New Umbrella!

 I know it's the exams periods, but I'm spending my days as though I'm the biggest sloth in the world. Oh my life is the biggest joke, ain't it？ Even <--- that question mark is a joke but I'm gonna leave it as it is since it's, I suppose, laugh-worthy.

Anyway, mum (or was it dad...) bought me a new umbrella today. It's really nice! Okay I know it's retarded to be showing off my umbrella on my blog, I wanted to blog about the General Elections but I'll probably drown in my own sweat and tears after typing out the post cos' there's just too much to say and I'm so very disappointed with the results. So, to bring move on in life albeit it being a joke, I'm gonna talk about my new umbrella instead :) I'm sure it's going to be very useful in times to come, I foresee more gloomy days and dark clouds to come, especially now that my area in under the opposition. ARGH.

Say HELLO  to my umbrella everyone! I hereby name it 'Blues'.

Look! It's so thin and compact! Awesome for people like me who has five billion and one things in my bag, I need an umbrella that is small and light that doesn't take up much space in my bag. 

 This picture show the size relative to a comb. Oh how random.

This is how it looks like when it's opened. (Wow what a messy table! IDC)．

 Clearer view of it being opened.

 Okay before this gets stupid and repetitive, I'm gonna show you what's REALLY COOL about this umbrella k.
Check this out.

 After sprinkling some water on the umbrella like how raindrops would wet the umbrella...
 Prints surface!

 Zoom in to see it! See? See how the droplets show the patterns?

 This is a clearer picture.

 Awesome shit right?

 I'm like playing with the umbrella only. HAHA damn cool.

 See? The flower pattern surfaced!

 Nice and pretty!

 Woah, damn bimbotic. But I like! :D

Anyway, Lizzy bought this mega funny autobiography of Tina Fey. Okay I haven't really read it yet, will read it after Lizzy is done with it and when I'm done with my exams. Maybe this will bring more joy into my life. Life, oh life. Sighs.

 She's a horror. Look at those arms.

Anyway, I bought Yoga Lin's album!! WOOHOOOOOOOOOOOO!
But why must it be in this faux-LD size?

 But I found a damn retarded page in the lyric book. Like what? Plastic bottles and a pair of sewing scissors? Hmm. But nothing can be weirder than another page I saw...

 Dissecting a fish! What the fish.

But for good music who really cares what's in the lyric book? It's just another funny concept they are trying to introduce and brand this album with. Pretty daring and rather cute I would say, matches my random and direction-less life now anyway. hehheh. what a joke.

Who's to Judge a Language?

About 2 weeks ago, my group mates and I were struggling with an assignment about annotating a corpus, and we had a presentation and blah blah blah. The main point I want to drive at is that, our professor came up to us and told us that we can gain extra credits if we can improve the flawed sentences on the corpus. Okay, so that was what I did, improving sentences on the corpus, and what I got back is a heap load of rubbish and a total ruination of my pride. I don't even think I know ENGLISH anymore. 

So what happened was that we had to annotate and tag word senses in a corpus, any corpus. We chose T*****a corpus (I don't wanna get into trouble here) as it is a multilingual corpus and seem very interesting to us budding multilingual linguists. We, however, faced problems while annotating the sentences because some of the sentences seem erroneous and sadly to say, some are downright horrendous as they are direct translations. Our professor hence told us to correct whatever sentences which we felt are wrong to improve the corpus as a whole and yada yada. 

And so I did. 

I made a total of 78 contributions to the corpus, mostly are comments of which I think the sentences didn't sound right and needed to be changed. For sentences which are not owned by anyone, I could basically adopt it, make it mine and correct it. HALLELUJAH, that was when hell came. 

After one night of editing certain sentences which I felt was wrong, I was greeted with 15 emails from strangers T*****a's war troops the next morning telling me how they don't feel a need to change their awkward-sounding sentences or that I must change my corrected sentences for the original ones are correct. 

Here are just some print-screens of my mortifying experiences with the evils of this earth. Of course, to protect the privacy of my enemies-in-war, I've sprayed paint on their names (If only I could do the same to their faces).

'She died for a lack of air.' This sentence sounds weird, agree? 

