Shanghai 2015 (Part II)

Hmmm, this is going to be more like a photo album rather than a real post, since I don't really have that much to say!

The picture below shows you Shanghai's Railway Station. :D

And we arrived at Suzhou station.

Yep, the tiny little men in the distance are my grandpa (left) and pa (right).

Suzhou's Garden of the Humble Administrator

Suzhou's Garden of the Humble Administrator

Garden of the Humble Administrator

It is beautiful.

Simply breathtaking.

The guy in blue below is our tour guide, and he is extremely talkative. 

I know tour guides are supposed to talk a lot, but this one talks non stop.

Wait, every tour guide does that.

Okay, it is just that nobody in my family listened to anything he said (he was mildly annoyed by our ignorance) and we still had to pay him 100 rmb. Grrr.

My dad was the most annoyed by him bwahahaa, because he likes to look at the scenery peacefully.

Yeah, the tour guidy dude kept saying, "I am your tour guide! Listen to me and follow me okay!"

He must have said that almost 5 times throughout the tour.

The lady in red below is my grandma. She is a grumpy little lady.

Ended this photolog with a picture of the sky~~

Happy ❣ ❤

Today is a happy happy day.

Before I actually really write about my cute fluffy little hamsters, I am going to tell you why I am so happy.

As you all know...

Wait, maybe you don't know. So let's start again.

I have been using Maybelline's gel eyeliner for a while, because it seems to me that gel liner is the easiest to draw, as compared to the sharp tip of a liquid liner, which is so fine that I sometimes cannot see what I am doing.

Hold on a moment, I am momentarily distracted. I need to tell you not to get the Silky Girl liquid eyeliner.

Silky Girl Liquid Liner

 And nope, I am not going to praise it because so far (meaning that to an inexperienced liquid liner user like me), I find the liner both hard to use and damn laupok (aka, lousy)

The shiny black surface

Sharp tip

Yes, the question is, if it is so lau pok, why did I buy it?

Well common sense tells us all that it was on sale when I decided to give up on my dried and crusty Maybelline gel liner and get a new liner. Which was kind of a dumb thing to do because when you are buying something out of a rather urgent need (actually desire), you usually get laoya stuff since you are just gonna buy. That liner with the "free" makeup remover costs around $8.90? I think.

I did tried it at the store. Trust me I did.

But the way we try stuff at stores is almost always on our hands. Like who the heck is going to try and line your eyes with a sample eyeliner which has run on all kinds of surfaces? God knows, little kids might have tried to use it to color the wall.

So I tried it, but it was on my hand. On my hand it felt pretty good: the tip felt soft and the pigment came out looking good, and even control was easy.

So I bought it.

Well, it kinda sucked.

For one thing, drawing on your hand and drawing a milimeter away from your eyeball is two completely different experience. Whatever control you may have drawing on your palm may be gone when you lift the pen to the eye, scaring your eye into thinking that you are actually going to be mutilating your eyeball with the sharp tip. So your eyelid will automatically close. Which again sucks since it means that I won't be able to see where the tip of the pen is going.

By right, you are suppose to open your eye half way while drawing the liner. I did, and jabbed myself in the eyeball a few times. Yeowch.

Another reason why it was rather crappy was because although the tip felt soft on my hand, it felt like saw paper on my eyes. I did research and found out it is because your eyelids are made up of much thinner membrane than the one on other parts of your body, so really, they are sensitive little things not to be poked around with.

So using that eyeliner was painful, drying and in all a rather traumatizing experience. The only good thing that came out of it was that I got a makeup remover .__.

I am jumping for joy

So why is today such a fabulous day? Keep your hair on, I am getting there.

It is because I managed to revive my dried, crusty lump of Maybelline gel liner.

The Internet is a wonderful wonderful thing. I googled how to revive the gel liner, and I came up to Bun Bun Makeup Tips that said I had to use a sanitary form of oil or solvent to basically de-clot (is there such a word) the gel.

I tried it.

It worked like a miracle.

I am a happy happy person today.

