0109'12

Friday, August 31, 2012

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The last week of August has been an amazing amazing experience. 
Apologies for not being able to blog as the events happened - I was perhaps too caught up in the moment. So here's to predicting this post being a nice long one! 


On Tuesday, it was IHG Closing Ceremony'12 - to those who don't know what that is, it's basically the closing ceremony of our school's Inter House Games where House compete in various competitions and it also officially marks the end of the House Year of 2012. Most importantly, it's when the Best Organized House (BOH) is announced the the coveted Champion House trophy is given out. To be honest, since I stepped into the school, Waddle has constantly won BOH and never won Champion House so it was something I never did expect Waddle to. Not that I ever doubted this House of mine, but it's just that I always expected Tarbet to win it - it's sort of a stereotypical mindset I really shouldn't have due to the fact that Tarbet has been winning it ever since I knew of such a trophy. 

When they announced that Waddle was the best organized House, I was most definitely elated, but I wasn't that surprised that we did because our House Comm this year has done a wonderful job in organizing everything. As for Champion House, when they released that Richardson was second runners up and Tarbet was first runners up, House Comm was majorly freaking out because we realized we stood an absolutely high chance in winning. Then it came. Waddle was announced as double champs - winning not only BOH but the Champion House trophy as well. It felt so gratifying as CELL went up to receive the trophy, to know that all the hard work of the entire House has paid off. If it's not obvious enough, I AM REALLY REALLY HAPPY (': Don't mean to sound proud or anything, but I really think Waddle deserves it, our House this year has been so supportive of all the initiatives and I think Louisa has been an amazing captain. 

Afterwards, I started thinking about how pressurizing it would be for myself and the rest of JELLO for next year. But then I realized how juvenile my thinking was. As long as I do my best for House, I'm sure I won't have any regrets in the end (: 


On Wednesday, I skipped school for Moot Parliament Presentation and Debates! My group (Sam, Mel, Jac, Chris) was not selected to debate because we have already won Third Best Bill and didn't have to prepare anything much. I was really looking forward to that day because I love my MPP group - we're all really weird people full of nonsense. It was definitely a day worth being excited for!

Reached the MOE Gifted Education Branch pretty in the morning and didn't fall for the trick the crazy trolls tried to play on Sam and myself! I must admit it was rather tough trying to stay awake during all the presentation sharing by every school - there was so much to sit through. Especially appreciated those groups who injected humour into their presentation - made everything so much more interesting! 

After all of that, we headed to the Parliament House. It's my second time there (the first due to MPP too) and I love going there! It makes me feel so important and everything there's so grand. Walking (actually I think our group was running) down the aisles of the Parliament House in our court shoes felt so... wow (': for the lack of a better word. The programme was behind time by a lot, and we were all pretty worried that the organizers would decide to cut down on our lunch time but after the first debate between NUS High and Dunman, it was a 2-hour lunch break for us! Ms Lim insisted that RGS teams had to eat at Funan Mall as a "tradition", so we went to Pizza Hut!


All of us except Mel got Meat Galore pan pizzas which was pretty good (: 


To be honest, the lunch break was probably the part I was most looking forward to throughout the entire day! I love food with good company!

HAPPY TUMMIES (': 

After that, we headed back to the Parliament House, not without taking lots of photographs along the way! We're probably the group who camwhores the most among all the MPP participants and were constantly being judged. It's alright, at least we have visual memories throughout our entire MPP journey! Here's another one: 

Doesn't the background look rather fake? It's like Singapore's skyline at the back. Well, it's real! (': 

When we went back, it was time for the debate between RGS Team11 and NUS High! It was probably the most entertaining debate of the day, with all the humor infused food analogies. I thought our RGS speakers did really well speaking from the Government's perspective, especially Simran and Prithipal with their calm composures. Finally, we had RI debate against Hwa Chong - I was initially looking forward to this debate as I thought both teams would be quite hard towards each other so it would be entertaining but it turned out to be extremely info and evidence-centred. 

