A Little Too Not Over You

Anne had the dream again.
        Later, she woke up to the news of his homecoming.
        Much later, she couldn't get a single thing done without thinking about the dream. About him. About who they used to be to each other and who they can be to each other, but didn't.
        She was utterly excited of seeing him again. At the same time, she was uncertain if he would ask her out again, just like old times. He seemed so changed since their last meeting. He chatted less, stopped sending her e-mails and no longer reply her calls. In these past few months, they had drifted away from each other. Would they be so far apart that it is impossible to bridge the gap? Also, something that happened during their last meeting opened up a gashing wound that Anne could never get over. He asked Her. He may not think of it that way, but the playground was special to her. Anne simply couldn't imagine anyone barging into the picture, especially not Her. She was thanking her stars she didn't get to meet them that day.
         Nevertheless, Anne couldn't help feeling that the uniqueness of the playground was ceasing, like old memories falling apart and the feelings they once held dear for each other evaporated into the atmosphere. Immediately, she felt like an idiot. An idiot who cared for someone who didn't care for her. An idiot who still live in the past. An idiot who still harbour a hope for the impossible.

Breaking Free of The Lotus spell

Anne didn't know if she really had a death wish.
        It could be the overbearing pressure of the imminent internals. It could be the backfire of her brain tailing a more than two months' suppression of stress and tension. It could even be her idle bones playing tricks on her willpower - and triumphing, it seemed.
        It came to her slowly and gently, like a mist. It wrapped itself around her gracefully enough, so that she doesn't notice how far up she was enveloped. Then, it happened - just as slowly as it had begun. She felt like a person under a spell. Her conscience was there, her limbs were working - and oh, how every nerve and muscle within her screamed at her: Wake up! Wake up! - but none of them were registered in her head. As she devoured movies after movies, procrastinating every prescious second she couldn't afford to fritter away in this ridiculous manner, all she ever wanted to do was to slap herself and say : Get your lazy butt up! However, her mind kept on whispering : Everything will be fine.
        In a way, it reminded her of the scene from Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, where Percy, Annabeth and Grover were lured into Lotus Casino - it's large glittering billboard reads : You'll never want to leave.
        So, whatever the hell was wrong with her, Anne knew it : She should put a stop to it. All these reckless behaviours had gone long enough. Tomorrow would be - as she put it - the day of purging. She needs to get all those extra carbs out of her system and all those devilish whispers out of her head. Her willpower is strong. She will do it. Nothing can thwart her. She's Anne, after all.

A Bad Day

This was my worst day since coming to India, except for the first night I landed here, under the sinking feeling of homesickness and excessive self-doubtfullness of my true purpose of being here, more than two months ago.
        The week hadn't been going on too well for me, what with the looming shadow of first internals, and the fact that I still had an eternity of studying yet to be completed, and the lecturers kept on attacking me with all those questions I had to struggle even to recall the answers, and shaking their heads and giving me that you-didn't-study-again-didn't-you-don't-you-have-any-idea-how-many-of-your-seniors-flunked-last-year-looks.
        Today was simply the last straw. I was completely broken down during physiology tutorial, where everyone seemed to be able to answer all the questions while I sat there, mute as an idiot. As expected, after giving me THAT look, the lecturer even asked me how much would I expect him to grade me because - in his exact words - I haven't taken part actively in the discussion. How could I - I almost wailed at him - when all I had got were about four to five hours per day, and an eternity of studies expected to be done, every details well memorised, and never to be forgotten, like, forever? Throw in assignments, diagrams and deadlines, it was a miracle I wasn't dead by now, much less Talk or Think.
        I was so exasperated that it was a wonder that I still had the grace to smile at him, like it was a joke, which I highly doubted. Because in his eyes laid the unspoken warning : if this insolence of mine goes on till the externals, my entire future would be flushed down the toilet.
        As if the day wasn't bad enough, I found out that he likes a girl, or allegedly so, as claimed by my friend's friend, whom was his ex-collegemate last year. Apparently, the guy whom she and her friend were so enthutiastically trying to pair up with another friends of theirs - was actually him. Will wonders never cease?
        I hate to say this, but the first thought that flashed through my mind was : will that be me?
        No, if I am the girl, why wouldn't he tell me that before we parted? But if I'm not the girl, why didn't he just go ahead with the match-up, get himself a girlfriend, or find himself a gf, and let me know once and for all, that I shouldn't harbour any hopes?
        I guess it was rather unfair and judgemental of me to think that, though. I acted just as indifferent as he was all along. In fact, I wasn't entirely sure of my feelings towards him. Are there true feelings on my side, or purely manipulation? 
        Oh well, I guess I just want someone who really likes me enough to verbalize and actionize that liking, not keeping it silence and waiting for me to make the first move. For heaven's sake, that was where the phrase knights in silver armour came from. Since Man claimed to be stronger than women, then why couldn't they show some guts in this courting affair? If they object so much to the idea of equality between genders, prove it. Seriously, do they expect the ladies to propose to them? That would be so unladylike, not to mention entirely losing the touch of romance.
        So, with the upsetting idea of both my future career and love life whirring out of my control, I could only say that life S-U-C-K-S.