I am going to write another post to show you guys how to do it, and what type of oil I use, but now I have to get ready to go for my training session lol xD

Catch you all vain beauties later! :D

10 Types of Facebook Users

I was out with Sluggy Sophia a day back and we were both uh...offering intellectual criticisms on the types of Facebook users that existed today in our social group. Well our very refined criticisms naturally ended up in a round of full on raging at the annoying categories, which partly inspired this post.

See, it is not just I who find the said people annoying.

Anyways, I was hanging out with Max today and he mentioned that people actually liked reading bitchy blogposts, much to my shock. I always thought that bitchy posts are terrible and annoying because they reflect so badly of oneself, but I guess sometimes I like reading other people's smart-ass commentary too because hey, they are saying all the things that I myself thinks.

So here goes. A collection of all the categories of Facebook users, some more annoying, some less so.

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TYPES OF FACEBOOK USERS

1. The Navel Gazer

YES. It is right on top of my hate list. the navel gazer who posts supposedly deep and insightful reflections about their own lives. It is like, when you open your Faebook hoping to see cute cats like Waffles or Pancake (holy, people like to name their cats after food!) and you see this philosophical posts that usually begin like this:

It was truly a rewarding day today.

OR

Today I was on the bus...

OR

Today is the day where we get back our results...

Along those lines. They can spin deep reflections out of just a piece of toast or a cup of coffee. I will do a simple demonstration below:

"Today I was eating this piece of delicious toast when a sudden realization hit me. Life is so short. From being a beautiful, independent stalk of wheat amongst a million others to being reaped and crushed into silky smooth and fine flour is really a very short period of time. In the blink of an eye, you are now a piece of bread. Then you are bitten, masticated and relentlessly swallowed into an acidic hell, before you are cruelly ejected into - for the lack of finer expression - the toilet bowl. Then you are being thoughtlessly flushed down into the drain and washed into the sea. Life is short, the universe is wide and without boundaries. You are just a tiny peck of poop in the vast vast sea."

Yes. All that deep shit from a piece of toast.

The thing about navel gazers is that foremost, there is nothing remotely wrong about gazing at your bellybuttons. It becomes annoying and weird when you post all these emotional paragraphs  novels onto Facebook. People are forced to gaze at your navel with you. And I swear that it is a wholly different experience when you are looking at another person's wrinkly belly.

Navel gaze and post all your philosophies on life and death in your own diary. Or your blog. Or just keep it in your head. Reflections always seem odder when made public.

2. The OOTD (Outfit Of The Day) Poster

I have no idea when #OOTD started becoming all the rage, but I had the feeling that if the Married Women's Property Act 1882 was the gateway to more equality, then the birth of #OOTD felt like the normalizing of self-obsession and narcissism.

I mean, before there was #OOTD, whenever someone wishes to announce to the world that he or she is wearing blah and blah, there would at least be an iota of hesitation and consideration: would it be too annoying? And I being too self-obsessed? OOTD seemed to preclude these problems by creating a trend, a fun "jump-on-the-bandwagon" thing that enables people to uninhibitedly share with the world whatever they are wearing.

It is like, dumping ice water on yourself without the #IceBucketChallenge is being a bit of an idiot, then doing it during the craze is being a noble idiot. Hallo, lesson learnt: the normalization of silly things do not make them less silly.

3. The Tagger

Like its name, the Tagger does one primary thing on Facebook, which is to tag loads and loads of people in their statuses, comments, photos....the lists goes on. A little bit of tagging is good, and probably very useful in getting your message across to the person intended, which hey, on the hindsight is kind of strange, since you are intending your message to the said person, yet you are simultaneously telling the 957 other people on your Facebook. Who will happen to glance at your message, probably heck it or roll their eyes, and continue their mechanical scrolling of the page.

Worst combination? The Tagger who is also the navel gazer. Which means that they literally pull you to stand next to them when they are staring (and admiring) their belly buttons in the mirror, and they don't give a hoot that you find their crusty belly buttons unsightly. Worst part is, they probably expect you to like their belly-button too, since yunno, comrade loyalty.