The debates rounded up the entire Moot Parliament Programme. Honestly, I wondered how they chose Bills to be debated - I would have wanted to see ACS (I) debate, it would have been an entertaining experience indeed. 

Debates
Best Government Team - RI
Best Opposition Team - NUS High
Challenge Shield Winners - NUS High

Bill Writing
1st - RGS
2nd - Hwa Chong
3rd - RGS (MY TEAM! :D) 
Challenge Shield - RGS 

In past years, RGS never really won major prizes for MPP, our seniors from last year attained the Best Speaker Award, but this year I think our batch did really well, with us clinching 1st and 3rd for Bill Writing! 


Thank you for the amazing journey guys, getting 3rd for Bill Writing was something all of us never expected! I love you guys so much! Oh yes and not forgetting our lovely student mentors, Jefferson and Zhong Ning! This is for you (: 

p/s: to our expert mentor, thank you for making us more independent than we already are! 


On Friday (yesterday!), after the Teachers' Day celebrations in school, I went back to Holy Innocents' with my RGS juniors. I never realized that there were so many Year 1s this year who came to RGS instead of Nanyang - a grand total of 3! Compared to myself and Jessa (Year 2) who were the lone warriors, three is considered a pretty large number. The five of us - Jessa, Julia, Ashley, Isis and myself - squeezed into a taxi and reached HIPS pretty early. I was so afraid that none, or rather few, of my ex classmates would come back but I'm so glad there were so many who turned up! 

Ms Yeo was so entertaining, sitting us down at the recycling corner and talking to us about life... in general. There were two other batches of 6R7 kiddos waiting for her but we got priority cos we were the oldest of the lot (x After visiting other teachers, a few of us headed to Hougang Mall and afterwards Nex just to talk. It was really good catching up with all of them and playing truth or dare, which got really boring after a while because we didn't really see each other a lot and didn't have much to ask about each other. 

Nevertheless, thank you for yesterday, 6R7'09! (:

Amazing amazing week!
Please be kind, September. 
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2408'12

Thursday, August 23, 2012

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Such an apt quote to those burdened by the many assessments they are being thrown with. 

Even for myself, I have been sleeping at insanely late timings, or should I say extremely early (into the morning)? Sometimes, when I wake up the next day, I don't really know why I even stayed up for. Most of the time, I stay up late because I'm just too high and can't get to sleep so I end up doing a lot of work with a lousy quality. On Tuesday, I actually stayed up till after 3am doing work that wasn't even urgent because I just felt so jumpy and excited over nothing in particular. 

I guess that's a good thing  - at least I stay up feeling happy and not stressed. If this is what growing up feels like, I don't mind it at all. Yes, I'm sorry for being on an overly positive mood these few days, I don't even know why myself. But yes, on the topic of growing, I constantly wonder how growing old will feel like. Do you? 

I mean, I look at my grandparents and wonder how they'd be feeling - they don't know what social media or even the Internet is or how to use it, they don't own mobile phones and the only form of media they are exposed to is at most the television and newspapers. Don't get me wrong, they are still wonderful wonderful grandparents despite not knowing these things and have an extensive selection of life stories and experiences but I constantly wonder if they feel a bit left behind as times change. 

Will I be like this when I grow older? Will I not be able to connect with my grandchildren (if any) because I'm lacking behind with the times? But the thing is, my generation is exposed to this sort of new technology since we are young and most of us are educated. Won't we constantly keep up with the changing scenes of society by saying reading the newspapers or accessing the Internet? Why would a generation gap be formed between us and the next generation? 

I brought this questions up to my brother and well he gave me an answer that kind of  made sense, although I still have my doubts. He said that in future, when we grow up, we'd be too busy with our working lives to care about such trends, we'd won't have the time to access Facebook, to see what are the new memes (or whatever the Internet's going to come up with next) and yes, a generation gap would still be formed. It's crazy, not to mention scary, at the thought of myself not being savvy about the trendy or popular things happening in the youth world. 

One day, I would be out-of-touch and young people will be irritated at me because I don't understand what they are talking about. Oh, how very depressing that would be. 

