Author Archives: judene

Pudding And Pools

  By judene | July 26, 2011 - 12:02 pm | Uncategorized
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This summer held a lot of promise. While in Moscow, I was told that I would be living in a new place, and not only did this new place have an air-conditioned room for me, it even had a swimming pool. Needless to say, I was really looking forward to coming home.

You see,  my fifth year in med school was nothing less than a bitch in heat that no dog wants to fuck. It was so hectic, I don’t even want to talk about it. You would need to hypnotise me if you wanted to listen to my traumatic experiences. Okay, maybe it wasn’t that bad. It was stressful, which made me eat a lot. When I say, “a lot” what I mean is, “I only stopped short of raiding my guninea pig’s cage for snacks.” Eating a lot made me put on quite a bit of weight. In fact, it’s the weight gain that I find traumatising.

What does my weight have to do with summer, you ask? Everything. A summer in Malaysia usually ends only in one way: with people leaving as proud owners of a second chin. Food is good, cheap and available everywhere. In other words, the chances of the numbers on the scale going down were very, very low.

Now that I live in a condo which has a swimming pool and since I love swimming, you’d think that I’d make full use of the pool and lose all my exam weight. Yeah, sure. Not even my toe has seen the cool, chlorinated water that I had great plans of splashing around in.

Note How I'm Not In The Photo

To make matters worse, I have an uncle who doesn’t snack between meals; one meal just blends in with the next. He doesn’t want to eat alone, so I’m roped in to keep him company. My stomach has forgotten what it feels like to be empty. Poor bastard sure is gonna suffer when I’m back in Moscow.

If you’re wondering whether my uncle is overweight, let me assure you that he is not. He does enough exercise to keep 3 middle-aged women fit. What he fails to understand is that I barely do enough exercise to keep myself fit. In fact, I probably do just enough to not get a heart attack.

This awful combination of minimal exercise and obscene amounts of food has led to the fastest weight gain I have ever experienced in my life, and I am quite the expert when it comes to..ahem..excess baggage. I’ve only been home for 24 days. Shorts that fit me when I arrived can’t go past my bum anymore and the loose T-shirts that I bought last week show off a pretty revolting bulge where my hip bones used to be ( I prodded and poked, I can’t find them anymore.) There’s only so much shrinkage I can blame on my clothes’ dryer.

That said, I sadly admit defeat and accept that getting into a size-10 dress is a bit like riding a pink and turquoise talking unicorn to Narnia.

Will There Ever Be A Perfect Church?

  By judene | July 15, 2011 - 1:30 pm | Uncategorized
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I’m a Catholic. This means I’m either pious to a fault or I’m a tart. You’ll probably know which I am by the time you’re done reading this.

When I was a kid, I was told that I was expected to attend Sunday School until my Confirmation. I was six when I went for my first class and at the end of it, I asked my mom “So, is Confirmation a long time away?”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for the Jesus-died-on-a-cross-so-that-I-can-slurp-cloudy-milkshakes-in-the-sky. I believe in God and I’m very grateful for all the times my ass gets saved when I do something stupid. I’m just not a big fan of all the rules. And there are SO. MANY. RULES.

My family isn’t very conservative, but it’s just my luck that I got the mother who only misses Sunday Mass when she’s at death’s door or something. Naturally, she expects me to be the same. I don’t see the point of going for Mass if I’m going to be daydreaming or falling asleep throughout the whole thing. It’s not very polite and I feel like a hypocrite.

Have you ever tried that sort of excuse with a devout mother? I’m convinced that the only reason she hasn’t disowned me is because I’m her only child. Instead, she has resorted to lecturing me every Sunday morning when I refuse to wake up. To get her to stop, I drag my sorry ass out of bed and get ready to go to church.

When I’m in Moscow, my church attendance is paltry at best. No one notices me and I like it that way. The last thing I need is people expecting me to be there every Sunday. I generally show up before and after exams to ask God to help me pass and to thank God for letting me pass.

I’m home now and last Sunday morning was one of those rare days when I was bright-eyed for Mass. Even my mom was surprised, almost suspicious. If she knew what was going on in my head, she would have figured that it was a false alarm.

