.last.shard.of.petals.
| | | prognosticating yesterday | | | words less hearkened | | | RSS | | |
About Me
Blogs I follow:
-
-
-
today, after a long and philosophical talk with jeun about things, one of the light-hearted things we talked about was this.
i said we all long for someone to understand us. but that’s not enough, because so many things are seizing my selves and claiming me. i compared it to a sea. i decided, it’s not about understanding me that really matters -but for someone to preserve what he or she has understood about me, by deciding its value and guiding me to hold on quite tightly to myself.
essentially, it’s not enough for someone to locate a beach, but to fall in love with that stretch of the beach, set his or her heart down like a row of sandbags, to keep that beach from eroding. it is about cherish, protecting and enduring. not entirely about locating.
at the end, j pointed out it sounds like “bitch” and we did a i-know-what-you-mean-this-is-an-awesome-pun highfive.
-
i found my good guy, he’s taken and i don’t know what the world is coming to.
-
Maybe it’s infatuation, maybe it’s love, but I’m intrigued by the fact I cannot figure you out. I accept that we probably will never be together, but I cannot convince myself not to admire you from a distance. You don’t meet a lot of my criteria, but you excite me in some ways that make me forget that there are a lot of things I’d expect from a guy. There are the really basic and important ones you meet, but I get really disappointed if you have no interest in anything apart from sports. You are like an incomplete painting.
I am only sixteen. I don’t expect to meet my life partner at this age. This infatuation will probably fade. But maybe one day I will look back and think “Oh, I was so innocent back then, I fell for this boy I thought was incredibly perfect.” And then I feel happy that I did stupid, teenager things as a teenager, and not, well, being light-years ahead in maturity, and not being able to enjoy the mistakes we tend to make when we are young.
Stay foolish, Anabelle, you will get hurt but you will learn, and then you will appreciate things better, I suppose.
(Source: words-you-never-heard)
-
Hehehe N’s and my plans/ tactics on how not to look loser:
1. Call people
2. Hence look busy and distracted
3. Pretend to text and smile to yourself heheheheheback to awkward life tmr :( i’m hoping it all gets better because i cannot survive one year of this hahahahaha. paranoia and mornings don’t mix well and neither does paranoia and food lol.
-
OHMAIGOSH I MADE IT BACK ALIVE.
I HAVE NO WORDS TO DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL. Not because of the fact that I survived one of the hardest challenges of my life, but because of how I feel towards the wholeprogram, the whole journey, the whole experience.
I’m not very good at touchy stuff, so I am going to sound like a retard describing to you my OBS adventure. Let me just break it down for you, starting from Day 1.
Day 1Basically all of us arrived at Palau Ubin and to be honest it was really quite boring on that day. Our instructors, Chloe and Sham(woohoo) taught us all those basics and went through with us their expectations for us, etc. Our class was split into two groups,DaGama and Cousteau, and because we will be doing most of the activities together during the 5 days, we need a common name, so we called ourselvesCOUGA :D
We went to camp 2 and settled in. All of us were horrified at the condition because it was quite dirty. We kept on complaining about how those from Camp 1 got the better deal because their facilities were better.
We were late for almost everything and had to ask for time extensions. ):
Most of us described that day as tiring, I guess because we are not really accustomed to all the changes, such as getting a small rinse for shower, sleeping in tents, cooking our own food using solid fuels, and all those. And some of us even wanted to go home ):
But then on day 2, things took a turn.
DAY 2We had to wake up at 6 in the morning and do the OBS physical training activity. I think only Couga did it because I didn’t see any other groups doing it. In a way it’s good, because it prepares us for all the upcoming activities. So on that day we had to pack our stuff into the OBS bag that they provide for us and embark on our expedition. The expedition is 3 days, 2 nights, meaning we leave on day 2 and return to our base camp (camp 2) on day 4 at night.
Our instructors guided us for our 1st day expedition (ie told us what to do and all that). So we packed and left camp 2 and kayaked towards camp 1. Our instructors ran a capsize drill, in case we capsized in the middle of the sea later on.
We had our heights element afterwards and personally, I have a slight fear of heights. I was initially very reluctant to do it, but our group motivated each other and though I did not make it to the top, I was surprised at how far I managed to climb.
Again, both our groups exceeded the time, and as a penalty, we had to eat dinner with our hands tied together. Camp 1 even had a proper and clean canteen and the chefs cooked for us :O
But the sleeping condition was… horrible? Gross? I think that’s merely putting it simply. We had to hike all the way up the forest just to pitch our tents. At night. And we slept on the rocky grounds and there were cockroaches and other large insects everywhere.
THAT, made us realize how blessed we are to have camp 2 as our base camp.
Day 3This is when our expedition really begins, and we are left to navigate around completely by ourselves.
Oh wait, before that, we had an activity where we design a poster-ish thing for each of our groups to motivate ourselves later on. So basically, our group, Cousteau’s campaign was something like “The Shitting Sheep Shits on a Sheet on a Ship” and we could barely get it right except for my friend Aivee, so she was correcting us. And when my friend Chi was trying to explain, she had a hard time saying it so Aivee corrected her. I think Chi wanted to say something like “yea, what she said”, but somehow, she unintentionally ended up saying “That’s what she said”. HAHAHA OHGOD THE MEMORIES XD
We had to trek for a total of 6 hours, carrying heavy backpacks weighing over 15kg. If you wanna know what we carry that makes our backpacks so heavy, each of us had to carry around 2 people’s items because some of us had to carry food and others had to carry our tents. If it weren’t for those lovely people singing and motivating us to carry on, I don’t think I would have made it. The entire hike was really tiring and we had to trek through numerous muddy grounds to find our checkpoints. Our navigator, although she made quite a number of mistakes and misled us, she was the one that put in the most effort to correct her mistakes. In the end, we changed a few navigators to let each of them take a break. Together, we pushed ourselves further. Together, we walked through webs. And together, we made it to our campsite.