Why am I entertaining such strange and weird thoughts /: Oh yes, perhaps because it's 2am.

On a sidenote, SS PT is over! (: I don't think I did exceptionally well but my examiner was really really nice, especially at the Q&A part when I couldn't find the appropriate words to express my thoughts and he just assured me that he already understood me very well (': I'm left with Chemistry AA! 

If only my life did not revolve simply around Academic/ school commitments.  
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2108'12

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

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Don't have time for a very substantial post but the above picture goes out to everyone facing a hard time - yes I know this week is a crazy week and for the sec fours, next week is going to be crazier!

But no matter what, just stay strong, do your best and most importantly, continue to enjoy the process (:

On a sidenote, I have been very happy these few days - school has been terrible in terms of lessons but I feel like my life is actually quite fulfilling and I'm really enjoying every bit of it. Next week is very exciting for me! 8)
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1808'12

Friday, August 17, 2012

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The day before yesterday was such an eventful eventful day, I don't even know whether to consider it a good or bad day

Started the day out with Philosophy PPA, which was the least of my concerns to be honest. I finished my paper and slept through the entire duration afterwards - probably the first time I slept in class (I never ever sleep during lessons and I'm pretty proud of that). I was in such a deep slumber that I even had a nice dream. So glad I took a nap as my day was going to be extremely long!

After the exam, my Guides batch started cleaning out the Guides Room - more specifically, the punk section. The punk section is most probably the worst portion of the entire room, as it constitutes the heaviest and dirtiest items. As an ex-QM, the messiness of  the Guides Room was not something I was foreign to and my batch definitely got down and dirty. We cleared out so much rotten and unusable punk from the room, which was something myself and the other ex-QMs, Mae and Minyie have always wanted to ever since we took on the role last year but we couldn't because the seniors always told us to keep them in case. It felt really good being able to make decisions on our own! (':

It was pretty epic when Michelle Zhu and myself went to dispose large bags of heavy punk into the main garbage collection area of my school with a huge and extremely heavy trolley. We realized how wheelchair unfriendly our school was, which is pretty bad. We practically wheeled the punk across the middle of the school carpark, with me being very paranoid about getting caught doing something so incredibly dangerous. When we finally disposed the punk away (really sorry green men for all the holes in our garbage bags, it must be really difficult to clear our rubbish and thank you so very much!), we had to wheel the trolley back to the Guides room. One might think that a trolley clear of punk might be a trolley that is light but well, we soon realized that it wasn't the case. The two of us noobs were trying so hard the wheel the trolley up a few steps, making so much noise by laughing at how weak I was - actually everything was really my fault, I had no muscles and made the most noise. Mr Evans, from the fourth floor of the Science block heard our laughter and screams and asked us if we needed any help. That was such an incredibly nice offer but making him come down all the way from upstairs would be a little too much, so we just declined his offer and continued struggling, to eventual success (:

My batch managed to make the punk section look a lot better than before and it's much more convenient to search for the punk that we need now! Ms Lee kept laughing at the "black" faces and uniform Minyie and I sported, probably due to all the grime and dirt from the punk and the worst thing was that both of us had something on after Guides Room cleanup. It was so funny - QMs always get the dirtiest in such circumstances. When we went to wash our faces, the water was all black - it was so amusing (': Afterwards, when the other batches came down to do their part for the Guides Room after their exams, I retired to the tables and tried doing some homework but failed to be productive. It was hilarious with Pan Wen, Fatima and Mae! We were all wondering what the juniors were thinking of us - if we were them, we would probably have been very angry at the seniors as we were doing nothing and just slacking at the tables because they didn't see us doing work before they came (: We spent time talking about our junior batches which was very entertaining! After all the work, the Guides room was really neat!


I still had to wait for a few hours till my House Captain meeting with Take 5 and New 5 and couldn't do much because I didn't have any laptops. To add to that, I was freaking out about whether I'd be able to finish my Lit PT that was due the very next day because the meeting was to start at 7pm and well, no one knows how late it will end. I had finished my own poem (which to be honest, I was pretty proud of!) but I was in charge of designing the anthology for my group which was rather important!