What I Really Want

There were countless encounters since arriving here that Anne questioned her true purpose of being here. She looked at the shabby buildings looming across the streets, stared at the faeces strewn along the pot-holed road and the pigs gnawing at the garbage and cows wandering into coffee shops like barns, and peered into the run down ruins that looked like the remnants of World War II instead of a prestigious medical college, as they claimed. In the course of the strings of activities - whether she lost herself in the shopping spree for essential items, or purchasing the staggering amount and thickness of books, or dashing about the streets in a risky auto ride - the same doubt kept jumping out at her:
        Is this what you really want?
        She thought of her local coursemates - how they studied so intently even thought it was the first day of class, how they sat so demurely with their noses buried in books and not moving a muscle throughout the lecturers and even the hiatus in between, how they were so eager to answer every questions - and saw in them the little girl who played with medical kit instead of Barbies and wrote about being a doctor in every one of her essays. But what she didn't know was there was a price for every wish. That was why Ariel had to give up her voice for a pair of human legs and Aurora had to pricked her finger before the curse could be broken. Quid pro quo, that was how it always had been. And this time, it cost her the one most precious thing in her life - happiness.
        It wasn't all the long pages of medical jargon or burning the midnight oils which concerned her. In fact, Anne pretty much enjoyed that. But why her? She had never done anything that wasn't her own choice, so why should she start doing it now?
        Perhaps that was because she had no money, or perhaps it was the obligations she felt towards her family, and maybe part of her pride wouldn't permit her to study locally when all her friends went overseas.
But lately she had been weighing all these against her long lost happiness, and suddenly they all seemed extremely insignificant. She could be an M.D. instead of a a M.B.B.S.. She could be studying accountancy for four years in Pahang. She could even be a salesgirl who worked three jobs per day. At least she would be happy.
        Of course, everyone else had been telling her to optimistic. But being optimistic was just like a six-year-old telling her mum to buy two more daddies at the supermarket should he never come back again. It was an act to mask the agony within oneself. Optimistic or not, a person would still be unhappy.
        Anyone would had known her would thought that Anne was a straight-A and ambitious person who knew better than anyone the consequence of falling away from the straight-and-narrow. In truth, Anne wasn't that tough. All she wanted was to be free of all the rules and regulations and responsibilities and expections. She just wanted to happy.

Time-The Old Bald Cheater

Anne thought she would never come to this, but on the day she turned twenty, a single realization struck her: time flies - no, a better phrase would be time is an old bald cheater. When she first came across it in Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis, the phrase reminded her of Shakespeare's Life's Brief Candle - the remorse and fury of a dying man against every waking moments of his life. Yet, there was also something peculiar and amusing about it; something that made the phrase fell oddly in place for her today.
        She wasn't thinking about dying, but about how the past two decades had shaped her future ones and made her into someone she wasn't. She thought about all the first tastes she had of the world: her first memories was lying down in the back seat of the Toyota with a red Mickey Mouse pillow on her face and sticking her legs against the windscreen; her first favourite word was power failure because it sounded like pow and flower and she shouted it everytime the house went dark; her first dream was to own a white house in Courtyard with a swimming pool and swirling mists and the sweet scent of fresh grass. Now, she couldn't even imagine how sweet tasted to her, not in the same way.
        It was a sad fact that the more we owned of the world, the more we owed. One of them: the child within ourselves. But then, that was always the irony of life, wasn't it? We spent a lifetime searching for all sorts of achievements, - the perfect schools, the perfect grades, the perfect testimonials, the perfect resumes, the perfect job, the perfect self everyone expected you to be - only realising much later, when almost a third quarter of our life was gone, that all we have to do was look down. Yes, time was indeed an old bald cheater, and we the yesterday's fools who strut and fret our hours to the days of dusty deaths. 

The Green Mile-A Review

We each owe a death,

There are no exceptions.