4. The "Irrelevant Caption" Adder (abbreviated ICA)

Ever taken a nice photo of the sunset? Post it to Facebook yet? Well, here comes the ICA.

The ICA usually functions in three easy peasy steps.

1. Take a photo of a common object, e.g. the sky, your table, smelly sneakers
2. Add a filter. Commonly used filters include monochrome and vintage effect
3. Write an irrelevant and "deep" commentary next to the photo, that has no link to the photo whatsoever.

Yep. That easy. Want a demonstration? Okay.

So imagine your friend, say a person called Ruth takes a picture of herself standing in the sunset. Then she adds this filter to make her photo look ostensibly professional. And her caption would be something like, "Love is so short, forgetting is so long." (I quoted Pablo Neruda on this, anyway.)

Which is like, completely irrelevant. But the said Ruth would expect you to make the non-existent links like: sunset means melancholy; hence her standing in the sunset means that she is being drenched in sadness; and inferring from the caption, she is suffering from a bout of depression because she has just been dumped by the person she likes.

If I ever comes across such a scenario, I think I would comment, "You are so short, your shadow is so long." At least it has some relevance to the photograph.

5. The Religious One

You heard it. The Religious One on your Faecbook can link every little thing that happens in life to God or Buddha or Allah (or the Powers that they believe in). And their statuses consists 90% of quotes from the Psalm, 5% praising the Lord and other 5% being perpetually grateful to everything around them.

Again, there is nothing wrong with having a lot of faith in one's religion. In fact, it is great that these people are such devout followers of their religions and I admire the trust and faith they put in their respective deities. The problem is once again with the surplus of sharing their faith to others that may be of a different religious faith. Or a freethinker, like moi.

6. The Clubber

I sometimes think that most of us have at least one friend like that. The one who always posts blurred and extremely pixelated photos of him/herself grooving to the club music. And getting drunk. Or hanging round some "chicks" or "hotties".

Favorite caption of the clubber?

"Out clubbing again tonite @location"

Short and to the point. Less words and more dancing.

7. The Sharer

The Sharer usually has few or no original posts of his or her own, and his entire wall page consists of an uninterrupted stretch of shares from different pages. Sometimes the sharer doesn't even use their own photo as a profile picture, but instead chooses to use a cat. Or a dog. Or a car.

Education? Nil. Work places? Nil.

The sharer likes to be mysterious and you are to decode him from the things that he share. Warning: the shares may be completely random and lacking in direction though.

8. The Game Inviter

Mousehunt. Farm Story. Bakery Story.

The Game Inviter sends his friends game invites that are far too many and far too often. See a notification on your Facebook? Open it excitedly only for it to read:

"ABC has invited you to play Texas Poker! 28 minutes ago."

OR

"ABC has sent you 100 coins on a-game-that-you-don't-play-and-never-will. Click now to accept!"

9. The Gym Goer

The Gym goer, or rather, the gym-whore feels that it is necessary for the whole world to know that he or she has been working out, and therefore make his/her grueling hours in the gym all worthwhile when the number of likes on the gym photo increases.

Alternatively, the gym goer makes everyone else feel fat, lazy and inadequate with a short yet striking 5 words:

"Going to the gym now."

10. Food (PHOTO) Sharer

The most dangerous, evil and cruel of them all. The food sharer. These people are also usually the ones who eat all kinds of heavy meal for supper and seldom gain an extra kilogram because of their crazily high metabolism.

Regardless of day or night, meal times or nap times, the food-photo sharer posts photos after photos of delicious looking, mouthwatering delicacies that make a full man hungry.

Nonetheless, these sharers are also usually cunningly accurate with their choice of share-times: at night, close to bedtime when you are just starting to feel a gnawing sensation in your tummy. Then, hey presto, creamy mushroom spaghetti! Prompts one to raid the fridge and eat yesterday's leftovers just to feel less sorry for oneself.