The meeting went pretty smoothly with pretty good food (: House meetings always leaves me with a positive vibe because I just feel like there's so much I can do and so much I want to do. It ended at a little later than 8.30pm. I rarely ask my Dad to fetch me from school but I was rather desperate and panicky about my Lit PT so I asked him if he was free and I'm so glad he was because when we reached our neighbourhood, we realized  that all the streetlamps were not on. No, actually, the whole neighbourhood was in darkness. No, not just darkness, in fact, it was blackness. The only thing that guided us on was the car's headlights. If I had taken public transport home, I wouldn't know how to walk back to my House as my phone was already soon-to-be out of battery and the light wouldn't even be able to act as a flashlight for myself. Yes, in other words, the entire neighbourhood was experiencing a blackout.

Neighbours were going around with torchlights and guiding my Dad and I - despite my fears, everything felt warm and friendly! When I reached home, my mum and brother were relying on candles - it was a pretty funny sight. It was the first time in my life having such an experience and well, what good timing! The lack of electricity majorly freaked me out - I was so afraid that electricity wouldn't come back that night and I wouldn't be able to print out my group's PT. To add to that, it's so rare that I come home so late on a weeknight and I had practically nothing done - I couldn't take a shower or do anything.


My house ran out of candles (yes we only have one torchlight btw), so my mum took out solid fuel! It was quite amusing but I'm proud that Guides and OBS made me buy so much solid fuel (': It came into good use afterall!

Soon, the electricity came back on and I could hear the whole neighbourhood cheering (': The atmosphere was so warm - everyone was truly helping one another: we had neighbours we never ever knew leading us back to safety, neighbours informing my dad that he forgot to switch his car's headlights off etc. It's really through this sort of "crisis" that people truly come together and kindness is genuinely felt. "Only in darkness comes light", literally.

And if you were wondering, yes I did finish the Lit PT in time and I was pretty proud of it!
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1408'12

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

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So, I've decided to take some time off from my homework schedule on a weeknight to blog! I truly find blogging extremely therapeutic and I'm definitely in need to lighten a bit of stress off my load. 

To be honest, there are many more people in my batch having greater need of stress relief as compared to myself due to their subject combis - it's definitely quite a taxing period for Year Threes as many of them have an insane amount of PTs/AAs (in other words, graded projects that require not only brain cells but also creative cells to impress the teachers). My current load's standing at a Literature PT, a Social Studies PT and a Chemistry AA! I'm so glad I got Chinese PT off my chest today, even though I did terribly, it's over. The current crazy workload haunting my batch is: Literature PT, Social Studies PT, Chemistry AA, Chinese PT, Biology PT, Geography PT (edit: AND SS PT!). All in the same time period. Not to mention we have an upcoming SA on Thursday - Philosophy. (Not that I think anyone would spend a lot of time on that subject) 

For myself, I've really been taking it slow and I feel like I'm still enjoying life as it goes on - something I don't feel very often when I'm in school, especially in the midst of the peak academic period in Term 3. There's something really wrong, I don't think I'm taking academics seriously enough. The start of the year felt the worse, I was just completely stressed out but I think it's because I was going through a lot of pressure in my leadership journey. 

Life is awfully unpredictable and sometimes, reading back to my older blog posts (this is not an indication that you should read my previous blogposts cos they are terrible) I realized how much I've grown and how naive and innocent I was back then, taking every little success I earned so seriously and being happy with the slightest of pleasures. I'm not saying that life now is horrid but I really wish I could go back to the day where days were truly carefree, where I went to school without worrying about anything. 

Recently, on Facebook, there has been a picture circulating with the text "letter to my 10 year old self" on it, and many of my friends were sharing it, together with well, a letter, to their 10 year old self. My favourite poet/rapper of all time, George Watsky wrote a poem a while back entitled "Letter to My 16 year old Self" and it's one of my favourite poems of his. I have always wanted to write one, but I didn't exactly know what age I should choose since I obviously couldn't write to my 16 year old self - I'm only 15. Seeing the interesting letters to my friends' 10 year old selfs, I wanted to write one to the 10 year old Li Yin as well, so I'm going to try doing it in a poem format.