But Oh Lord,

Sometimes the green mile seems so long.

These were the words spoken by a man who once witnessed the death of someone who shouldn't die-a man who now desires to die, but couldn't.
        "It was my punishment," he sighed. Those very words sent a deep pang of sorrow into Anne's heart. She felt awfully sorry that while blood was shed and bones were piled upon men's insatiable search for immortality, there were some who reached the point where they had nothing more to be gained from living.
        Speaking about death, the ubiquitous question would be:"What would we do in the face of death?". But had we ever thought of this:"What would we do if we witnessed death?". This movie cast death in a whole new light-death in the eyes of the prisoners, the executioners and the witnesses of the execution. While she found it agonizing for the prisoners to count their remaining days when death was literally just next door, Anne simply couldn't bear the thought of watching death at such a close distance-much less executing it on someone else, even if they deserved it.
        That was why she cried so hard during the execution of John Coffey. She couldn't fathom the state of mind of people who had so little left in this world that they wished for nothing but to leave. It wasn't that her strong urge of survival guided her into subconsciously projecting it onto those who had lost theirs, but the undeniable fact that life was once and forever. No matter what they believed death allegedly had to offer-an escapade from mortal sufferings or an afterlife as depicted in religious metaphors-they must also believe that everyone lived for a special reason, especially someone with a gift like John.
        In Anne's eyes, a true hero didn't need superpowers, but the courage to save the world from all its sufferings. With that belief in mind, it didn't really matter how long the green mile stretched, because every minute of our journey had been worthwhile.
        And that, Anne felt, was the true essence of immortality which everyone had been seeking all along.

Luck and Fate-A New Light

Anne once read that whether or not people believe in fate comes down to one thing: who you blame when something went wrong. Do you think it's your fault-that if you'd tried better, or worked harder, it wouldn't have happened? Or do you just chalk it up to circumstance?
        But for Anne, believing in fate is akin to believing in a greater force beyond human-that even after you'd tried better and worked harder, you'd still believe that something good would turn out from something bad. It isn't right to think that bad things will keep on happening, because just like good lucks, you eventually run out of bad lucks too.
        That was why Anne started to doubt herself when the news about the changes made to her university placement reached her. Idealism wasn't presented to her in the form of Kasturba Medical College, but she glinted hope in J.J.M. Medical College, and she took it, believing that fate promises her something good out of the present.
        Now, Anne began to see herself in a new way. She might not be as lucky as everyone else, but in the face of life-turning moments, luck never fail her. That was how she realised that she had been a lucky person all along.

Pain

For Anne, P-A-I-N spells life.
        As perfect as her life had always been, Anne had had her fair share of painful moments. Pain revealed itself to her as early as her mother's first stern word to her when she misbehaved in public, and hurt as deeply as losing her best friend. This time, pain came in the form of Sri Devaraj URS Medical College.
        Anne was never a lucky person. She never win anything at lucky draws. She never guess the correct answers during quizzes. She almost always got picked last for team building. Now, she believed her luck couldn't get any worse than seeing her name appearing under the list everyone prayed to be spared from.
        When pain was imminent, most people chose to run away. Like most people, Anne curled away from the pain the way mistletoe reacted to touch. Because like most people, she was a coward at heart. She was afraid to face pain, but too afraid to make it go away. She could only depend on time to wash away the painful memories. That was how she survived all these years. But Anne had a sinking feeling that this time, it might not be that easy, at least not for the next five years.

Totem Pole of Popularity

Anne was thirteen years old the first time she disappeared.
        In fact, she couldn't even tell you how, why, or even when this happened. All she ever remembered was the excruciating pain. Then, it faded slowly to a dull ache. Until one day, it vanished. Nothing was left. And that was how she knew she no longer existed.
        Since the first day she set foot on its ground, Anne had mentally dispatched her highschool along the line with the Bermuda Triangle or Tsunamis, or simply, any montrous things that were capable of swallowing her whole.
        As a swimmer, she was reminded often enough not to play hero in the face of a raging current. The rule was to grab onto a floating object, long enough to be washed up to the shore. For all the survival instincts she had in mind, her body seemed to react in opposite. In lieu of going with the flow, she had been thrashing, kicking, splashing and spluttering to stay afloat. She didn't cared about anything except that she didn't want to be like them. Any of them. It wasn't as much her discomfort around people as her diverging interests from her friends. She detested being surrounded by people who only cared about what happened to Wu Zun and Jay Chow; who gossipped away the first hour of extra class and have her babysit them through the next; they seemed so fake sometimes she thought if she poked them with a sharp pencil they'd burst like balloons.
        Add to her indifference was her first cardinal mistake was to assume that things worked the same way as in primary school: that being top in academics was the ticket to the top of the totem pole of popularity. Apparently, adolescents were nothing about standing out but all about fitting in. By the time Anne learnt the lesson, she had netted a string of A's and lost most of her friends simultaneously. As if that wasn't bad enough, her alleged best friend dealt her the biggest blow of all when she broke off their friendship deliberately. As much a failure as Anne was in relationships, she couldn't fail to notice the aftermath of this outbursts: how every lies spun, every rumours weaved hung menacingly around her like poison, driving the distance between the world and her to a gaping ravine-a blackhole so vast she didn't know how to bridge.
        The theory Anne had formed on the whole business of popularity was somehow ironic: either you were someone you didn't want to be, or someone who nobody wanted. In other words, to be a fake, or to be yourself. The question was: would you be either?