I commented on suggesting a change. but those ever-helpful front line troops replied after I commented on changing the sentence to a less awkward-sounding one. 

Well, not only is he/she indirectly saying that I'm stupid for not knowing that the original sentence 'is fine', he/she is trying to tell me that my vocab sucks too for not knowing the word 'asphyxia'.

Next is a really weird sentence that I've never ever come across before in the twenty one years of my life. 

Does that English sentence even makes sense to you? It seems so ungrammatical to me. The Chinese translation of it doesn't tally too.

So, the backside-itchy me went to change the sentence to "No sooner had I left it began to rain."

Then, I received an email notification telling me that someone commented on my sentence. The person not only commented once, but twice. Twice on how my English sucked and I should go right to hell for having such bad English.

As seen from above, I was trying to understand what is so 'right' about the original sentence, so I commented on whether the comparative 'than' should be the chronological 'then' instead. 

BUT NO. 

Someone smart came and rescued his fellow trooper by telling me straight in the face, 'No, it's "than"'. 

OKAY POINT TAKEN. 

What I didn't know was that people are really so free to stay on T*****a's website forever and go through all the comments/changes that others make. Yes, I received another comment on my change.

I hate my life.

 Now, You must be wondering, so what's the original sentence?

Here you go. Don't be too shocked though, cos' I'm just a student and am unable to pay your medical bills if anything were to happen to you.

My work is to do redundant things and make myself a laughing stock.

Okay, I proposed 'My sister works as an English teacher', but that was mercilessly shot down by those ever-protective soldiers of T*****a. 

WHAT A DUMB ASS I AM TO NOT KNOW THAT THE BEST TRANSLATION FOR ‘我姐姐是个英文老师’ is 'My sister's work is teaching English' (and we are from China). 

Next one is an epic. It is such an epic that I now declare myself a failure in the English language. 

Check out the sentence is:

 Wah I swear when I first saw this sentence in T*****a, I was laughing so hard I couldn't feel my cheeks for the next five minutes. 

But when replies and comments came in to my change of the sentence, I couldn't laugh anymore. I cried. I cried for the inabilities for being able to see the beauty of the English language. Here are the comments I received.

Woah woah woah. First, someone thinks the original sentence is correct (!!!) Next, someone else thinks that I'm so dumb I don't know how to find links on a web page. 

I feel so dumb I was at a lost of words to fight. I succumbed to my dumbness and gave in to them, admitted defeat and swore in my heart never to go back to that war zone ever again. 

There were more actually, but during my quest to print screen more wreckage from my defeated war grounds, the site crashed. Evidence as shown below. 

My theme chio right? XD

  

To ensure that it isn't Firefox's problem, I tried it on Chrome. What I got what the same "Service Temporarily Unavailable" message.

My Chrome theme chio too right?

Yah okay, seen through me, these two print-screens are meant to show off my themes of my web browsers and nothing more. Kill me kill me. 

Well, I went back to T*****a again shortly after and the website is working well. I'm not gonna meddle with it anymore and it'll prolly just make me feel even more like an idiot than before. 

So bye bye and good luck. 

Then again, don't meddle with politics too. GE is around the corner, parliament has dissolved, but I don't want to see friendships dissolved too. 

XOXO.

BTW, if the orange font colour is too bright for your eyes to function then I'm really sorry. Cos' I'm feeling really bimbotic now and wants to paint my world with a colour of my liking. Peace out. May your God's love be with you cos' mine will not be. 

XOsauce, for yummy prawns.

AT&ABNN

ATs and ABNNs. So many of them in Singapore. So many that I don't have to explain what the acronyms mean.

Morning trips to school on the trains are never so comfortable anymore. Faces among us on streets do not look so familiar anymore. The once ubiquitious Singlish do not sound so common anymore. Char Kway Tiaos do not taste so local anymore.

Here's a big WELCOME to all our ALL-SO-FAVOURITE ATs and ABNNs!

I don't hate them, I'm just hating how things are becoming. I hate their guts for coming to my Sunny Island in search for a living. I hate my country's leadermen even more, I hate them for allowing these foreign 'talents' to take up land space and fight with us locals for oxygen.

