Skating in Singapore?!

It's probably no surprise that I've been quite lazy this Spring Break, as after all I have nothing of real importance to do. Aside from homework, which I'll do on Sunday. What else is the Sunday before school resumes for?

Today I went skating with Nick at this place called Kallang Leisure Centre, which is in the east side of Singapore. It was a lot of fun, however I did something rather stupid. I didn't bring my own skates! As weird as it sounds, I actually brought the nice-ish figure skates I bought last winter here to Singapore. But because I didn't want to lug them around, I decided to just wear rental skates. The rental figure skates were much nicer than the hockey skates I rented at The Edge in Bedford. Seriously though, what was the point of bringing ice skates to the tropics if I end up renting skates anyways?! Anyways, there were a decent number of figure skaters training for some competition, who were generally pretty good. There were also some parents teaching their little kids how to skate. In addition, there was this random business man in work slacks and black skates practicing little jumps around the ice. I had a lot of fun. I'm not good at it (any more), but I love skating!

It sure seems like I'm seeing a lot of movies lately- I  saw 'The Lorax' today in a nearly empty theatre. Aside from the random musical numbers, it was quite good. Apparently Taylor Swift and Zac Efron were voicing the main characters, though I could only tell with Efron. 

So now I'm sitting around doing nothing. I think we're taking my aunt to Newton Circus for dinner tonight. That will be interesting, to say the least.


Quote of the Day: 'All our dreams can come true- if we have the courage to pursue them.' ~Walt Disney

Shopping and Sore Heels

I can't believe it's already Wednesday- in a way, March break is going by very fast. I've lost the first weekend and three days of the week already! It felt like it was going very slowly up until now because I hadn't seen my friends.

Yesterday we went to Mustafa, which is basically this big Indian department store. It sold practically everything you could imagine, and then some really strange stuff. I don't think everything there was super inexpensive, but the stuff I bought was. Among other things, I bought watercolors, cheap paintbrushes, and oil pastels. I'm the best at the pastels, and have had good fun messing around with them this evening. I'm no artist, but I'd like to believe I'm not terrible at art.

Today I went shopping for a prom dress with Flick and Cathryn (the same Cathryn that took me to the Singapore Zoo way back when). It took a lot less time than we anticipated to actually find and purchase it. Before they could start dressing me up like a doll, we had to find shoes for Cathryn. That took a while, mostly because she couldn't find heels that were short enough for her dress. After that, I was dragged into Tangs. Total, I think I tried on about 13-15 dresses. I was looking for a teal dress- but of course that didn't go as planned. After lunch, we went to Far East Plaza. There's this really lovely dress shop in there- more Western cut, but nice regardless. They were just throwing random dresses at me until they handed me this black dress that I ended up buying.

I have photos of it, but I don't know what the custom is about prom dresses at this school. I know at some schools, the date (or potential date) cannot see the dress before prom. Yes, like a wedding dress. But since I don't know the customs here, I will play it safe and not post photos. Sorry :(

After all that shopping (about 4 hours), we parted ways and I headed home. After dropping the dress off and misplacing my keys, I went to meet up with Nick. We saw 'The Hunger Games', which I've been dying to see since I heard they were making the book a movie. It was extremely well-casted to the point it was freaky- at least in Effie's case. So yes, if you're not afraid of a bit of gore, go see it!

Now I'm sitting around being tired and sore. I bought new heels today that I wore out tonight, which was extremely stupid. Serious blisters are never fun. Oh well....


Quote of the Day:  'Here's some advice. Stay alive.' ~Haymitch, The Hunger Games

The 1 am Thing Needs to End

Sorry I haven't been posting in a while- I'm officially on March/Spring Break, and blogging feels like a lot of effort.

I'm really glad that stressful week is over. Everyone was at their breaking points and it was generally not very fun.

