ritual of checking for rats and mites burrowing in the one shared bedroom. Modernity brought about a drastic improvement in living standards, but with it came electric lights, television, and other kinds of entertainment that have thrown our sleep patterns into chaos.

Work has morphed into a twenty-four-hour fact of life, bringing its own set of standards and expectations when it comes to sleep … Sleep is ingrained in our cultural ethos as something that can be put off, dosed with coffee, or ignored. And yet maintaining a healthy sleep schedule is now thought of as one of the best forms of preventative medicine.

Reflecting on his findings, Randall marvels:

As I spent more time investigating the science of sleep, I began to understand that these strange hours of the night underpin nearly every moment of our lives.

Indeed, Dreamland goes on to explore how sleep — its mechanisms, its absence, its cultural norms — affects everyone from police officers and truck drivers to artists and entrepreneurs, permeating everything from our decision-making to our emotional intelligence. 

Wordsmith

Came across an incredibly well written article. I must say it hit all the right notes as I read the letter. Impossibly the most articulate piece written. It must be if it's written from experience and an open mind. 

Blew me away this one. I'm sure it will resonate with some of us here. 

::

An Open Letter To My Ex: How A Best Friend Becomes A Stranger

SEX • PAUL HUDSON • MAR 3, 2014 - 2:17PM

Sometimes breaking up isn’t too difficult. Sometimes you know the person is entirely wrong for you. You know that it would never work because you never achieved that level of intimacy necessary to build a lasting relationship. You never became best friends.

Then there are times when breaking up is the most difficult thing in the world, not just because you know that you are breaking your lover’s heart – and your own while you’re at it – but because you are willfully choosing to lose your best friend.

There is nothing worse than choosing to let go and move on when you know that your best friend will never be more than just that, a best friend. It’s a very difficult phenomenon to describe, which is why most go with the all-time favorite cliché: “I love you, but I’m not in love with you.”

The truth is, that is the best way to describe it: You love someone deeply and feel that you ought to be part of each others’ lives, but not in the capacity that you have been thus far. Unfortunately, not everyone can break up and stay friends. In fact, I’d say most couldn’t. That is why we lose our best friends. We lose the people who are most important to us and, let’s be honest, end up lost for a good moment afterwards ourselves.

With time, however, we learn to pick up the pieces and redefine our direction in life. Yet, not all of us completely move on. Some of us still hold on to that friendship even though it is long gone. Why? We do love them. We wish they could be part of our lives. But at the same time we understand that is impossible. So what else is there to do than to write them a letter we’ll never send?

---

Hey there, stranger.

It’s been a very long time, which I’m sure you’re aware of. I’d like to say that it was your decision alone to keep this distance, but I think we both know it was for the best. I’d like to say that I’m glad you are well, but as we both know I have absolutely no idea how you are. The one thing that can definitely be said is that when we cut ties, we leave no strand behind, but slice right through until we no longer remember how to find each other. It’s amazing to think that once we were inseparable, the best of friends.

You knew me inside and out, and I, you. We were there for each other in the best of times and through the most difficult of times. We definitely managed to put each other through hell on occasion, but when support was needed the most, support was given. Until, of course, that final day. I sometimes find myself wondering why we couldn’t stay in touch. Would it be so bad if we got together for coffee from time to time? Or if we gave each other a ring to see how the other was doing?

Using the phone to make calls has become archaic, but surely we could send a text to wish each other a happy birthday? Or a happy New Year? I mean, we’ve been through so much. You are a part of my life and there is nothing I can do to ever change that.

You can’t be forgotten because forgetting you would be like forgetting myself — impossible. But then again, maybe you are right. Maybe we are better off as far apart as possible. We know we aren’t right for each other. We know it would never work, and we know the friendship we have — we had — created a bond that would make slipping back into romance too easy. It would make repeating the same mistakes too likely, repeating the same heartbreak certain. That’s what it really comes down to: It’s not my heart that I’m worried about, but yours. Breaking my own heart would be my responsibility to bear, but I can’t once again be responsible for breaking yours.