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That's all I have for now! I realized that only part of these people are annoying haha, not all. I can't think of anymore for the moment, but if you find a particular category particularly irritating, feel free to share it with us and we might have Type of Facebook Users II! ^_^

Cheers and keep it scrolling!

Ritz Carlton: Banquet Waitress

Yes!!! I finally have lots of inspiration to write this blog after almost 2 years worth of brain damage caused by too much studying that killed all the funny cells in me.

Anyhoo, I realized something damn sad, which is that according to some website that helps weigh the value of your blog, the value of my blog (aka this blog) has dropped by 64 FREAKING PERCENT.

I am not even exaggerating.

But, since I can't help the fact that people don't find sponsored posts interesting and thus gave up reading this blog that sometimes have a surplus of sponsored posts (com'on, I find sponsored posts an annoyance to read too!), I can only write more interesting posts to tell you about my very interesting life.

For instance, I am going to be working at Ritz Carlton soon as a banquet waitress.

Yes, seriously. And I can't wait for my job to start post training because I have been wanting to work in a hotel almost all my life. I like the ambiance in hotels, and I especially like Ritz Carlton since I read about it in Xiaxue's blog and it sounds like such a wonderful place.

Charmy told me that being a banquet waitress is going to be horrifyingly tiring, a news that took the edge off my high and sobered me up a little bit. But hey, working in a hotel is still going to be much more fun than working in Mac, where you earn a minimum wage of about 5 bucks per hour.

Not to mention that hotels are so much classier.

Anyway, I went down for my job interview yesterday, which was less of an interview and more of an information session to let me know more about the job requirements etc. It was simply awesome.

Basically, I could choose between three locations, which are mainly: Cityhall, Orchard Road and Sentosa. I was originally assigned to work at Four Seasons hotel with this other girl that came at the same time, but the problem was that Four Seasons is at Orchard, which is even further from my house than Cityhall. Imagine the amount of busfare that I have to pay each day. *shudders in horror*

Anyway, I told my person in charge that I would prefer Cityhall since it is nearer, and she swapped me into Ritz Carlton, which had me dancing with joy since hey! It is a hotel I have heard of!!!

I kinda wish that the other girl would be swapped into Ritz too, since she is rather nice, friendly and full of smiles. I wouldn't mind having her as a friend hehe. I mean, Cityhall is probably nearer for her too, since I caught her saying that she lived at Woodlands.

Anyhoos, we were given this paper with the requirements for working as a banquet waitress, which roughly includes:

• No fringe around the face
• Use hair gel to secure fly-aways
• Use hair net to secure hair bun (only if your bun is messy)
• Wear formal leather shoes (actually they say fabric flats is also fine)
• Formal black pants
• No outrageously dyed hair colours (Thank god I never had the money)
• Black socks above ankles

All of them sounded pretty reasonable to me. My only worry is the hair bun, since I have LOTS of hair and tying it into a bun has almost always given me a headache. :(

Andddd, I get to work the late night shift at Mice Sentosa for three days during New Year, which I thought was rather awesome.

The girl with me got assigned to work at the CASINO at Sentosa since she is older than 21, and damn! I want to work in a casino! It pays really well, like 12 per hour and all she has to do is to push a food trolley around! 

I managed to get my formal black pants from Clementi's BHG at $29.90 and court shoes at $19 from Chinatown muahahah. I thought I got a good bargain since I checked the prices of similar looking shoes from everywhere and they cost at least $50. Hee~

You realized this thing about getting a job: you have to spend a lot of money before you even earn any, which is kinda sad for me, since all I left now is about $20.

Now that we are all paying adult transport fares (which sucks big time, since I don't even earn that much yet), Sluggy has to pay almost $100 per month on transport. I bet myself as well, since travelling from Bukit Batok to Cityhall is no joke.

Which means I have to strategize: I should try to travel less and work longer hours at each go, rather than going down more often. 

Anyways, Bryan just annoyed me on whatsapp with his comments on my new job. I mean, haven't we all learnt: don't give comments unless they are nice comments? Sometimes I feel like Bryan is the antithesis of such. Anyway, our texts went like that:

Me: I got another job today and I am planning to rest well before I start slogging :D

Bryan: What job sia?

