How to be a lady...

...bird.

Decided to throw out a short post while detoxing, one of my favourite ways to do which is to let sit a bulgarian rose mask on my face while listening to Rachmaninov's Concerto No. 2. My favourite rendition will have to be Lang Lang's - it's like winter on steroids.

My mind has the tendency to go off on a tangent. Anyway, I dressed up as a ladybird for Halloween this year. Or ladybug, if you spell colour without the u and get your re's mixed up with er's. Here's how I improvised my costume. Quick, easy and very economical - everything I saved by forgoing the skanky French maid costume will contribute to more overpriced shoes.

1) You will need a piece of black felt, scissors, double-sided tape.

2) Cut out different sized circles using round objects for reference. They do not need to be perfect. You are not Archimedes.

 

3) Keep cutting out felt circles as if working in a sweat factory. I ended up with about thirty, but it depends on how spotty you want to be/how much surface area needs to be covered.

4) Find a red dress or fake a jumpsuit like I did with a red top and shorts. Attach circles with double-tape. Be roughly symmetrical. Remember to do the back as well.

5) You should be able to achieve the makeup with products you already have. Eyes: use a pink lipstick on the outer corner as a base, and top with blusher. Pop some white shadow in the inner corner. Put a few dots along your crease with black liner. Practice the look before the actual day, because more likely than not you will mess up the first time.

Insert narcissistic self-shot

6) The whole process should take less than two hours, unless you have two left hands. Hope you had a fantastic Halloween!

P.S. For those who clicked into the post looking for advice on how to be an actual lady, my tips are to 1) never poop; and 2) drink tea with your pinky sticking out.

The moving chronicles

My dad says that a good start is half the success. In that case, I better start investing in low tops and cute heels to please the surgeons, because I spent the first three days of my surgical rotation in hibernation. I must have been part bear in my last life.

I know, polar bears don't technically hibernate. But how adorable is this?

Or marmot, which sleeps for eight months, and copulate and eat for the other four. What an enviable life indeed.

Or snake, except the metaphor is suddenly not so cute anymore.

But I digress. My slothfulness was absolutely imperative because I had to move houses straight after my paediatrics exam, and those who have done either one will understand my torment. Moving is a painful process, especially if a) you/your mother are stereotypically Asian and like to hoard; b) your apartment is large and allows for storage of aforementioned hoarded items; c) the last time you moved was nineteen years ago; d) your family pretty much dismissed the renovator's advice a month ago to take action early.

In our case, it was all of the above. We were so last-minute with things that our kitchen looked like this at 6am on the day of moving.

The kitchen, three hours before the movers arrived

Bad time management aside, we do actually own a hell lot of stuff. I wish I'd placed some money at the back of all our closets, because they seem to be a fantastic culture medium for replication. When the movers called earlier to arrange for cardboard boxes to be delivered to us, my mum told them she guesstimated we would need about thirty. We ended up with about eighty. Needless to say, we felt the need to tip the movers generously. 

It was definitely no easy feat to pack my whole life into boxes within two days. As you sift through your possessions, you find yourself reliving chunks of your life...like that slutty hoe phase you went through in year 9. Those skanky Ecko tube tops should not have been mine to own, especially since I was neither black nor did/do I own boobs. Looking at my old closet, I'm surprised I was even let out of the house, thank god that part of my life is over.

Of course, there are many other gems retelling precious memories, some not for you to relish, such as the photos of your mother posing in a bikini on a sofa in the hotel on her honeymoon.

Yeah, let's not even go there.

Did you really think I was going to show you my mother and her goodies? Seriously now.

Anyway, it has been almost two weeks since we moved into our new place, and it is still strewn with boxes with just the minimal amount of floor exposed for one to shuffle sideways from one room to another. Unpacking is seriously such a bitch. After all, what goes in must come out. Of bags, not vags, you dirty-minded child.

Moment

Waiting for my yellow pill to set in. It's always worked like a charm. Don't fail me now.

Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night, your way back to slumber barricaded by a torrent of thoughts and old memories, of him?