Day 3’s campsite was the best amongst the whole journey. It was near the seaside and we could sleep quite well. Also, the food on day 3 tasted fantastic. We had beans, corn and noodles.
Day 4WOW. It was really hard to believe we had made it so far. That day was our kayaking adventure. We set off at 8am and our initial target was for us to reach back to camp 2 at around 2-3pm. My kayak mates are Isabel and Nechie, and together our kayak was the fastest kayak, as in we always overtook the navigator.
The first obstacle we had was navigating through the swampy area. It was very hard as we were the first to reach a certain point and we had to wait for the others, while trying to hover our kayak in the same direction, at the same place. However, we kept on crashing into branches. One of the kayaks even capsized trying to get away from the branches.
Moreover, we got lost numerous time navigating through the river and faced countless dead ends, making the task of completing the trip within 7 hours much more challenging.
The second obstacle was the high tide, strong winds and bad weather condition we faced the minute we kayaked into the big sea. The rocky waves made it hard to control the direction of our kayaks and many of us ended up crashing into the fence.
There was one point in time when all of us through that we couldn’t make it because we have been floating around the same jetty for over 2 hours while waiting for some of the kayaks to catch up. After a while, we kayaked and gathered on some random shore along the way to rest for a while. Our instructors were quite unhappy with our performance because some of us were not kayaking properly and not pushing themselves hard enough. (That’s what she said. SORRY HAHA HAD TO PULL THE JOKE) We ended up switching partners, so as to stagger our abilities, etc. So our kayak ended up with Isabel and QiQi.
Halfway through our kayaking, my kayak capsized because of the strong waves and we crashed into some rocks :O HAHAHA BUT IT WAS A TON OF FUN THOUGH. Afterwards we tried our hardest to kayak faster while trying to balance the kayak at the same time.
We helped each other back on our kayaks and sang to keep our spirits up. You cannot imagine how we felt when we reached land and our instructors told us that they were proud of us that we were willing to push ourselves to that extra inch just to achieve a common goal.
In my opinion, the 11 hour long kayaking experience was the most memorable. It meant so much to all of us. Accounting for all those obstacles faced, none of us thought that we could do it but we did. I recall this other class that had to kayak in the stormy weather. Their instructors called for backup halfway through, some of them even cried and they were pulled back to camp 2. However, I am so glad, now that I think about it, that we persisted and ended our journey right. Our class is the only class whereby half of our classmates/watch-mates capsized, and none of the people from the other classes capsized. Our instructors thought we really could not make it and were ready to call for standby but we persisted and despite how long we took, we still made it in the end. That is what it is all about. As our instructor Sham has always said “It’s not about how it begins but how it ends.”
It was THAT activity that made us realize that whatever happens, as long as we reach higher, persist and give it our all, anything is possible.
Day 5We’re back. Lots of packing up, lots of cleaning, lots of debrief.
All of us cried, a lot. It’s not just those sort of oh-I’m-so-happy-camp-ended tears nor is it those omg-I’ll-miss-this-so-much tears. It’s those tears that tell a story, tell us how much we been through together, tell us that anything is possible, and that we’ll always have each other.
Here’s the story.
We had a ball of cotton twine that we passed around, and everytime someone receives it, we share our most memorable experiences during the 5 day camp and roll it once or twice around out fingers. Everyone off us talked about either the trekking or the kayaking experience. After everyone has gone one round, we passed them to out instructors. Chloe told us this story about how they instructors found a dog at camp last year, desperately trying to scramble up the stairs to the multi purpose hall. What really touched them is the fact that the puppy kept toppling over and after numerous attempts, it finally got onto the ground. They loved the dog so much that they brought it home and took special care of it. It was so smart till the point that it was potty trained within less than a week. A few months later, the instructors had to meet up for an annual gathering. At Palau Ubin. So of course the dog had to be brought along with them. However, on the trip to the island, the dog did not make it and halfway, it stopped breathing. Chloe told us how she was glad to see that we were willing to put in that extra tiny bit of effort to do something, constantly reminding her of the dog. Afterwards, she cut off the cotton twine connecting all of us, telling us that our real OBS journey starts right after the camp ends, because our instructors are no longer there with us, we’re all alone now and how we flair depends on how much we are willing to give. All we have is our classmates, each and every one of us, together as one.
This is a picture of mt portion of the cotton twine, tied around my short obs journal during the course. Horrible quality pic, because it was taken with iPhoto.
Throughout the five days, we were always behind time and we sincerely apologize to our instructors for putting up with our haphazard work. Okay our work wasn’t haphazard at all, it was perfect, because each and every one of us was part of it.
Shockingly after the five days, I only had 1 mosquito bite :D but I got MUCH MUCH TANNER D: Haha that should be all I guess :D Wow this is like a goddamn monologue-ish speech.
I’d like to end off with one of the things that our instructor told us. On our tombstone, when we die, there’s gonna be 2 dates. One which says when you are born, the other which says when you passed away. But those are not significant at all. What matters most is what happened in the tiny little dash that connects the two dates.
-
hahahaha aww <3
-
yet another rehearsal for that ending without end: it’s very interesting meeting people who are rather similar to me....
it’s very interesting meeting people who are rather similar to me. they seem to be my mirror image. i observe them, in an attempt to understand myself. then i started to realise i do give off the rather cold and disinterested vibe. that’s fine with me, i find a lot of things boring and beneath me.
-
maniac-snails
dont-letyourfearswin
miningourpsyche
miningourpsyche
miningourpsyche
randomcheeze
miningourpsyche
wahnvorstellung