Me: Banquet waitress

Bryan: Whut

Me: It's nice what

*no replies to today evening*

Bryan: Sounds erm...wrong

Me: Why would it sound wrong lol. It is a very normal job.

Foremost, it is annoying because there is nothing remotely wrong with being a banquet waitress. It is a perfectly legitimate job. It is not like I am being a SPG, an escort or something of that kind. Besides, it is in a perfectly good environment, aka a FIVE STAR HOTEL. I am not even being a waitress in a pub, a night club or a bar, even though that one pays about $12 per hour? (not sure)

Thus, I feel like I am righteously pissed off, because for people who are born into this world with a silver spoon in their mouths, they can choose to slack away their holidays (prior to enlistment, which actually makes their slacking almost forgivable, too. Urgh) 

Nowadays, I feel like I have very little patience for those who like to comment without thinking it through. I know that there are those who appreciate their "frankness" and "honesty", but come on! There is this line between being frank and being an insensitive wart.

Poor Denyse is working at an Italian restaurant at Raffles Place, and she told me that it is really tiring. 

See, this is what I mean. It is so easy to comment on people's job, but it is actually very hard to persevere on in a job, especially those that are more tedious such as in the service and retail sectors. 

Oh yes, another part of the conversation with him also annoyed me mildly.

The way he spelled "what" as "whut".

It is like, for the life of me, I cannot understand why people would deliberately misspell what with a "u" instead of an "a". It changes the feeling of the world completely. I would demonstrate via two instances:

Scenario 1:

Person 1: I am three months pregnant!

Person 2: What?!

Scenario 2:

Person 1: I am three months pregnant!

Person 2: Whut?!

SEE WHAT I MEAN. "Whut" and "What" has two completely different tones and emotions. The latter (meaning the normal one) is an expression of surprise or shock without any literal implication of condescension. The former (meaning the misspelled one) has this tinge of impatience, derision and almost disgust. It is like, I am so stunned that I have to purposely misspell an extremely easy word just to express my inner most feeling of astonishment and horror. Rawr.

I myself use the annoying "Whut" deliberately to annoy people at times. Especially when they misspell it first. Ha. Imagine a conversation that goes:

Person 1: Whut's wong wif u

Person 2: Nuffink

Person 1: U sur

Person 2: Yea lol

Person 1: Oh ok...

Person 2: WHUT

Person 1: Whut whut?

Person 2: Whut whut whut?

Person 1: Whut whut whut whut?

My suggestion is that if someone likes to misspell everything when typing a whatsapp message to you (SMS is different, since it costs money for some) and they like to spell "you" as "u" and "with" as "wif", ignore the dude or dudette. Can you imagine a person being too lazy to move even an extra few centimeters to type in a properly spelled word??

OH YES I have another thing to complain about. Which is about those who are forever complaining or saying that they cannot find jobs and that they are so envious of those who have jobs. And then when you tell them that jobs aren't actually delivered to their houses by a postman knocking on their doors, they say this annoying line,

"I want to find a job that I can fully dedicate myself to. One that I am passionate in. I don't want to earn money for the sake of earning money. I want to do it for my own interest."

Which is like, okay, perfectly logical. But it is the way they say it: like they are above you since they are hinting that they are looking for a career or some crazy passion that they always have (and can potentially earn them billions, god knows) whilst you are working as a (not) miserable part-timer.

Earn money for the sake of earning money? I am betting that half the population are doing that. Not everyone gets the job of their dreams, which is why sometimes, what you study in University and what you do is ultimately different. Your parents are probably also doing that to bring you up.

Okay, enough of my annoyance-fueled rambling. My whole point is, just don't be a spoilsport when others get a new job. I mean, it is perfectly fine if you don't want to do whatever that your friend is going to be doing, just don't go and rain on other people's parade. Also, keep the deep philosophies you have to yourself, or your blog (like I do) since people have a choice of whether they want to read it or not.

