It has been nearly a week of mourning, and I guess it's time to blog on.

A little update on the casualty: I have sent the laptop to the Toshiba center here in Irvine, some ulu place that took me an hour on bus, and it seems that the hard disk is corrupted due to wear and tear over time. It will cost me USD250 to recovery my data onto a new hard disk, and after much consideration (a lot of consideration... that money can probably fly me to New York and back!), I've decided to pay the money. So it's under repair, return date unknown.

And sometimes it's hard to imagine returning to a time when you have no handphones and no computers. But just think about it, we survived it well then, And so maybe it seemed that we could be over-reliant on our new techy gadgets; the mechanical needs to make us feel complete.

In a return to innocence without the above-mentioned, I'm faring ok, till the weekends I guess. There's nothing much to do here around Irvine, and local students all go home over the weekends. Sick of doing homework over the weekdays, and American Football and baseball can only keep me entertained for that amount of time. So here I am at the library, checking out the 2hr bus routes to go exploring this county again.

After this entry of course.

The most striking thing over the last week was discovering what the image of Singaporeans was like in the minds of the Americans, or well, the people here who have never heard of us.

I could fogive them for not knowing where we are geographically, but I must say I was really annoyed (and even pissed) when they thought we can't write essays.

Like what the heck right? I must admit that I do not pronounce every word of English perfectly, but I would have gladly wanted to say that I can probably write a better essay than him, even if he can speaks better than me. And I'm damn sure my vocabulary is better too, not to mention my SAT scores. And besides, they weren't the original inventor/user of the English language, excuse me.

So much for trying to be helpful.

As I launched into a delightful philosphical argument on Aristotle's definition of "happiness" and "reasoning" in his Nicomachean Ethics, I was haughtily glad to see his jaws drop, and very much thankful to PH1101E back in NUS.

1 Point to Singapore! Cheers to the tiny red dot on the map people! Be proud!