True Dino Colour Revealed

This passage was written based on the facts gleaned from related articles which were published on the National Geographic official website. For more information, please visit http://www.nationalgeographic.com

Crichton and Spielberg might not be thrilled with the prospect of a total brush over of the twentieth century international hit Jurassic Park-films and novels alike-but to paleontologists Li Quanguo and Jakob Vinther, this was a once-in-a-lifetime discovery as compelling as winning the Oscars, because for the first time in history, scientists had decoded the full body colour patterns of a dinosaur, bringing dino colours from the realm of art into the realm of science.
        The subject of the new study-the 155-million-year-old Anchiornis huxleyi-turned out to have looked something like a woodpecker the size of a chicken, with black-and-white spangled wings and a rusty red crown.

Dino-pecker: picture of Anchiornis huxleyi-the first dio to have its full body scientifically normal.

Fossil protofeathers of Anchiornis huxleyi preserved in an ochre-coloured slab of mudstone, discovered by the Li-Vinther team.

                           

The subject of the Feb 4, 2010, science study-Anchiornis huxleyi.

                             

Anchiornis's complicated pattern of reddish brown, black, grey and white feathers are quite similar to the silver-spangled Hamburg chicken, a domestic breed of ornamental chicken.

        The new revelation was an one-ups from last week's announcement of the unearthing of fossilized melanosomes-pigments-bearing organelles-in the filament-like "protofeathers" of Sinosauropteryx. Add in the complementary findings of this nano-sized packeted pigments in the fossil bird feathers-a study reported by Vinther in 2008-and you could put to rest once and for all the long debate of dinosaurs' cognate with modern birds.

                                  

An artist's reconstruction using new data shows dinosaur Sinosauropteryx with striped tails and orange black feather.

                                         

Sinosauropteryx, a turkey-sized carnivorous dinosaur, is the first dinosaur-excluding birds-to have its colour scientifically established.

A model of Sinosauropteryx prima, a birdlike dinosaur with feathers.

        An organelle containing the colour-associated pigment melanin, melanosomes were the stacked structures which gave modern birds their irisdescent feathers. The two most ubiquitous type of melanosomes were eumelanin, the rodlike pigment associated with black and grey feathers, and phaeomelanin, found in reddish brown to yellow feathers with a round shape. A lack of melanosomes made white. Ergo, by analysing melanosomes collected from various places on a single specimen, and comparing their sizes, densities, shapes and arrangements with those in the feathers of living birds-as was completed by the Anchiornis team-there you have it: a scientifically precise, fully-coloured rendering of a dinosaur.

Fossilised dinosaur Sinosauropteryx, showing its striped tail and fine hairlike filaments-their protofeathers.

A close examination of melanosomes, a subcellular structure that contain the pigment melanin.

       Not surprisingly, a breakthrough as significant as this had set the wheel to scientifically colour dinosaurs in motion. Other contender against the Li-Vinther team (the Anchiornis team) in the race was a team led by Fucheng Zhang and Mike Benton (the Sinosauropteryx team). No doubt, it was an eye-opener-akin to going back in time and capturing a true dinosaur's picture close up, where one's childlike awe over teh mysterious beasts was sullied by the realization that they weren't magic after all.

        For all the insatiable imaginations it had sparked, the discovery of true colours of dinosaurs posed questions we didn't even know how to ask. For starters, why feathers evolved in the first place? What role did colours play in the prehistoric life-camouflage, visual communication, sexual display or territoriality? How do these behaviours pertained to modern birds?