I was sitting there, picking holes in everything.

There was a poster of a stick man on a cross. Seriously, this is how we depict the person who died for us? I wouldn’t care if it was a doodle in a notebook (although I may be wondering why someone would doodle a man on a cross), but this is a church. It looked out of place. It looked like a joke.

The church choir seemed to only know one melody for all the hymns. To make matters worse, I felt like they were singing to a group of kindergartners; it all sounded playful and childish. I’m aware that hymns can be dull and they’re trying to liven things up, but the best way to describe my feeling would be to say that I felt patronised. As I was sitting there, listening to people sing as if they were doped up on Prozac, I realised that I bitch about the choir in the Moscow church as well. They’re too old-fashioned and dull.

Then there was the sermon. I’m sure that if I Google some of the keywords, I’ll find it as some excerpt from one of those religious self-help books. I felt a little sad. I don’t know how much priests have to do during the week, but I’d like to think they put in more effort into what should be the highlight of their work week. In Moscow, the priests are French and while their sermons sound more heartfelt, I can’t help but think that some of it gets lost in translation. I don’t know, am I being too demanding?

The clincher for me was when the congregation began reciting a prayer for St.Ignatius, the patron saint of the parish. I didn’t even know what he was the patron saint of, so I just kept quiet. Then I began wondering all sorts of rubbish, like whether anyone in the church considered him their patron saint. My grandma picked St.Jude for my family (She had excellent foresight; he’s the patron saint of hopeless cases) and I rarely even acknowledged his existence. Was everyone just reciting it because they wanted to be good Catholics? Did THEY know what St.Ignatius was the patron saint of? Did it matter? Yes, rubbish thoughts.

I came up with a conclusion. My perfect church would be one where the patron saint would be St. Jude (even though I don’t pay much attention to him), with a choir that is upbeat enough to make me want to sing along, a priest that means what he says and preferably conducts Mass a few solid hours after sunrise.

I may have better luck keeping a dodo as a pet.

Summer of Sobriety

  By judene | June 20, 2011 - 2:08 pm | Uncategorized
2 Comments

Without realizing it, I’ve kept to my promise of not blogging till the 20th of June. I was done with my exams 5 days ago, but was busy lazing about trying to remember how to do nothing.

With these papers done, I am officially in my final year at med school. I’ve been living in Moscow for six years now and I think it’s taking a toll on me,as well as on many others. My guess is six years is the limit for any foreigner living here. I’m pretty sure that if I can make it through one more year without going nuts (clearly a tough feat, seeing some of the people here), I will earn the right to walk around like a smug ass who thinks she deserves to be worshiped.

With exams done and no obligations set in stone, I’m free to do all sorts of things till I head back to Malaysia. At the top of my list is shopping, because I still owe my mom two presents. I’ve mentioned before how much I dislike shopping, so this task is a bit like swallowing the frog. Thankfully, I’ve recruited Abilash to accompany me. He’s fun to go shopping with because he takes just the right amount of time in each store, doesn’t make fun of me when I want to have a drink in Starbucks (SOME people I know claim it’s just overpriced coffee) and he’s tall, so he can help me get things I can’t reach. That last bit is the most important because when I’m alone, 90% of my purchases are made based on whether I can reach an item or not.

There’s also plans for a detox, because I’ve been terribly cruel to my body. For three weeks my diet has been dominated by Lay’s potato chips, instant noodles with mussels and pretty much anything that goes well with this Chinese chili paste I bought from the Vietnamese shop. I’m convinced that the paste may not even be approved by the FDA of some countries, but it tastes bloody awesome. Either way, my tummy decided to retaliate yesterday and it wasn’t pretty to any of the senses. My gastrointestinal tract has seen one too many nasty things and survived, so things must be really bad for me to realise that I may have done something wrong to it.

Speaking of dirty things that need to be cleaned, there’s also a matter of….um….everything I own. I’m not the cleanest person in the world, I’ll readily admit to that. But running out of dishes, clothes and table space is unacceptable. The way I’ve ignored my chores, you’d think that I spent every waking moment studying my little heart out. Twitter and Facebook will prove otherwise. Now that I have no excuse to shirk from my responsibilities, I will just have to face the mountain of mess I’ve created. This should take up a large bulk of my time here, which isn’t a bad thing.