So all that I can do is wish you the best. Wish you a great, bright, loving future. Wish you to find the lover of your dreams and to create a lifetime of your fantasies. I wish for you to find a friend as great as me, but a much better partner. One who won’t drag you through the mud. One who you won’t feel the need to bury with guilt. I wish you all the best and although you will never read this, although we will never speak to each other again, and although you are out of my life forever, I wish you nothing short of happiness.

Never again to be yours, 

Your Lost Best Friend

Dreams

The kind of dreams that bother you the whole day. They seem so unbelievable and surreal you wonder if you're still dreaming even after you're awake. 

Ever so subconscious yet real they eat at you while you're going about your day. Hard to shake off, even harder to forget. 

Nothing good. Nothing that bad either. It just lives when I thought they had gone away. 

Brow Resurrection + Eye Define (With Images)

Slept the whole day to stave off the fever and boy, do I feel ten times better than I did this morning. I'm on extended MC but I hope I don't get to use it. Pray that my fever doesn't come back tonight.

Time for something productive after sleeping so much. Was looking through some photos and found these meant for a blog archive sometime back. 

In August 2012, I went for the BR + ED package promo which set me back about $1.6k. To chart my journey, I also took photos on the day of my brow and eyeliner job. 

As I looked back on my new brows, I realised it was too dark initially but had faded to a nice natural gray after about 6 months or so. Around the same time, I decided I wanted bangs and had it for about a year before I grew out a side fringe. Alas! My brows had no chance to show itself off. 

2 years on, I could still get away without drawing my brows or putting on mascara thanks to BR + ED. 

 This was, I think, 1-3 months post BR and ED

Scrubbed face, sans makeup, natural light

Best look of my life

 Brows look harsher indoors

 Most current look circa December 2013

Brows are drawn in using brown pencil to soften the look

 Also taken in December 2013

This was taken after my submerged water baptism

No makeup and brows weren't drawn

 One of the first few bangs I spotted

Brows weren't drawn

Annie, my stylist, commented that my brows was too harsh

Most of the time my bangs look like this

Completely covered my brows

The photos below will chronicle my process with BR + ED. I thought the BR was more painful than ED. Some of my friends thought otherwise. When I went for my touch up 3 months later, it was the other way round. Till date, I can only say that I may or may not go back for BR but ED is something I'll probably consider doing again because I have very light looking lash line. 

 Before BR + ED

 Before BR + ED

 3 colours to choose from

I went for the darkest shade (top) because I wanted it to last longer and it matched my black hair then

Swatch from top-bottom: Black, Grey, Brown

 After BR + ED

 After BR + ED

Perfecto brows!

Weird sleeping habit

Roused from my sleep with sweat on my back. And so the coughing fit starts. It has been like this for the past few days. Never a good night's rest. The fever came back again when I was at work on Monday. It wouldn't have felt so bad if the medicine actually work.

Seen 3 doctors over the week and got new or re-prescription but still no progress. Wow. It must be one kind of resilient virus. 

Sick health aside. I'm going to KL for ASOT in March! It's been a long awaited trip. Still with the same group I went with to Melaka for Freedom years ago. Which was a blast. 

Should probably update that I just did Root Canal Treatment over CNY. Worst decision ever. I'd show you pictures but it's not a pretty sight. 

Never again. I can't warn my friends and family enough about this. Not worth the pain and trouble to end up with having a dead tooth in your mouth. Pain is probably the only thing you'll take away from the therapy and nothing else. 

It's expensive ($2000+), super troublesome (3 rounds of RCT plus 2 rounds of crowning), and you still need to care for it like you would your other teeth despite it being a dead tooth (meaning you can't feel pain). And you basically pray that you take such good care of it, it won't decay (yes it can) in the near future so that you don't have to PLUCK IT OUT. Yes, eventually. See how it's not worth the trouble?

Its already 6am. I should try going back to sleep. 

Sickies

Outrageously awake. Drugs coursing through my veins pumping me up at this hour. Having a really bad backflow.