I am pretty glad that Max was quite positive when I told him that I was part-timing as a banquet waitress even though he said he was feeling down at that moment. I was literally scream-typing into whatsapp, which admittedly, can be kinda freaky. Anyways, I was kind of glad that I have someone to share it with, heh.

Anyways, I am secretly wishing that Denyse would transfer from the restaurant sector to the hotel sector after her contract is up, so that I would have a friend to work together with haha. It would be more fun and less scary.

Oh right, I was supposed to have another interview today for a job in the marketing/sales and public relationships department of an electronics company, but I ended up cancelling because the person sounded kind of shady...like meeting in Chinatown? Weird.

Actually I have something else to write about, but I kind of lost my train of thoughts...never mind, till next post! Keep reading, kay?

Baby Hamsters~❤

As some of you would know, some time ago, I was given two hamsters by my mom's student! They are really quite cute and fluffy!

male hamster 

female hamster 

So a while, my female hamster got pregnant and gave birth to around 5 pinkish, squeaking babies.

It was a beautiful (and somewhat scary) sight to behold.

Naked because they have absolutely no hair when they are born, and with eyes still glued together, the baby hamsters looked like tiny little aliens. Yikes!

Yup that's the mom with the little babies!

And now the babies are grown up after almost 2 months plus! I have 7 hamsters at home now and I am giving 2 away because they are making a mess. Like I have to separate them into 5 containers because some of them would fight with others.

Uh, I am kinda of too cheapskate to buy the real ceramic hamster house thing, and we had a surplus of these cups at home, so I am using them.

I usually place my hamster's food inside so that they can find it easily!

This pale beige colour one here is really fidgety and hyperactive! It loves running around the cage and simply just keeps itself moving. A lot.

These hamsters are generally quite friendly and they like to lick and nibble a lot. Even though sometimes they nip way too hard and it becomes too painful.

Then the hamster below is my favourite! It is the chubbiest and the ONLY MALE hamster out of the newborn litter, and it must be like, twice as large as the others. Don't ask me why man, it was born that way!

The other pale beige one that I separated from the other 3 hamsters you saw because it was getting bullied. A lot. And when I found it, its sides were scratched, its ear looks scarred and its one eye looked kinda puffy (to me).

This morning something terrible happened.

The fat hamster and the one who always gets bullied ran out from their homes and got stuck on my mom's sticky lizard trap. It was horrible. Especially for my poor beige hamster because she was stuck more (it was harder to get her out). I didn't know how they escaped from their own homes.

The fat hamster was easier to get out because only one of his foot was stuck (caught by glue) and most of his fur were untouched. It took me less than a minute to peel him off the glue trap.

Then the beige one. She was so much harder to remove because all four legs were caught, and in trying to free herself, she was twisted in this awkward position. Most of her fur were caught and I had to carefully snip away part of the fur because I couldn't detach her from the trap otherwise.

It was a painful, heartbreaking process because the beige hamster looked so scared, and she tried to nip me when I was helping her, which wasn't helping much since it was making me scared of her too. I managed to unstuck her eventually, and I washed her foot with water. I didn't dare to use soap since she was still licking at herself and I was afraid she would eat the soap.

Don't worry though, I think she will be okay, and I will be checking on her frequently to check how she's doing!

Till next post, ciao!

It is not easy to teach (tutor)

Almost all these time I have been a student.

A student at school, a student at a tuition center. Listening to people who are older and more experienced than me tell me about all the things that I may or may not already know, whilst silently judging them in their capacity as a teacher.

As a student, I think I must have been one of the harshest and most picky ones. I mean there are students out there who can see the good points in every single teacher and appreciate their own way of passing on their knowledge to the posterity. If there are such angels out there, well, the laws of physics (hur hur just kidding, like I would know any laws of physics, Newton's aside) dictate that there would be devils like myself who are the most unforgiving critics.