On Saturday after dance I ended up going to the movie theatre with my family. We saw 'John Carter', which was a pretty good movie all things considered. It was based of the book, The Princess of Mars which was written like a thousand years ago, explaining the female lead's over-acting and predictable behavior. Generally speaking the graphics were good and the basic concept of the movie was interesting. The ending had a bit of a twist, which is always appreciated in my opinion.

After the movie I ended up on Skype until 1am, at which point my father kicked me off the internet.

Yesterday I woke up extremely late and eventually went shopping with my aunt. After successfully leading her through the underpasses (I'm still not super-confident in those), we ended up at Far East Plaza. I got my nails painted while she wandered around. Heading back home we went to ION, at which I got a nice black Superman t-shirt. My mother expected me to do proper shopping while out with my aunt... oh well.

My family got lucky that it had stopped raining, because we went to the Night Safari. It took us a while to figure out that the animals were different than those at the regular Singapore Zoo (fail). We had fun going around on the tram and walked a few of the trails. There were some really strange and interesting animals there- it's another place I will take people to if they come to Singapore.

 *cough cough  JACKIE, COME TO SINGAPORE! cough cough*

Anyways, we got home around midnight and I ended up in bed around 1:30 am.

I have to spend time with my family until Tuesday. Wednesday through next Sunday is fair game for hanging out with friends, which is a deal I made a while ago with my family. I can't decide if I should be looking forward to Wednesday- I'm going shopping with some friends, but it means that a decent amount of my Spring Break will have slipped away.

Quote of the Day: Imperfection is beauty; madness is genius. - Marilyn Monroe      

All Hell Broke Loose

I’m just going to start off by saying that I was not the source of the vast majority of the problems that happened today.

School today was pretty relaxed. I ended up watching Kung Fu Panda in Chinese class (with Chinese subtitles), which turned into a debate about the origin of calligraphy and dumplings. Some idiot thought the Japanese invented both. My Chinese pride kicked in around the same time my teacher’s did, and we corrected him. People that stupid scare me. Couldn't do African dance with my ankle still being sore, which was a big disappointment. I really enjoy African dance- I’m terrible at it, but it’s a lot of fun.

Law was nothing to mention, and free was boring. I’m reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for English class, and I can safely say it’s the hardest book I’ve ever read.  I cannot understand what anyone is saying in that book due to their dialects- Jim is particularly difficult. To be frank,  I think I understand Shakespeare or Homer better. That’s kind of scary considering one is old English and the other is translated from Greek. So, I fell asleep in the roundy-circle-chair thing in the tech office for about an hour. When I woke up, Nick was sitting on the side of the chair and it was time for tech.

Sound had an earlier call than everyone else so we could mic the kids up, which turned into just hanging around the theatre. For a while, everything was ahead of schedule… until we were suddenly 15 minutes late.

This performance of ‘Once on This Island’ was probably the worst night. It was closing night, which is a mixed blessing. I’m quite thankful the show is over- don’t get me wrong. It’s just kind of annoying that performers and techies alike are unable to redeem themselves from this show.

Overall, sound was decent- there were a couple of things, but nothing show stopping. I didn’t screw body mics up too badly or anything. Lights were pretty good too.

But the stage absolutely fell apart. Actors forgot lines, scenery broke and generally failed, mic sound-receiver things fell off, and Mrs. Silverman (teacher-techie) was caught on stage. One actor decided he was going to skip one of his ‘cues’ (to laugh) because he didn’t feel like it, which really messed some people up. Then after the show, a fair number of techies ended up running around trying to collect microphones. There was something really stressful about tonight- I suppose since it was the last night, no one wanted to make mistakes. In their desire to not make mistakes, people were kind of off their game.

 On a completely unrelated topic:

 I keep finding these amazing quotes from songs, movies, books, poems and video games. Apparently, I have nothing better to do than share them on my blog. So, for the very first quote of the day: "My friends are my power.  And I'm theirs!"-Sora, Kingdom Hearts 1

So now I'm tired, and have a presentation/essay due tomorrow that is sort of half-finished at the moment. Tomorrow we get to strike the set and then there's a sort of party at one of the techies' houses. That will  be fun. 