With so much to do, what the heck am I doing here, blogging?

Hiatus

  By judene | May 24, 2011 - 11:32 pm | Out of the Blue
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I should take a break from blogging. For one thing, there’s usually nothing for me to write when there’s so much going on around me. Let’s face it, it’s boredom that brings great/weird thoughts. I’m assuming that I’m going to be busy attempting to study and will not have time to write till the 20th of June 2011. Here’s a bit of what’s been going on:

1. It’s warm now, and I love it. I get to go out for walks (PERFECT procrastination activity). I love the peace and quiet in the woods; gives me time to think while jumping over piles of horse poop.

2. My exams are in nine days. I’m royally screwed. If my papers were in English, I’d be bitching less. In Russian, I lose my ability to bullshit because I’m busy trying to get my grammar right when I write or speak.

3. Despite owning the 6 trillion beauty products sitting on my shelf, not a single part of me looks groomed, or remotely presentable for that matter. I’ve been too lazy to use anything beyond deodorant of late. I probably shouldn’t be admitting to this, but who cares? It’s not like anyone here was turned on by me before to be turned off now.

This is the dirty pig, signing off till Cancer comes to play.

The Heart Is Pierced, But The Tongue Bleeds

  By judene | May 18, 2011 - 6:02 pm | Out of the Blue
2 Comments

Between 20th December 2007 and 16th June 2008, three people who were very dear to me passed away. I don’t think that I showed much grief, not more than the average person anyway. Without me realizing at first, these deaths, especially the last two, left a significant mark on me.

Prior to this, I looked at death in a very detached manner. I understood that the pain that comes from the death of a person is simply because we will miss the deceased. I believed that they were headed to a better place, and they were no longer subjected to the nonsense that happens here on Earth.

I still believe those things, but now I know exactly how much I can miss a person and I know exactly how much it can hurt and how long it takes for the pain to go away. I don’t want to feel that for a long, long time.

During those dark six months, a few things happened:

1. The one person I really wanted to comfort me was nowhere to be found. The person’s absence cemented my secret fear: they didn’t care and didn’t want to have anything to do with me at all.

2. The people I had just gotten to know a little better were more comforting than they could have ever known, even though their methods were slightly unconventional to me.

3. I found out that work and anime are excellent distractions.

4. I much rather someone quietly hug me than say something like, “you’re still upset? But he died yesterday!”

All in all, this whole death business changed a very big part of me. I try not to say hurtful things when I’m angry. It’s not easy, since being hurtful is a talent of mine, right up there with hair trimming and making bad jokes. I consciously make an effort to not make something worse than it already is. I worry about those who are dear to me every single day. Most of all, I do everything within my power to make sure that I don’t have many regrets if I do lose any of them.

Why am I bringing this up suddenly? Because there are some people out there who are making me choose between being quiet and keeping the peace with them while others suffer, and saying hurtful things that will make me look like a hypocrite but may force their eyes open.

It’s May. Let The Mistake Making Begin!

  By judene | May 5, 2011 - 4:27 pm | Out of the Blue
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Clearly I’m a random sort of person and at the rate I’m going, I may graduate before I write something proper. So here’s some stuff I sifted out of my head.

1. Forensic Medicine classes have begun. My major plan to ace this one is to download and watch as many episodes of CSI my puny little laptop is capable of holding.

2. The Malaysian Students’ Annual Dinner is in two days. The past weekend was spent consuming fajitas, burgers, fried chicken, loads of fries, moist chocolate cake covered in melted white chocolate, and enough barbecued meat to make up a decent sized lamb leg. I might as well just go wearing a saree.

3. Speaking of barbecued meat, I had such a great time at a barbecue party on Labour Day that I’m still raving about it. I don’t know whether it was the different company, the wonderful food or the fact that every beverage I had between 11a.m. and 9p.m. was alcoholic, but it KICKED ASS.

4.Exams are in a month. Seeing that I did crappily in the one paper everyone said was as easy as Paris Hilton, I’m already worried about this semester’s papers because they’re all hard. Am I doing anything to reduce my worry? Nah, I’ve got a month.