I remember my own train of thoughts as a student who sat through lectures, tutorials or enrichment lessons. Indeed, some of the lessons were particularly well crafted, enlightening and even absorbing. Then there were those that were horribly dry, nastily confusing or even just tangential. To the lessons belonging to the latter group, I remember my inner consciousness keeping up a tirade, including silent grumbles about that being a waste of time (if it were compulsory) or a waste of money (if it were enrichment), and sometimes wondering if the teacher had prepared the lesson at all.

Now, I even remember not liking to nod at my own tutor (for enrichment lessons) when he or she looked at me during the lesson simply because I wasn't really the type to look over enthusiastic or eager. I liked keeping up my cool, calm and collected front, you know, the facade of absolute nonchalance that nothing can ever shake. I can also vaguely recall my tutor asking me time and again, "Do you understand?" and my own composed (see, there's the word again) replies of yes, which would almost always be followed by the next question, "Are you sure?"

At that moment, I had thought it was mildly funny that I would be asked if I was sure I had understood something: I mean, wouldn't I know if I had not completely grasped something?
My tutor's concern were read by me to be a standard operating procedure, slightly funny, sometimes ickish (I think there is no such term, haiz).

There must be something like karma, because I am now finally understanding how it feels like to be the one teaching and wondering (after hours of tedious explanation) whether your listener has understood anything.

Woe betide karma and retribution. *wryly*

Since our holidays are long and I wouldn't want to be a freeloader at my own household of busy people, I decided to tutor some students. Although it is not my first time tutoring other people (for money), it is the first time that I am teaching older kids (i.e. no longer in primary school), and the experience was truly worth me reflecting on.

Here is the story.

(In case you are wondering why I sound so abrupt and jerky, it might be symptoms of post-traumatic disorder. Joking really^^.)

I had to teach this secondary three boy Maths, Chemistry and Physics. Let's call him Peter since Peter has a nice ring to it. The maths lesson we had together was on Monday (this week). Today we did physics.

Both lessons felt horrible.

No, it wasn't because of him at all. Peter is a bright student who is currently in an academic crisis because he doesn't study at all. No seriously. Like all he does is his homework assigned at school, at what I believe to be a breakneck speed, and then enjoy his youth for the rest of the day.

Our Physics lessons went roughly like that today:

*I explain a simple concept made tedious by my own fumbling with words. I might have trouble with coherency, hmm.*

Me: So do you get it?

Peter: *pauses* Mmm *nods*

Me: You sure?

Peter: *nods once*

So that part was okay. Apart from the fact that I was doing exactly  what all my concerned tutors were doing, which is to desperately look for some signs of affirmation that what was being explained had somehow sunk into the child's head. And I kept wondering how to fish an affirmation out of Peter without looking like I was doubting his intelligence (which I was not). I really just wanted to know that he wasn't wasting his time and money.

There was a horrible part where I was explaining about scalars and vectors and all the vernier caliper measurements. It was made more terrible by several other factors:

• I prepared kinematics not measurements today (since I assumed that their school was doing that)
• I hated and sucked at reading teeny tiny weensy scales because I am supremely shortsighted.
• I was extremely nervous when I am trying to explain something in which I have no confidence

In the roomy room, all I could hear was my own voice blabbering on and on in this high pitched almost nasally tone, punctuated with my even higher pitched erms and uhhhs because I was that horribly nervous. For once, I was so thankful for the whirring sound of the ancient fan at home because without it, I think I could hear the crickets chirping in the distance.

It was awkward.

No wait, it was beyond awkward.

In fact, within 15 minutes I was sweating so much that I had to tie up my hair (I was leaving it down to dry post showering) and fanning myself because I was afraid that I couldn't get my point across clearly.

It didn't help that my tongue seemed to grow shorter (Or longer? Should've measure it!) when I am nervous. It resulted in a series of most embarrassing stutters and stumbles in my words, not to mention that I almost bit my tongue once because I was so freaked.

The stutters went something like that:

Me: "The dis- distance moved, no I mean displac- actually dis- distance, sowe- I mean sorry ARGH WHAT IS WONG WIP NE, I mean what's wrong with me!"

