Impulse Buy and Dinner

We were scheduled for dinner today. Friends for.... 10 years at least. Actually, we should have met up for Chinese New Year lunch. However, certain people cannot make it and so it was canceled. This is sort of a "post-exams" dinner. Technically, 2 of us are already working. earning decent pay. Not very much, but decent I supposed. That is good. At least there is a source of income for them. I am very happy for them. Mr. Lawyer-to-be seems to be doing quite alright, though he claimed he is being squeezed out of the elite group. Big thank you for the dinner Sis gave. We had dinner at F.I.S.H., then desserts at Bakerzin. Same places where me and two pretty girls went for dinner.... I think slightly more than a year ago. Strange that I remember such details vividly, down to what we ordered back then.

Moving on to impulse buying, I bought 2 official Gundam T shirts. Well... in the past, to get official ones, I probably have to buy it online. Thanks to Uniqlo, I get to buy them off the shelve. Too bad I am not a fan of online shopping. At least not yet. Honours students are though (again, pretty girls there). I would love to get Gundam plastic models. However, since they are quite expensive now and well.... serve no major purpose other than making me happy and proud displaying them (that itself is a very important reason why anyone would buy them in the first place), I decided to forgo them a few years ago. At least until I start earning a salary. Since T-shirt serve an obvious practical purpose (to prevent myself from being sued for indecent exposure for example), I have valid reason (or excuses depend on how you see it) to buy them. So yes. I finally have Gundam T-shirts to wear.

One of the T-shirts I bought. It is a scene from Episode 36 - Forever Four. Four is a female character in Zeta Gundam. In this episode, she was killed. So Four here does not refer to the mobile suits (robots) depicted on the shirt. (Picture from Uniqlo)

Ok. I mentioned "pretty girls" twice (I am merely using a proper adjective to describe a fact. Ok. Subjective "fact" if you insist.). Sounds like I am abit desperate for girls eh? Well... In truth, that is kind of true. I am no longer a teenager and it is not that I have no one I like. Problem is, how to go about doing it. THIS is a problem I have to figure out myself.

Final Fantasy

I heaved with relieve that the weightage for Mother Tongue language was not reduce. I think it would be a very wrong move if it was indeed reduced.

Moving on, there is, again, this inertia to get on with work. This time, its Project Final Fantasy. If I did well, science research will be my future. If not, well... I supposed it is time to sought other employment. That explains "Final"

Why "Fantasy"? The way I see it, it is a fantasy because I finally get to handle virus. I have been reading about infectious agents for some time. None excites me more than viruses --- Very tiny bags of nucleic acids and proteins, some highly capable of mutating and causing pandemics. Think Spanish Flu of 1918 or more recently SARS of 2003, H5N1 of 1997 (still ongoing) and H1N1 of 2009. I have been wanting to work in CDC (either Communicable Disease Center of TTSH, or Center for Disease Control and Prevention) or even WHO (The Fatal Strain by Alan Sipress).

Somehow, I cringe at starting. The horrors of working day after day, but not generating any results is very scary, nevermind depressing. I am speaking from experience of course. Then again, I am probably a bit differently now --- Less likely to repeat the mistake of old. I am very happy to get the chance to decide what kind of project I want.

In Tumour Biology, there was an assignment which I have to design experiments to show p53 induced transcription-independent apoptosis. Similar to now, I was given free reign of choosing what kind of hypothesis to test. I choose one which I think was not done before and so had to design my own experiments. I came up with half of the experiments. No paper to consult whatsoever. It was lots of fun then, perhaps because I knew that I did not have to carry out the experiments.

Now, I am back in the same situation (adapted from Tumour Biology assignment instruction): Virus induced cytoplasmic membrane formation. Based on existing literature results, provide ONE reasonable hypothesis. Design 3-4 experiments to test for it (with justification).

Ok. Now that I have framed it in a more familiar way, it is really time to start working. Time to see how much I have improved.