The beauty of childbirth

Whoever said childbirth was the most beautiful thing in the world has clearly never seen one. 

Let's talk vaginal deliveries first:

• Firstly, babies never arrive when you want them to. The first day I was on duty, the labour ward had a record low of two deliveries the whole day, neither of which happened within my fruitless 12-hour shift.

My vaginal expeditions

After the last post dedicated to my girlfriends, here's one for the boys too.

Why you shouldn't be a whore

My girlfriends who suffer from urinary tract infections or need advice on contraception/plan b will be pleased to know that I have started my rotation in obstetrics and gynaecology. Gynae only, to be exact, so my eyes are, until two weeks later, safe from seeing vaginas get ripped open by babies' heads and uteri being pried open with brute force.

The thing about O&G is everyone warns you about how bloody and disturbing obs is, but nobody tells you gynae is just as bad.

Last week I had the misfortune of attending the colposcopy clinic. To put it in laymen terms, the purpose of this looking at the vagina and cervix through a microscope is to check for lesions so that early cervical cancer can be detected, which isn't all too bad...until they do find something suspicious and decide to take biopsies, i.e. a tissue sample. For cost-effective purposes, only those ladies with positive Pap smears are referred for a colposcopy, so essentially every patient I saw that afternoon had chunks of tissue clamped off them with forceps like these...

Honestas ante honores?

All throughout my high school days, I had never been to a single inter-school event unless I had to personally participate in the sport, which, of course, was never - after all, we do have 1700 students every year, 1698 of them more athletic than me and the last one being Jane. Without having to say more, I'm definitely not someone who's fired up with school spirit.

The school has changed a lot since I left. It's not just the hardware like the SSC without sofas, but also the silly systems that they run for publicity's sake (Healthy Eating, anyone? I'm glad I graduated before they banned Twixes from the campus) when there are better things to be concerned about.

Airhead

I like writing, I like reading what people write about what I've written, I like reading what people write. Despite numerous attempts to create outlets where I could spew whatever I fancied without a care who was reading, I often end up - without intention initially - creating fixed personas. 

It has become quite apparent that there is something my readers find inherently interesting about my superficiality. I think this monologue is proof that I make a pretty good airhead:

(Pitter-)patter

For those tucked cosily indoors and watching raindrops slide off window panes, the city's been cast a lovely shade of dove grey today; but for those scrambling for cover in a once-white-now-see-through shirt and no umbrella, the streets are wet and murky, and would it please stop fucking raining?

Guess which situation I was in this afternoon.

Training for robotics

I am an easy addict. I pick up new obsessions extremely quickly. It is a curse that I grow out of them at an equally hasty rate, as it makes me a jack of all trades and master at none, but fortunately for you, it means there is a great chance I will finally stop raving about nail polish after this third post on the subject.

I do not even know where to begin with the wonders of my new preoccupation. For starters, I have not been this academically diligent since my medicine rotation in year 3, because I have found that there is truly no better complement to a manicure than a textbook. It's not that there's nothing better you can do in between applying your second and third layers (in fact, typing/txting on iPhone is one of the few things I can do effortlessly without smudging my polish - whoever invented the touchscreen must've been a woman who enjoyed painting her nails), but the fact that it is such a waste of time - you are literally watching paint dry - the sheer decadency of those 5-10 minutes of otherwise idle waiting evokes a stronger feeling of guilt than any other useless interest I have ever pursued. And with guilt comes motivation, so at the end of the day you have nice fingertips and knowledge of lamotrigine's side effects. Talk about an undecuple win. By the way, that's an elevenfold win - one win for each freshly manicured nail.

Nail fail

Shit! I just did my nails for the first time - or more like, only the ones on my left hand - and I've totally messed up omg. I tried covering my mistakes with a new layer of polish but I screwed those ones up too, and finally decided it might be a good idea to stop after the third coat.

Looney tunes

Whoever said you finish the psychiatric rotation with the best stories wasn't lying. Here are some patients I have had the pleasure of meeting at the country house:

1) Taxi-driver with persecutory delusions that the mainland police were after her for illegal parking. Was wheeled off to hospital after she was found sitting on the streets dishing out one-hundred dollar bills to dogs.

