firstly i have to apologize for behaving as tho i'm not a part of the class, letting the class down in so many ways, e.g. not really reading the blog, allowing it to die, and i rmb with much guilt how wl almost strangled me at the airport the night i was supposed to fly off and how she texted pple to tell them abt it.

last time i read this blog, it had kinda gone into hibernation so i stopped, and then nik told me today that there were updates on the recent class gathering, and i found out tt avid bloggers were blogging about sch/army life...what made me decide to kick myself into blogging here was cm's post that totally caught me off guard cos it was so unusally sentimental :'( awww

well..i'm not sure where to start about the u of I besides the fact tt it has a long name - uni of Illinois at urbana-champaign. yes it lies on 2 cities, west half is champaign, where my dorm is, and the east half is urbana, where my future apartment is. decided that it's much cheaper to get one on a 12month lease so that we can save alot more money on food, cos it's cheaper to cook on our own, and alot healthier too. every meal is a buffet, and with all the new food there is, who wldn't be tempted to try everything. you have that, and the fact that my school is in the midwest where the weather is crazily cold and i need to kick myself to get out of bed and exercise, and you end up looking more prosperous than usual.

what strikes me the most about school is how independent everyone is, and how much freedom there is to do what you want to do. we have some hours to fulfill for our major, some general education hours, and elective hours. my school is a public school, meaning that they offer a huge variety of majors, and we're allowed to take level 1 classes from almost any major. i've had qte an interesting semester this fall...psych 100 is my only psych class cos it's the prerequisite for everything else. besides that, i took global history, a music class that teaches vocal techniques, a community health class abt drugs and society, and a religious studies class where i learn the bible as a lit text. there are so many opportunities around..many diff performance groups putting up their plays/musicals/concerts/standup comedy performances whatever and the details in chalk on the sidewalk or pasted on the toilet doors, community service stuff, volunteer opportunities for psych studies (almost got into a very good paying one but they rejected me). we're such an agricultural state (main crop being corn) that we have buildings for animal sciences, crop sciences, dairy sciences etc. kinda mindblowing. anw, i've been the slackest in my whole batch, being one of the non-engineering pple and, like how aaron has felt guilty being slack, i've felt guilty the whole semester as well. they get quizzes every week, while i'm practicing singing as homework.

anw, for those who were wondering what it was like during the elections, i wasn't there at chicago, but when the announcements were out, pple on the floor of my dorm were screaming, running around, cheering, crying etc. it was highly emotional and most pple really wanted obama to win. well, i just joined in with the screaming anw. haha. it's really different in other states, like when i went to texas to see my relatives, they all reacted so differently to the elections. well...they're the united states, but the line that divides the democrats and republicans is rather well-defined.

also, my school has the biggest greek system in the country, meaning we have countless buildings for frats and sororities with different permutations and combinations of 3 greek letters. who wld know what they mean man..i cld prob come up with a random combination and there's a high chance that it exists. anw, there'd be a few weekends when pple wld go "rushing" from frat to frat, get to meet the frat brothers, see if they like u, and if they do, u're in. unlike what i first believed, there's not much initiation - at least tt's what a friend tells me. there are professional frats for those in the same major, and there are social ones for all the partying and drinking. partying starts on friday, and the dorm wld be super empty except for mugger singaporeans like me and my best friend cum roomie, but we've learnt to go out, have fun and have stuff like 2am suppers at the international house of pancakes. back to the greek system, it's amazing how they're so developed tt they have greek merchandise in the bookstores..sweatpants with the letters plastered all across the butt area, shot glasses, wine glasses, notepads, shirts etc in hot pink and other girly colours.

for the rest of the stuff, pls refer to my fb pics or my blog. haha.

back to being sentimental, i just kinda miss the familiarity of the routine lives we led for 2 years, seeing the same faces every morning, sharing our lives and forging those friendships even for those brief 2 years. the opportunity to create those bonds just seem to get shorter, don't they? u'd think that jc was short enough, but it's worse in the army, even for that brief 6 months i was there. 3 months with girls, and then 3 months with guys..and it's repeating itself here in uni too. 6 months of a fixed set of classes with random pple that just happened to select that same slot at the same location, listening to the prof speak, submitting assignments and all...after those 6 months, the class is over. the prof gives his final lecture, and the students file out, nv to meet again. if u're lucky, u prob made friends with the pple u sit with during lecture. otherwise, it's a brand new start once again next semester. new classes, new profs, new classmates...for a while i just wished some things were constant. but we're just individual faces that make up the crowd of 12,000 pple. whew.

if working pple say that life was much better in uni, i wonder how we shld view the future. haha.

whatever it is, it's interesting looking at what we've become after a year. i've no doubt that many of us will achieve great heights in our respective fields...but i just hope even more that we'll all be doing what we really want to do, myself included :) maybe one day, when we re-write that list, there'd be a journalist/pastry chef/whatever among them. haha