One more day until Spring Break!

The Fifth God

I can't remember much of today, except wanting it to be over so I could tech and go home. This morning I watched The Last Samurai very first thing, and pretty much woke up to people dying highly dramatic deaths. It was about as lovely as it sounds...

Today was the second show of On This Island. I must confess, while it's certainly not the greatest show in the world by any standards, I am not sick to death of the songs. They are not overly catchy or generally obnoxious. However, in sound today I made more mistakes than I would have liked. Most volume-mixing related- it's kind of impossible for it to ever sound good unless some of the actors sing louder.

The gods presented me a lot of problems. The Goddess of Love was louder than usual, while the God of Death somehow got even quieter. The God of Water was my only break- The Goddess of Earth had issues with her mic in the beginning of the show. It was an absolutely horrible feeling to have her all ready to go, and then discover I had no signal from her mic. Then midway through the show, it started storming really badly. The first set of thunder sent Nick and I into a panic- we thought we had done something wrong to result in this awful booming noise! But, no. It was really Zeus, the fifth god. And I couldn't mute him XD

Tomorrow is the last day of the show. Then we take the set down on Friday (striking the set) and are officially done with Once on This Island. Thank goodness.

Roller-coaster Ride

I don't even know how I feel about today. It just sort of... happened. 

In law I basically learned how to talk to police and avoid getting my imaginary car searched, which is always useful. Then I did nothing in free and was half asleep in Chinese.

In school, I danced on my healing ankle, which was probably not the smartest thing to do. However, it was group work and I didn’t really do much. If the teacher hadn’t been a guest artist from Rainbow Dance Theatre (he’s amazing), then I probably wouldn’t have danced… but whatever. We did some interesting weight-sharing exercises, which sounds weird. Essentially, it was partner lifts and how to make them look pretty.

After school, I teched my very first show! To be completely honest it was pretty stressful because I didn’t want to miss anyone’s lines. I made two or three mistakes, but none of them were terribly major. Some were kind of embarrassing (I sent some kid’s conversation into the whole dressing room, apparently), but ultimately the audience didn’t hear much that they weren’t supposed to. It’s kind of strange that I have at least 50 tech hours, but haven’t worked an official show yet. I guess it’s kind of based on when I joined tech… go figure.

A lot of stuff has been happening to people lately, and it kills me to watch them all suffer.  As far as I can remember, nothing has really bothered me in the past two months or so.  There have been minor irritations, but nothing to really set me off for about the last month. While I know life happens to people, sometimes I wish it didn’t have to.  I wish I could take their pain from them- it doesn’t matter if it hurts me, I just don’t like knowing they’re hurting and there’s nothing I can really do to stop it. 

I guess I'm going to borrow some song lyrics from the All American Rejects....

'Speak to me- when all you got to keep is strong,

Move along, move along like I know you do.

And even when your hope is gone,

Move along, move along just to make it through.'

Bed Before 11?

Well, this is just a list-post, because I'm too lazy to write out anything properly.

1. Tomorrow is the first night of Once on This Island.
           1a. At tech today, there were a couple of mistakes on my part. Sort of missed a few main's lines.
            1b. But at least I get to wear a black shirt to school tomorrow!
            1c. That show is going to be... interesting. Very... interesting.
            1d. This is actually the first show I'm ever working!
            1e. The next one will be the HS dance show- that I'm dancing in. Don't know how that will work
2. My ankle is getting worse every day.
          2a. Evidently time for Tylenol.
          2b. Maybe I really shouldn't have danced yesterday....
3. I got the vast majority of my homework done that was assigned today.
          3a. Who saw that coming? I mean, seriously. I normally go to bed around 11-12.... ish.
4. I've been dating Nick for a month.
          4a. Yay <3 !
5. I am now going to bed. Good night :D