5. My term as a glorified letter writer is coming to an end. I am over the moon about this. My heart is singing and the birds are dancing to the melodies playing in my soul. I’m exaggerating, of course. I barely did enough to warrant such joy. The work I did this past year makes the previous secretary look like a rabid workaholic. Or maybe he just is a rabid workaholic and I’m normal. Either way, I’ll be done and I can go back to my quiet life of ignorance and sloth.

That’s all folks!

What I Do When I Don’t Get On MTV

  By judene | April 15, 2011 - 9:13 pm | Uncategorized
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When I was 15 and MTV still had shows worth watching, it was a dream of mine to a) marry a member of Blink-182, and b) be on MTV as a guest on Top 10 Favourite Videos. Between the two, I was always under the impression that the latter was more attainable. Never mind that I’ve wanted to be a doctor since the age of 6 and the only chance I’d probably ever get to be on MTV would be to make some lame-ass PSA about condoms and dental dams.

Regardless of this fact, I made my list and many revisions since its birth. Although I’ve got it in my head now that even the odds of me trying to make contraceptives sound like a barrel of fun on TV is slim to none, the list is alive and well. Call it a reminder of my youth, full of hopes and dreams of making out in Tom DeLonge’s tour bus.

During my daily hour (or two) of procrastination, I found myself on You Tube watching old music videos and was reminded of my list. Naturally, I had to share it here, because I believe that like the Gospel, good music videos should be shared. And I’ve convinced myself that you people are interested in my taste in stuff.

10. All The Small Things- Blink-182

There’s no way I’d make a list without including my all-time favourite band. This video parodies mainstream pop videos that were dominating pretty much every single channel on TV. Tom dressed as a Britney Spears always always ALWAYS does it for me.

9. Cherry Lips – Garbage

I love Garbage’s music. I think Shirley Manson is hot, especially in this video. Bonus: she takes her dress off.

8. New Friend Request – Gym Class Heroes

This video is cute because it’s all about MySpace, which is almost extinct, sort of like Friendster ( do people still have accounts there?).

7. Island In The Sun – Weezer

Anyone who has known me for more than a day will know that I love animals. I will pretty much touch anything that isn’t poisonous. So when Weezer (which has the adorkable Rivers Cuomo) made a video of themselves playing with all sorts of cute baby animals, I couldn’t help but fall in love.

6. Inside Of You – Hoobastank

This video is awesome because a bunch of hot chicks are very excitedly watching Hoobastank perform at one of those dodgy looking peep-show places. And Doug Robb looks very do-able here.

5. It’s Not Your Fault – New Found Glory

What I like about this video is the way it doesn’t show the process of two people hooking up, like many other videos. In fact, the ease between the two characters may lead one to believe that they’re a happy couple.

4. Pain – Jimmy Eat World

The guy in this video does all sorts of things just to feel something in the absence of the girl. There’s a certain madness about it all that appeals to me.

3. Warning – Green Day

When you’re 15 and trying to be rebellious and there’s a music video of a dude doing everything he’s not supposed to, a small part of you turns him into a hero. At least, that’s what happened with me.
(Embedding is disabled, so here’s the link instead.)
Warning – Green Day

2. Walkie Talkie Man – Steriogram

I love this video so much that I watched it and was so fascinated by it that I completely didn’t notice the name of the band or the song. I actually had to Google the term ‘yarn in music video’ just to find it. It’s cute and creative, a combo that works for me almost all the time.

1. Special Needs – Placebo

This video is a haunting sort of hot. I can watch it a million times and it doesn’t get any less arousing. It may seem like a creepy idea, and people may never want to sleep with me after watching this video, but it’s my all-time favourite and it will take a lot for me to change my mind about this.

There you have it, my half-fulfilled dream of telling people what I like watching. And to think, I didn’t even have to dress up to present this list.

Rinne, Highmore and Kiesselbach

  By judene | April 2, 2011 - 1:19 pm | Uncategorized
7 Comments

(This was written 5 days ago, in a lecture I had no intention of paying attention to)

It’s amazing how some lectures inspire me to write anything but its related notes.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I completed my ENT cycle, and you would think that I’ve moved on. No, I wouldn’t be me if I move on sooner than 6 months. Besides, I promised myself that I’d write (read: bitch) about this subject, and by golly I will.