Little changes

My newest favourite lunchtime hangout is the paediatric psych ward.

Our first visit there was probably my creepiest experience as a medical student, second only to observing autopsies at the morgue. The inpatients had just finished group therapy, so it was one long corridor of expressionless children in checkered pyjamas - one kid every five metres - waiting to return to their rooms. As if it wasn't bad enough, the entire place was also washed over by a sallow tint by the crappy lighting as per our usual hospital-last-renovated-thirty-years-ago standards. Then the case we were assigned was a psychotic girl who giggled to herself and had big, round eyes that stared into nothing ninety percent of the time. I was so freaked out the first time she squealed and flailed her arms around without warning I think I must've jumped half a metre backwards.

Psychotherapy

Woops, I'm doing a terrible job at updating regularly. To be honest, I haven't been faring all too well recently: crappy sleep, lots of external stressors, and generally not being in karma's good books have tipped my life out of balance. Psychiatry seems to be one of the more loathed subjects amongst medical students, but I've personally found it to be quite entertaining. There was certainly nothing nearly as humorous (except the bone. Ha. Ha.) about orthopaedics, and I forsee nothing but multiple anuses after paediatrics/medicine/surgery from professors ripping me new ones each tutorial.

The glamorous life

I've been told that my girlfriends and I live like glamour girls. I hope whoever said that meant it in the context of an apparently-exorbitant lifestyle and not in the whore kind of way. Since blogging requires momentum and I've clearly lost mine in the past week of last-minute panic before my first examination this year, I figured I should write about just anything I can think of before the inertia completely sets in, so I'm going to record the trivialities as I go along, and you'll be able to live vicariously through my words life as a Shirley for one day and decide how much glamour in there there is for yourself...

The inner keen bean

I can never understand why people get bored. They'd have to be absolute sloths to still have all that time on their hands when there are so many things that can be done. I'm not saying they're all useful pursuits - in my case, they mostly are not - but at least I'm always entertained. For example, this morning I woke up, made a list of restaurants I want to visit in due course, ate a bowl of cornflakes, then decided to extend the mini-break that I gave myself yesterday before I start my weeklong revision for Saturday's CCT because, as usual, there's nothing I do quite as well as procrastinating and rewarding myself for trivial achievements, like nailing yesterday's presentation.

Obligatory v-day post

Hope you all had a happy Valentine's day!

I know, it's such a corrupt way of celebrating eros. Why the hearts, flowers and fluffiness, you say? I refuse to be part of this cookie-cutter routine that is to send the girl a nice bouquet and buy her dinner!

Nailing it

Today, I embarked on a journey of no return.

Ladies and gentlemen, I bought my first ever bottle of nail polish.

I know right, how is it possible for someone who has such an unhealthy obsession with all things makeup-related - so much so that she never goes home without a new lipgloss - not to own a single lacquer?

It is therefore my sincere belief that this purchase was long past due. I know, you are going to tell me that this decision is not without grave consequences: now that I own my first polish, there is no stopping me from becoming a mani-ac (punny!) who insist their twenty-five bottles of black varnishes are, in fact, different shades and variations of charcoal and ebony. To counter this line of thought, I would like to point out the medical faculty condemns anyone wearing bright nails in the wards, and this alone should empirically stem any potential obsession with buying too many polishes.

...or did I just give myself the excuse to buy myself a collection of creams, ivories, baby pinks and other 'work-appropriate' colours? Zeus totally knew that Pandora would open that box of evils.

First world problems

I realise this is going to be completely anticlimactic because I may or may not have slightly hyped this up to be the end of my blogging hiatus and everyone now expects rainbows and unicorns to sprout from my fingertips.

Anyway, I'm ditching my other most recent site before I even reach five posts because wordpress sucks for charging people to alter their CSS/HTML, and that's possibly the biggest turn-off for a nerd who owned at least three xanga sites solely for layout-testing purposes and spent most of her Sunday's in her teenage years looking up the funky cursors and ad-removing codes.