Fever is coming on and off as it pleases. Parents just got home at this hour. Nice to have company for once. 

Shall refuel and feed on my meds.

Convalescing

First sick leave taken for the year. An achievement given that I literally bulldozed through January in a healthy state. Was looking at my average MCs taken last year and found that I took approximately 1 MC per month. Hmm. Very interesting.

Anyway, I'm down with tonsillitis and recovering from a fever caused by my throat inflammation. Haven't had fever for so long I forgot how it felt. Thankful for my buddy at work who is holding the fort while I'm resting. And really helpful to have Nick by my side when my body refuses to cooperate. 

Not one to be okay about falling sick. Most of the time I can be in denial until the diagnosis is made and I don't have a choice but to admit that I need to rest. 

I'm a little stubborn that way. 

Had a really bad dream (probably cos I'm sick) and was woken up by a coughing fit. And secretly relieved to see Nick already awake and glancing at me while patting the chest to comfort my coughiness. 

Came across this article on Facebook from ThoughtCatalog. Felt a strong emotion tug at my heart and knew I somehow had to archive this. 

How The People We Once Loved Become Strangers Again

FEB. 19, 2014 By BRIANNA WIEST

It’s interesting to think about how we make people who used to be everything into nothing again. How we learn to forget. How we force forgetting. What we put in place of them in the interim. The dynamics afterward always tell you more than what the relationship did — grief is a faster teacher than joy – but what does it mean when you cycle out to being strangers again? Because you never really stop knowing each other in that way. Maybe there’s no choice but to make them someone different in your mind, not the person who knew your daily anxieties and what you looked like naked and what made you cry and how much you loved them.

When our lives revolve around someone, they don’t just stop revolving around them even if all that’s left is the grief and pain that comes with their memory. Because you loved them, there will always be parts of them that linger. The memories that are impressed on the places you went and the things you said and the songs you listened to will remain. We all eventually find ourselves standing in the checkout line, hearing one of those songs come on and realizing that all of a sudden, we’re revolving around them again. And maybe we never stopped.

Do you ever really forget your lovers’ birthdays, or all your first times, intimate and not? Do your anniversaries ever become normal days of the year again? Are the things you did and promises you made ever really neutralized? Do they become void now that you’re broken up or do you decidedly ignore them because there’s simply no other choice? The mind tells you to go on, and forces your heart to follow suit I guess.

I want to believe that you either love someone, in some way, forever, or you never really loved them at all. That once two reactive chemicals cross both are changed. That the wounds we leave in people are sometimes too raw to risk falling back into them. I don’t want to believe that we write each other off because we simply don’t matter anymore. I know love isn’t expendable. I wonder, and maybe hope, if we ever just force it to be out of that necessity.

Maybe it’s just that we’re all at the centers of our own little universes, and sometimes they overlap with other people’s, and that small bit of intersection leaves some part of it changed; that’s where we grow together. The collision can wreck us, change us, shift us; sometimes we become eternally undetachable and connected and other times we decidedly move away because the change required to accept another person’s universe colliding with yours is a safety we don’t want to leave. Either way, it’s inevitable that your universe expands. That you’re left knowing that much more about love and what it can do, and the pain that only a hole in your heart can bring. Whether or not that hole will ever again include the person who made it that way, that’s for you to decide.

We all start as strangers. The choices we make in terms of love are usually ones that seem inevitable anyway. We find people irrationally compelling. We find souls made of the same stuff ours are. We find classmates and partners and neighbors and family friends and cousins and sisters and our lives intersect in a way that makes them feel like they couldn’t have ever been separate. And this is lovely. But the ease and access isn’t what we crave. It isn’t what I’m writing about right now. It isn’t what we revolve around after it’s gone. We are all just waiting for another universe to collide with ours, to change what we can’t ourselves. To fill us, to make us whole. It’s interesting how afterwards, we realize that the storm returns to calm, but the stars are always changed and we don’t choose whose collisions change us. We all start as strangers. But we forget that often, the only thing we do choose is who ends up a stranger too.