ENT as a subject by itself isn’t so bad. It’s when it is a subject in my University that things go downhill. Other departments start classes at 9 in the morning, this one starts it at 8.30, sharp. When you live on little sleep and it takes almost an hour to get to the hospital, that half an hour matters. Not a single professor is understanding (i.e. lenient, a slacker..not anal). All of them were in school during World War II, not all of them are fully present now, if you get what I mean.

The two things that bothered me the most were the dress code and the exams. It’s compulsory for us to dress in office wear. Sure, I have shirts and blouses and junk like that, but those things require ironing and using starch and whatnot, effectively killing about 15 minutes of sleep time. I’m more of a roll-out-of-bed-and-pull-on-a-hoodie-and-remember-to-wear-jeans sort of person. You can see how this was going to cramp my style, or the lack thereof.

Then there’s the exam. That bugger was going to be at the end of the cycle. Two miserable weeks to learn EVERYTHING there is to know about the ear, nose and throat. Okay, I’m going a little too far; two God-forsaken weeks to learn ALMOST everything there is to know about the ear, nose and throat.

I’m sure I would have been able to take things in stride if I had not seen my roommate during her ENT cycle last year. She wasn’t my roommate during that period of time; she was a zombie who went for class, came home, studied, had a meal, and slept for about 4 to 5 hours daily. These activities were not necessarily done in that order. Needless to say, watching her made me scared. Shitless.

Truth be told, the two weeks went by fast. I spent every single day being petrified. The only problem was, all that fear didn’t even come close to making me study as hard as I should have. I pretty much just listened to lectures and my professor (who drilled it into our heads that we were going to fail with the horse poop knowledge we had).

The day of the exam was a killer. The exam was divided in two parts: practical skills and theoretical knowledge.

I was fearing the worst because THEORETICALLY, I knew how to examine a patient, but my partner, Anna has a super sensitive gag reflex ( I see the possible humour. Don’t.) and it was virtually impossible for me to perform a posterior rhinoscopy and pharyngoscopy. I knew what I was supposed to see, I’d just never actually seen it before. Thankfully, the patient given to me was easy to deal with and the techniques I had to demonstrate had nothing to do with reflexes of any kind. I survived Part One.

Part Two was my next hurdle, because I knew practically nothing. At least, it felt that way at the time. In Russia, most departments have a list of exam questions prepared for the students. This list is usually up on a notice board, or students are given a copy of these questions. It’s a little hard to explain, but the summary is if a student has managed to find the answers for all the questions on the list, they’ve pretty much studied everything.

The ENT department gave us a list of 95 questions at the beginning of the cycle. Out of these 95 questions, only two will be asked along with a case question.Each student gets a different set of questions. Naturally, being me, I only prepared exactly four answers. FOUR. Out of ninety-five.

Obviously, the odds were against me. I don’t know how it happened, but thankfully my first question was one of the four that I had prepared, my second question was about rhinogenic meningitis (which was the question that I specifically declared wouldn’t be asked because the occurence was so rare) and my case was about a nosebleed. I didn’t choke and die while answering my questions. Okay, I choked a little, because answering in Russian will probably never stop being scary to me.

Of course, now I look back and think that it wasn’t so bad. Clearly, I don’t remember all the details anymore.

We’ve Been Told We’re Worth It

  By judene | March 8, 2011 - 10:45 am | Uncategorized
3 Comments

Women are a funny bunch. I should know, I am one.  Many guys I know are usually baffled by how we work, but just ride the wave because it’s easier than trying to figure us out.

I roughly know what the usual stereotypes are about women; we don’t say what we mean, we can have bitchfits at the drop of a hat, we have a pseudo sense of direction etc. What caught my eye recently, however, was a blog post about how women have too much stuff. My first thought was, ‘NOOOOOOOO we don’t.’

After the reading the post, I went to my cupboard and inspected my stuff. It all seemed pretty reasonable, but it DID resemble the picture the writer had posted along with the piece he had written.