Singapore IS a part of China, don't you all know? The amount of ATs there are here makes me feel like a minority in my own homeland. I feel as though I'm on an exchange in some University of Ah Tiong in Boon Lay.

Singapore could be a part of India too, don't you know? From Changi Airport to Expo, from Tanah Merah to Simei, from Bedok, Eunos, Paya Lebar and Aljunied, Bugis station and beyond even to Chinese Garden, our MRTs are all filled with them carrying their luggages and their entire clans and villages migrated directly from slumdog millionaires.

No, I'm not being racist here. I'm a freaking Asian and a freaking Chinese myself. I'm proud of my heritage, my roots and my nationality. My NATIONALITY.

But this influx of ATs and ABNNs is becoming absurd. Leadermen say we need them cos' no one wants to take up jobs like being construction workers, cleaners and low-paying jobs. YAH RIGHT! We have so many houses to build is it? At the end of the day we're just building more houses for foreigners we call EXPATS anyway. And cleaners are still old aunties and uncles who are equally annoyed by the extra piles of mess made these newcomers who aren't quite sure that Singapore isn't China or India where they have the ground for dustbins and spittoons.

Stop giving them scholarships already, your local kids are finding it harder and harder to get into local universities as competition is so high. I don't understand how they can even pass English proficiency tests when they can't even hold a proper face-to-face conversation with us locals. Electronic dictionaries are their gods, not you, MOE.

What advantages are they bringing in when all they do is jumping off buildings with their innocent children when they find it hard to adapt to this lifestyle in Singapore? If it is THIS stressful to live in Singapore, I would have jumped down from the Swissotel over and over already.

Eh seriously la my leadermen, GE is coming and you guys are coming up with all sorts of ways to get our votes. Let me give you a sure win idea k, give voting rights to ATs and ABNNS lah, you sure win hands down cos there're SO MANY of them. You don't need a tsunami to drown Singapore. One spit from each of them will drown the Merlion too.

Sometime somewhere I heard that companies managing construction workers can no longer provide them with transportation *gasp in horror*. Notice how those lorries filled with ABNNs are now no longer in sight on our roads? Wow, now the roads feel clean and safe. Sure, at the jeopardy of cleaniness and safety on the trains, of course. Cutting down of transportation cost ah? Why are the construction workers taking the trains now instead? Aren't they supposed to be ferried around on buses or lorries to construction sites?! I don't understand. Nothing was said or addressed about this. I feel like an idiot having to wake up 3 hours earlier to go to school just because trains are sardine-packed every morning and I have to beat the peak and peak-pre-peak hours.
'Too close for comfort' is an understatement. I often smell the hair of the guy standing in front of me while feeling the chills of somebody breathing down my neck from behind.
Is it so expensive for SMRT to just get another train to ferry people in the morning? Waiting time of 4 minutes in the morning is just too long and the human crowd germinates and grows within the first minute of wait.
This is a vicious cycle. Why not you smarty-pants leadermen ferry those poor construction workers who have to squeeze in the trains with snorbish Singaporeans like me in your own cars? You'll feel how it feels to be us, fellow countrymen whose only means of transportation is the MRT.

Again, I have no personal grudges with the ATs and ABNNs, I am good friends with some of them too. But when things get out of control, something has to be done. And I'm pretty sure that either you, our leadermen, are too busy with GE to look into this, or just fooling yourselves that our population of 5 million people is really the result of your baby bonus strategies.

BLEH.

This little depressed girl.

I'm currently in this phase of life where I feel so sad for myself. I'm living now just so to meet expectations of people and really, living by the day.
Paying to kill myself slowly. Weapon of manslaughter, Studies.

............

Hmm.

What should I say.

I've not blogged for so long, I should have something to say.

But I don't. Nothing. Not a single word.

We'll see how things go.

Till then.

ARGH.

JADED MAX




























Life sucks.

And there goes 2010...

Well, a BIG WELCOME to 2011!!! although the fact that a new year has come has yet set into my brain.
2010 was, er, exciting?
I don't know, Work & Travel sure was fun, but school was horrid.
Another year passed in a boom, all's too fast for me to stop and reflect for a while.
Living now as happily as it is. And it shall remain this way.
2011, you better be nice and good to me. Thank you.