halloween, kit, kids and sastera.

wow, has it really been a week since i've posted? time's a-flying!

well, this week was definitely better than last week... i had more fun, more sleep, and more exercise. =) oh and i also had my first halloween! i didn't actually do anything on the actual day, but i partied the weekend before. in summary:

1. looking like a nerd one night and an emo the next wasn't too difficult for me. not necessarily a good thing.
2. i made new GIRL friends, yay. fooding at sierra and kelly's was a lot of fun... i actually had a semi-meaningful conversation in mandarin! and i heard "aiyo" for the first time in ages! (kelly's singaporean)
3. iball was a blast! good job isa people! =)
4. don't drink alcohol on an empty stomach, when you're really tired, when you had alcohol the night before, or any combo of the three. lol.
5. "crank dat soulja boy" was overplayed, but i had a blast dancing to it over and over and over and over again.
6. i still haven't carved pumpkins. =(
7. i still don't know how girls could and can walk around with their super-short skirts and minimal tops - i was wearing three layers and i was still cold!
8. sean's been hanging around romandy a lot.

kit had his birthday the day before halloween, so happy birthday buddy! wish i could be there to celebrate it with you and everyone else... i was thinking about it and i realized that it was the first surprise birthday party i've missed since we started having surprise birthday parties for the gang. and that was like, 5 years ago! emofying. anyway, i hope you had a great one!

hmm, what else? work's been getting better... there's nothing like having a kid voluntarily climb into your lap. or run to you for a hug. or turn to you for comfort. and it's hard not to have favorites! i like kids. i still don't like diapers tho, but i'm getting better! oh and speaking of kids, i'm volunteering/interning with a grad student who's carrying out research about theory-of-mind (basically how and when children learn that people have their own beliefs and feelings that may or may not guide their behavior), and we've been practicing the scripts... i'm really excited about running actual experiments! i'm helping out with making phone calls to recruit participants too, and i got us our very first participant! woot. =)

in lit class we just finished with the ramayana, which i enjoyed. with the odyssey, which we did before this, i felt kinda disadvantaged because almost everyone else in class had done it in high school, and the closest i had come to it was watching troy. greek mythology was something i hadn't really been exposed to either. the ramayana was something i was definitely more familiar with, and it's amazing how i felt such a strong cultural connection with it. the way the characters talked, their beliefs, the society... even the names were easier to pronounce. i didn't expect to identify so strongly with it, so it was a pleasant surprise, and a reminder of home.

and probably the most amazing thing is, the lit i learnt in high school back home actually helped! that's right, fellow malaysians, bm sastera is not completely useless! on monday we were gonna have a quiz in class, and i assumed it was gonna be about the odyssey since we had just finished it the week before and we were just gonna start the ramayana that day. i'd completed the assigned reading on the ramayana, but i focused a lot more on the odyssey. and of course the quiz had to be on the ramayana! so i thought i was screwed, but bm sastera came to the rescue! you know how we learnt about this bird-ish dude who was fighting with some other monster dude or something to that effect, and how the bird-ish dude's wings get cut off? well that's from the ramayana, and the bird-ish dude's name is jatayu. one of the extra credit questions was "who is jatayu?" and when i first looked at it i had no idea! then i remembered how we were laughing at the story in high school, about how ridiculously stupid the story was, and remembered that there was a jatayu involved... so i managed to somehow connect the two and answer the question! and the first question was "what's sloka?" and i had no idea at first either, but then i remembered "seloka pak pandir" and all the other selokas, so i hazarded a guess about it being the hindu epic style, which i vaguely remembered reading something about, and i was right! lucky me that bm has some roots in sanskrit. (random note: at work, we keep track of when the kids get diaper changes or when they use the potty, and "bm" is used to denote "bowel movement", i.e. poop. for all you non-malaysians, bm back home stands for bahasa malaysia/melayu, which means malaysian/malay language.)

kay i think i've written enough for today - just submitted a blog post for cog dev (that's our assignment - writing a blog post about something we learnt or read or discussed in class. so cool ya?). next monday i have a quiz and a midterm, and on tuesday i have a paper due... so wish me luck!