Determined to prove that there’s a logical explanation behind every tube, bottle and jar, here I am, explaining why we have the amount that we do. At the very least, why I have what I have and maybe some women will agree with me. Here we go:

Moisturisers

I have one for the day, one for the night, a generic moisturiser for the days I’m too lazy to do the whole toner-hydrating serum-moisturiser regime, body butter, and a “heavy” moisturiser for my elbows and knees.

Why so many, you ask? Contrary to what many guys believe, skin may be just skin, but some areas have thinner skin than others, making it more sensitive. That’s why we have different creams for different body parts. You wouldn’t use a harsh bar of soap for your handsome face, would you? Wait, don’t answer that.

Pre-wash Hair Products

Okay, there are two types of hair oil and a homemade hair mask made of rice and mung beans. Hair oil is a very Indian thing to have, I suppose. While not many Indian girls my age use hair oil, many don’t suffer with a 3-finger wide ‘hair parting’ the way I do, either. I’ve got two different oils because both are good, and two good things should make a better thing, right? The hair mask is another traditional thing. All I know is, my Nanna used to apply it to my hair when I was a kid and I never had any comb-overs.

Foot Care

Bath salts, foot scrubber, pumice and peppermint exfoliating cream.

I’ve seen what happens to feet that don’t get the treatment they deserve. You are either capable of not noticing when you walk out of the house barefoot, or you spend almost 2 hours at a pedicure with the poor woman doing all she can to make your feet appear humanlike while she wonders how she has sinned to deserve a client like you.

I must admit, I have the bath salts only because they smell nice.

Hairbrushes and Combs

Yes, even the woman who has approximately 400 strands of hair thinks that she needs more than one comb. I have two hair brushes with identical properties and a wide-toothed comb. The comb is to detangle the wet hair before blow-drying, one hair brush is to blow dry my hair and the other brush is to style my hair after I dry it because all the static from the previous brush will just fuck up the styling process. See? Not that complicated, right?  *snort*

Miscellaneous Products

This is usually a result of my inability to say, “No.”  Yes, I plan to make that my selling point at clubs, but that’s beside the point.

I have a ‘Bi-phasic Hydrating Serum’ that I have to put on before I apply my moisturiser because apparently, my skin is SO dry that the moisturiser can’t be absorbed by my cells. Magically enough, this miracle serum can bust through my Sahara-like skin and make me look so dewy fresh that you could mistake my face for a blade of grass at dawn.

If you think that’s silly, you should know about my ‘Shaping Facial-Lift Lipo-drain Serum’. The kind aesthetician  at Clarins explained to me that by applying this cream and holding my face is various ways that usually make me look like I’m mourning the loss of a fingernail, I can get rid of the chubby cheeks and double-chin that I’m genetically predisposed with.  You know, the very same cheeks that my UK –Size-8 mother has. In my defence, I really needed to wee and saying ‘yes’ to the lady ensured I didn’t leave a puddle on her recently waxed floor.

I am well aware that guys may have some sort of way to minimize our possessions by 60% (e.g. use more cream on the thicker skin, use less of the same cream on thinner skin or some nonsense like that), but that’s not what we want. If we had any less that what we have now, we’d probably think we’re punishing ourselves. It’s a girl thing.

HAPPY WOMEN’S DAY!

 

I:the person who is speaking or writing —used as the subject of a verb

  By judene | February 22, 2011 - 2:16 am | Bitchfit
2 Comments

I KNOW I’m going to regret posting this. I can feel it. Strange thoughts tend to show up late at night, and it IS late.

I’m amazed by how a few choice sentences can remind me of certain things about certain people. I haven’t decided whether these reminders make me less of a fool or simply a more bitter person.

Satan in an ill-fitting dress. I came up with that one, and I’m pretty proud of myself for it.

I’ve never portrayed myself as person who is genuinely violent ( a few fellas in 14-05 may beg to differ, I know) but there are people I encounter that I just want to beat up. I want it enough to consider taking up some martial arts class. Why? Because coming up with witty comebacks would be a waste of time and nerve impulses.

I know I sound childish and immature. I don’t care. *sticks out tongue*

Too many “I”s in this post.

P.S: Normalcy will resume shortly.