If you think I am losing all my composure (which I so treasure) because my student is a hot guy, well you have gotten it wrong. I am losing my head because everything that made perfect sense in my head seemed to stop making sense when I vocalize them.

That is kind of sad, isn't it?

The even harder part is when I felt like I didn't dare to ask Peter if he could understand too often (even though I already asked a lot) was because I didn't know him well. I thought my fear of him would be overcome if I could just get to know him a bit more.

Knowing him was hard. He didn't like to talk.

It went like that:

Me:  Have you eaten?
Peter: *shakes head*
Me: Are you hungry?
Peter: *shakes head*
Me: Do you want to eat something? Like snack?
Peter: *shakes head*
Me: Oh okay then.

At that moment I recalled my GP lesson with my tutor:

Tutor: What's wrong with you?
Me: Nothing.
Tutor: No, there's something wrong with you.
Me: There is?
Tutor: You look unfocused and out of sorts today. (something like that, I think?)
Me: Huh?
Tutor: Yeah, I think you are on the edge of a mental/psychological breakdown.

At that time, I was partly freaked out, and partly amused. (I really didn't think I was on the brink of a psychological breakdown, I mean, com'on, I sleep excellently!) On the hindsight, the tutor felt pretty caring: why would he care whether I was losing my marbles?! In fact, most of my tutors were caring~!

Not only so, I couldn't make myself say cheesy encouragement lines because as a student, I disliked those intensely. I also didn't dare to make any promises because much of the results were going to be dependent on how much effort he was going to put in. I didn't dare to be cheery and optimistic because it felt weird to be cheery when the student was almost glum looking.

In short, I didn't know how to be useful.

Behold the feeling of uselessness.

There were so much things that I almost said but whenever I took a breath, I ended up exhaling. The cynic in me scoffed at every encouragement I could think of:

(italics: hopeful me vs normal text: cynical me)

It will get better.
No it won't. It won't get better unless you spend 2 hours a day memorizing and doing practices. Just an hour half with me isn't going to suffice. Furthermore, how would you know?

I have absolute faith in you.
Yeah, but not myself.

Physics is about understanding the concepts, learning the examples, and improving by practicing. I am sure you can do it!
Who are you to preach?!

Look, just let me know if you have anything I can help you with okay? I will do my best to help you.
Argh to the cheese.

Basically I couldn't say it. Everything that I wanted to say felt incredibly patronizing even though I was sincere at that moment.

The worst part was that despite preparing for the lesson for almost two to three hours before hand, I had to change my lesson plans (as mentioned) when I realized that we couldn't be too ahead of the school schedule. The abrupt changes ate away at my confidence, too.

When the lesson was ending, I was almost fearful of assigning homework: what if I stressed him out? Would he do it? Is it too much or too little????

Thus at the end of the first lesson of maths and physics, I wanted to sit down, whack myself across the head and bemoan my incompetence. I felt both apologetic and guilty towards Peter because I felt like I had taught him nothing that was of key importance.

The salvation came when he said that he could understand and felt that he had learnt something. Not to me, but to my mom. (Thank god my mom has a natural affinity for children.) I felt like I was being relieved of the burdened that I carried for the entirety of the lesson.

I felt revitalized and hopeful.

It was then I abruptly recalled why my teachers had always asked some of us privately, after a lesson whether we could follow her/his train of thoughts. Our teacher aren't us, hence there was almost no way for them to be completely sure of what we knew and what we didn't. They had to watch our expressions and body language for signs of affirmation, as I had tried to hard to that day. It was so easy for one to feel like one is "talking to myself" and silences were always so dreadfully awkward.

If it was so hard for me sitting down next to a person, I couldn't imagine how it would be like before a classroom full of people looking at you (or sleeping, yikes).

I always thought I knew a lot about what an excellent teacher should be like till I tried and failed miserably this time (I don't know why, but I think I taught better when I was in Secondary 1).

I am still in the midst of improving myself to explain clearer, teach better, and keep my composure as a tutor.

But next time, I think I will also know how to be a much better student! ^^