how do you fight loneliness? smile all the time...

an update

which reminds me of this:
list of top 5 things to buy before i leave...

1: a nice warm jacket. so i don't die of the cold.
2: a digital camera. something i can carry around without having to break out the big bag
3: a portable harddrive. to make up for my measly 60 gig laptop.
4: a few nice books. to read on 20 hour plane ride.
5: a travel/portable charger for my zen neeon. so that it will last the 20 hour plane ride.
all of which will cost me loads of money. money i don't quite have. very irritating that.

strike off items 1 and 3. got both for free. thanks kaicheng, for the harddrive. it works great.
which leaves me with a 3 other things to get.

got a fantastic deal for a calculas textbook at NUS co-op, thanks to dedrick and his NUS card. hehe... now i have a 1200 page math text to slowly plow through. if you are looking for a nice calculas textbook, much much cheaper than what you can get overseas (in the US at least), then NUS co-op is a good idea.

walking about NUS was quite fun. dedrick looks very much the uni student, though i agree with him that people who dress sloppily to go to school are irritating. i cannot believe that NUS outranks columbia when they allow people to go for class in JC PE t-shirts, berms and flipflops. of course, walking about NUS also reminds me that soon i'll be a college student too. which is quite nice.

NUS housing is also pretty interesting. on one hand, it's incredibly cheap. at 40 dollars a week, it's about a sixth of what i'll be paying at chicago, which is pretty insane. though the rooms are pretty small. i don't think i'll ever get used to sleeping in such close proximity to another guy. i mean, even army gave us more room between beds. but it does look nice in a whole freedom-conferring way, like moving into a dorm is some sort of symbolic transition point of life.

most fun of cos was just hanging out with my good friends. and realising that these times are about to past when i got home after that was obviously not very nice.