"perceiving life as a perpetual film."

"When two members of a family or two intimate friends are separated, and one goes abroad and one remains at home, the return of the relative or friend who has been travelling always seems to place the relative or friend who has been staying at home at a painful disadvantage when the two first meet. the sudden encounter of the new thoughts and new habits eagerly gained in the one case, with the old thoughts and old habits passively preserved in the other, seems at first to part the sympathies of the most loving relatives and the fondest friends, and to set a sudden strangeness, unexpected by both and uncontrollable by both, between them on either side. After the first happiness of my meeting with Laura was over, after we had sat down together hand in hand to recover breath enough and calmness enough to talk, I felt this strangeness instantly, and I could see that she felt it too. It has partially worn away, now that we have fallen back into most of our old habits, and it will probably disappear before long. But it has certainly had an influence over the first impressions that I have formed of her, now that we are living together again -- for which reason only I have thought fit to mention it here.
She has found me unaltered, but I have found her changed."

- Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White

i just thought that paragraph was rather apt, considering how i feel things are going to be like when we return to singapore. it was on the first page i read today, i'm reading it in advance for 19th century lit next semester. after this whopper there's still quite a few more to go. am planning to take asian american lit, 19th c, the body: 3Ps, personal finance and something else, i haven't decided yet.

here i sit opposite mil at the breakfast table, having just demolished half of a very heavy pollo mexicano potato taken away from jason's deli yesterday. it's 4pm (so late! i had no idea) and i'm still a little sleepy, surprisingly. there's exactly 2 more weeks before i touchdown in singapore, and half of me's raring to plunge myself into rush hour responsibility, while the other half of me's whining about how there's so much more to experience here in the states. funny how time flies so fast, how we cling on to memories in a bid to make each second seem longer. kinda like ryan stiles acting out the famous baywatch running down the beach scene. it's so damn funny and prolonged that your stomach's doing the splits, but inevitably, he's gonna slide down the floor and rescue some person in the audience anyway.

okay, i'm weird.

the past few days have been a whirlwind of activity, i know not where to start to describe it all - i've played 4 straight hours of texas hold em' poker and bankrupted twice only to win a substantial amount at the end (no worries, didn't lose money we played with fake chips), i've gone on rides at the sixflags water theme park at arlington that i've normally never thought i'd have the bravery to do so, i've been the backseat spectator at mil's first daylight driving attempt in an empty carpark. =P it's been a really fun past few days, because mil and i finally had a chaffeur to take us around the place. hanweee came down on friday afternoon via greyhound from houston and we celebrated mil's 21st birthday at midnight with a yummy icecream cake. i think she's blogging opposite me now at the - okay her computer just died again but being wonderful mil she's not being very frustrated and is still smiling (if it were me i'd probably have bashed the screen in or something).

hurricane harbor was really fun. we went for practically everything worth going, and my favorite was this 4-seater ride that had an enormous yellow and blue loudspeaker cone at the end - we dropped from a huge height and went all the way - okay halfway - up the side of the cone and then back and forth we seesaw until we hit the smaller end and out! we go. shooo fun! there was the body slide ride where you lie on top of this mat (kinda like fantasy island's surabashi) and mil and i tried to do the ice age thing... bend your head down low in an effort to go faster. we took this ride where you sit on a yellow raft-like thing sans seatbelt and it goes vertically down... i was gripping the sides so hard that by the time i was enjoying skimming the surface of the water like a jetski i hit the blue safety barrier at the end... talk about going all the way! haha. all in all, we had a splashy blast. i think mil's going to upload photographs - maybe i'll upload some too, soon. it's been awhile since i've had an adrenaline surge for the entire day.

oky i guess i'll sign off for now - gotta do grad school research like my dad told me to. you guys take care, i'll be seeing you soon! and the weather here is scorchingly hot, even hotter than in sg i believe. left crayons in the car yesterday and they melted into liquid - makes you shudder to think about people who "accidentally" leave their kids and pets inside the car while they go off to buy something or the other. the car becomes a greenhouse of heat even in half an hour, it's scary. it's an average of 34 degrees celsius here. sigh, prepares me for home.