Li Yin, 
Stop being so obsessed with sudoku. 
There's no one to tell you
If that number you place there is false or just true. 

But always remember, 
Don't let anybody tell you that you don't have
What it takes. 
Because trust me, you do. 

The road might seem long but the journey's really all too short. 
I know what you want because well, I'm the future you. 
If I were you, I'd fooooooooocus.  

Focus.

Focus, Li Yin, Focus!
There's no point being distracted in thaaaat. 
It'll end up being a braaaaat.
Really. 

Continue playing hopscotch
And the little game of boys-catch-girls
If anything, just run
Don't get caught. 
Or not. 

If you think life is tough, just remember
It'll pass, it'll pass, it'll all just pass. 
Lift your head up and do your best
You'll survive and gain no less. 

Good luck. 


(Ahh this is so sketchy don't blame me it was written in half an hour. I shall lie to myself that I made it deliberately simplistic so my 10 year old self will be able to understand it.) 
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1008'12

Friday, August 10, 2012

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Happy (belated) 47th Birthday Singapore! (:

National Day is probably one of the national holidays I most look forward to, apart from Chinese New Year and Christmas because I sincerely love this country and being able to feel the spirit and experience the tangible signs of love for the country means so much to me. Celebrations in my school are also quite a large scale thing, with so many people putting so much effort into it. 

I felt really happy being able to witness the parade put up by the Uniformed Groups CCAs and seeing my juniors march pretty perfectly made me feel so undoubtedly proud of them. The only thing that bothered me greatly was that this large hoard of fairly translucent flies just kept flying around my head throughout the entire parade section of the celebrations and I felt extremely tempted to run to the toilet to wash and chase all the flies away. It was a horrible and frightening experience with shivers going down my spine every minute due to the level of uncomfort I was feeling. - I kept wondering if I did anything special to my hair that day but I don't remember switching shampoos or anything. So glad they dispersed when we moved to the amphitheatre for the real "show". 

Thank you Year 4s for putting up such wonderful performances (: I truly admire your batch for being the batch that's ever so bonded, that's ever so inspiring and ever so amazing. Thank you OT for making everything possible - the celebrations really made me feel immense Singaporean pride - it was most definitely a success. 


Speaking of Singapore, this is probably pretty late news - but thank you Team Singapore for doing so well in the London Summer Olympics. Two medals is a pretty incredible feat for a small country like ours (': Feng Tianwei, Li Jiawei and Wang Yuegu, you guys are amazing and thank you so much for sacrificing so much for our country. 

I know that there seems to be a lot of controversy about how these athletes are not 100% made-in-singapore but are instead foreign talents, which is indeed true but I don't see why people are creating such a big fuss and complaining that the medal is not deserved because it's not won by a true blue Singaporean. It really scares me, how narrow minded some people really are. 

I mean, sometimes do try to practice a little bit of empathy. Imagine yourself in the other person's shoes - the athlete herself has already agreed to play for our country and that decision must have been a difficult one to make. Think about it, especially China with it's strong sense of patriotism embodied in every citizen, how would the athlete feel to be sort of "betraying" their own country? (for the lack of a better word)  And now we're faulting them for not being true blue Singaporeans? I believe we should really be more appreciative that these athletes have managed to get Singapore on the medal standings in the Games and feel proud for them, if not feel proud of Singnapore. Perhaps, I wouldn't expect these people to show any sense of pride but really, if you don't have anything nice to say, just don't say it. 


Anyway, come National Day, come the long weekends! (:
Felt pretty productive so far, and today I went out with a CELL of JELLO (Waddle Captains 12 and 13!) Basically CELL stands for Chunyen, jingEn, Louisa and Liyin and JELLO stands for Jing En Linjiaying Liyin and Ooikaryn! 