Two photos of Archaeopteryx dinosaur fossils, showing its overall birdlike shape (right) and a single feather (left).

The feathery scene created in the late 2000s shows what look like giant turkeys (the firaffe-sized oviraptor, Gigantoraptor) fucing off against a menacing meat-eater. This Lanzendorf Prize winning artwork shows how far paleoartist, Luis Rey has come in his depiction of birdlike dinosaurs.

        In some ways, the story is just opening up, and we couldn't predict where it would be headed.

A Sleepless Night

It was late at night. In fact, it was three in the morning.
        But it wasn't any night.
        Tonight, Anne felt inspired. Perhaps it was the aftermath of finishing a novel. She was always overwhelmed by a cloud of emotions in succession of burying her nose in a book without food, drinks, or occassionally, bath, for days, as if she had developed a sense of divinity all of a sudden. Why did she always felt like she had to do something in the face of spur-of-the-moment emotional seizures? After all, she thought discouragingly, this book wasn't even a page-turner, but one of those teenage novels, which she had outgrown years ago and discarded in a dusty, web-woven corner of her bookshelves. One of Anne's quirks was rigging up these long-forgotten troves and savouring them again, bit by bit, with as much details given as a lady would to her wedding albums: the only living evidence of her youth and beauty and once-in-a-lifetime glories which were nothing now but sepia memories.
        God, she had been overthinking again. But how couldn't she? Now that all the hues and cries of chinese new year were over, and absolutely nothing else to look forward to except another heart-wrenching home-leaving episode a few months away, even Bill Gates couldn't pay her enough to bring a smile to her face.
        Her conscious always got the better of her. What else did she wanted? All her dreams came true, from securing a scholarship towards realising her dream career to acing her A-levels, that was all a girl could ever dreamed of.
        But then, there was always a fraction of difference between being perfect in the eyes of the world and in spite of it. The first part was easy-she always knew who she had to be in the face of the society: the future doctor, the perfect daughter, the straight-A student. It was the latter part-her wanting part-that was unapproachable. Because deep down in her heart, she couldn't resist fantasizing herself being the little girl forever. Ironically, she found herself caught between the Wendy conundrum: to stay, or to leave Neverland?

The Last Lunar

The fireworks were so beautiful it took her breathe away.
        It was this exact moment, standing alone in her front drive, watching the night sky lit up as bright as day, that bestowed this first day of the lunar year the stroke of magic. Anne sucked in the cool night breeze, the faint hint of burning crackers, candles and joss sticks at the edge of it soothed her nerves. 
        Back inside, a conglomerate of sound waves mixed and mingled-the pounds and beats of new year songs; greetings and wishings of the hosts and celebrities on screen; peals of shouts and laughter-blocking one another so that everything and nothing was being said at once. Not that it bothered her anyway. Instead, an odd comfort settled inside her. Anne realised it wasn't so much the mood of celebration was in the air as the sheer familiarity of it all. Even with her eyes closed, Anne could picture the shrine set elaborately with fruits and flowers and sweets; the kitchen stored to the brim with pineapple tarts, bee hives, kuih kapit and kuih bakul; the sparks of firecrackers charring the driveway's cemented ground.
        She didn't even need to count down to anticipate the stroke of midnight. On cue, a loud bang exploded. A white beam sliced through the overhead darkness and hemmorrhaged into a flood of bright illumination which was a palette of red, blue, green and purple. Then, just as seamlessly as it had started, it was over. But Anne knew better. Several seconds later, an entourage of sparks burst forth from all directions without a slight hiatus in between, like butterflies freed from a bottle, so that she was warmly surrounded by a world of hues.
        Peculiarly enough, Anne was reminded of the ancient parable of the Pandora Box-of how all forbidden human emotions were freed into the world, and how hope was the last thing you were left with when you had lost everything in life.
        Anne sighed deeply. Next year-and the five years in succession-she wouldn't be standing in her driveway. Instead, she would be miles away wishing she was anywhere but there. It wasn't so much the missing out of the celebrations as the absence of familiarity which scared her. The idea of losing her family, her friends, her home, and everything she had grown up with was too hard to stomach. By then, all Anne could look to was the only thing left in the world for her: hope. The hope that all bitterness would eventually passed; the hope that she could survive-and turned out a better person.
        "Hey, sis. Wanna light up these ground-skitters?" Her little sister was holding up a packet of rolled-up explosives-a kind of firecrackers which buzzed around the ground when lighted-and a lighter.
        "Sure." she laughed, and joined in the fun, more than ever determined to savour every last moment she had on this place she called home.