We had dinner at F.I.S.H at Somerset 313 and it was a good break going out and taking a break from all the work. It feels good spending time (that did not concern Waddle work related stuff) with them and I'm so fortunate to have them in my life, really (': After we had Fish and Chips (at least most of us had that, no idea what Louisa got), we had dessert (coupled with lots of camwhoring) before going shopping! Window shopping heh. 


Camwhoring at F21! (:

Thank you for today, CELL of JELLO (: It was really enjoyable!

This is such a haphazard post, apologies for that, but did I mention that public transport gives me the most inspiration for poetry? So lucky to have the existence of public transport.
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0608'12

Monday, August 6, 2012

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Apologies for not posting as often as I would have liked - every time I see my blog hits remain relatively high even though I have not posted anything new makes me feel extremely bad. I wish there was some sort of machine that could simply translate my thoughts into words without me having to lift a finger. 

The past week has been rather emotional and mind-boggling. Actually not the week, rather, just Thursday. Why do interesting events take place all at once. If only everything was spread out - my life would be much more entertaining and I would perhaps have a little bit more motivation to open my eyes every single day.

So, on Thursday, Student Leaders' Investiture 2012 took place. It was an event that personally meant a lot to me because for one, it's THE Investiture where I'd get to see my batch stepping up for real. It's quite strange having all the investees come from your very own batch and it's inevitable to have flashbacks from the first day our batch stepped into the school - so insecure, so afraid of everything that laid ahead of us. And now, we're becoming the seniors, the leaders of the school, working together to (as cliche has this might sound) leave a legacy as a 13atch together.

For me, it was definitely a milestone as I was to be invested as Waddle Captain for the year 2013 and also as a prefect once again. To be given the responsibility of leading Waddle and House just felt extremely surreal as I knew how much I loved House and how much I was willing to do for House and to be given this platform felt like a dream come true, honestly. I really hope that by doing my best for House in 2013, I won't let anyone down.


The handover ceremony was so crazy - Take 5 spent so much thought into their gifts for us (': And really, it's not just their gifts but throughout the entire year, they have truly been such wonderful mentors and I can't thank them enough, especially YOU, Louisa! (You're probably reading this considering how much you know about my life without me telling you) Thank you so much for always being there, always being so supportive and really just giving me so much more confidence to do what I believe in.


And Fiducia! Wow we'll be the seniors of the Prefectorial Board soon. No words can express how proud I feel when occasionally realization strikes that the Head Girl of RGS comes from my batch. Being a prefect is definitely no easy task and sometimes I admit that I might fall short of the many expectations that come along with being part of this board but I've grown to realize that being a prefect isn't about being perfect. Thank you for all the support you have given me, Fidu, even if I might not be the most involved batchmate you have.

SLI was such a memorable and meaningful event, 13atch let's do this (:

On the same day, I had Guides session which I felt was incredibly important as well. Kim, our CL from when we were sec one, came back to talk to my batch about certain issues which are perhaps too sensitive to post here. Looking at her, I realized how far we have come, from being those immature and ignorant sec ones to becoming the ones taking over the CCA and it just scares me, how time passes so quickly. I thought what Kim said was really really true, and I really hope that my batch will remain united and lead Guides together, not as individuals, not as CLs/ PLs/ etc but really as an entire batch.

Becoming a Sec Four Guide essentially also means dealing with the prospect of trying out for the President's Guide Award, something that I have always put off and never really thought about (no idea why actually). However, I'm really starting to toy with the thought of going for it because it seems like a wonderful experience and opportunity. Guides means so much to me and the passion I have for it is comparable to that of House. As a Brownie in Primary School, I had attained the Brownies equivalent of the PGA - it was called the Chief Commissioner's Badge and I really enjoyed the process of going through the interviews and tests as a young girl. However, what's holding me back is really the amount of commitments I will have to deal with next year.

Oh decisions. I seem to be facing many crossroads in recent months.
If only life was one straight path.
Although that'd be horribly dry and boring.

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