omg i have been struck by a serious case of The Wanderlust.

it happens every time i'm studying and hear about people in places i'd love to be right now.

my uncle just messaged from london, complaiing about a craving for vegetarian food. it's only about 9 in the morning there so i'm not sure where the craving comes from, or why considering that london's full of sandwiches, pasta and most importantly, indian food. and he's probably staying in some fancy-schmany hotel so room service, hello! all on the JPMorgan tab, of course.

i am Craving for some London. my dear uncle is always either in london or new york. occasionally france. my ideal life. he goes for work, but still. i'd quite like that life.

and one of my other uncles visited them in new york last week, on his way to holiday in peru and mexico with his wife. what i would give for a bit of peru rather than sitting here in muggy singapore, mugging. what an unfunny pun. both those uncles are bankers. so i'm thinking it must be something about the banking profession. i shall be a banker, yay. i hope banking still pays well in about 5 years' time. although it seems rather more lucrative to be a banker's wife, because many of my mom's friends are, and they have endless time and money. their husbands seem to be rather non-existent though, so maybe not endless sex. but atleast one of them that i know of is presently pregnant, so there must be -some- sex involved. unless it's the gardener's kid, ala gabrielle-who-doesn't-know-who-the-father-is. hahaha.

oh and the uncle going to peru gave my grandparents an ipod shuffle when he visited. apparently they have no idea what to do with it, but are fighting over it. so CUTE. that image sort of made my day brighter, because earlier my mom was talking about my grandma's chemo procedures and it was really depressing. my poor grandma. my mom might go visit her sometime next month, which means my mom's going to new york and i'm not :( i KNEW we ought to have gone to new york this june. although it means i'd have done even less work than i have done. but all the same. ugh now i'm confusing my desire to see my grandma with my desire to go to new york and shop and feel happy and everything. which is bad. i think.

btw got back from tioman on sunday, it was a too-short, much-fun trip and the people were really great so i ended up being very much less antisocial than i had intended to be. and i am slightly tanned, much to my annoyance. three days, barely. and the first day involved ten hours of travel. just to get to an island in freaking malaysia. in ten hours i could've almost got to london. i could've reached sydney, or shanghai. but it was really good all the same, just such a waste to travel ten hours and then stay just two nights and leave at noon the third day. and the pressed-for-time-ness and the good company means i didn't actually go and hole up in a spa in the end. which is disappointing, but i don't altogether regret it. wish i'd had more time to do more things. i swam a lot despite my fervent hatred of sticky salty stingy seawater, cycled on this funny quad-cycle thing that you steer like a car, kayaked etc. played pool with the guys who were unnervingly pro. and i've just about forgotten how to play pool. i was embarrassingly bad. but i was surprisingly pro at kayaking despite it being only the second time i'd ever kayaked. the first being OBS, which was just about the most irritating experience in my pampered little life.

oh vaish i was reminded of you in the restaurants! the one in the resort had a black cat prowling around, with really scary bright green eyes. it had some sort of skin disease but the waiters didn't seem to care enough to chase it away. and it sat under my table at one point, and stared at me. i was extremely freaked because while i'm not as petrified of cats as vaish is, i definitely don't like them either. so i just sat huddled in the chair until the stupid thing prowled away in a different direction. and then i complained to the waitress, who either didn't understand me or didn't care. and then on the way back from mersing on sunday we stopped at this hawker centre place, which was disgustingly unhygienic what with flies and piles of rubbish so thank god we'd had food packed for us from the hotel itself, but the worst part was prowling cats. again there was a black cat, this time without skin disease, but there was another non-black kitten with a patch of hair on its back missing, and yucky raw pink skin showing underneath. was very gross. i lost my appetite and ate very little, which in retrospect was a good thing, because a mostly-empty stomach saved me from puking on the bus. what with the serpentine roads and the bus's completely useless suspension and the smell of burning rubber everytime it screeched around a corner.

my tutor says that the problem with malaysia is they build all these nice places and then they don't know how to maintain them, or to provide good punctual efficient courteous service. it's quite a turnoff paying hundreds of dollars to stay at a place that's supposed to be 5-star and then finding that the aircon doesn't work and the remote control doesn't have batteries and they let cats prowl around in their restaurants and the room service is rather shitty etc. and the pool only opens at 9 in the morning, and closes by 7. but for all the indifference of the staff, and the cats and the slow serving of lunch, the resort was very nice. especially because it reminded me of marwell. wooden cottagey things.

but the ferry ride from mersing to tioman island and back was fantastic - although a major part of the ten hours on friday consisted of waiting for the ferry (three hours waiting! and the ferry was overloaded, and apparently the ferry company said there weren't enough life jackets but that they didn't care. it's quite titanic-ish, but i only found out about the lifejacket situation after i got back to singapore so while on the ferry i quite enjoyed it. and anyway the ferry didn't sink.) standing on the deck with the breeze and the sea, it's impossible to see the darkness that conrad saw in it. maybe he always just looked in the evening or night or something. because malaysia's roughyl the area the secret sharer is set in right? in the afternoon it's gorgeously blue and beautiful and endless. there's nothing like the sea to make you feel absolutely tiny and insignificant. in a non-depressing way, surprisingly. maybe space is worse, but i'm not counting on floating around in endless space anytime soon.

on another happyish note, i think part 1 of post-A-level holiday plans is coming into view. my dad's got some sort of thing in sydney or brisbane or something, starting a couple of days before the A levels end. so after they end the rest of us are probably going to join him. it's been something like ten years since i last went to australia, wow. it'll be summer then, whereas the last time i went was winter. but it'll be nice and beachy. i hope the trip materialises. and i hope it's sydney rather than brisbane, because as far as i can remember, brisbane is the most boring city in existence.

i also want to go to new york after that. i hope my grandparents are still there, because if they're back in india i'll be compelled to visit them there and i really don't feel like going to india AGAIN. the annual trips to india get so grating. but my mom says she'll take me to the moon if i produce kelly-like grades. kelly you are my ruination!!! (and you're also my mother's idol or something. wtf.)

ok the mother is home, from visiting her friend's new bungalow that she spent millions of dollars building, but which apparently has bathrooms that are completely black. like floor, walls, counter, everything. and the driveway of the house is black slate but the front door is blue. and the garden tiles are also black. i find that more than just a little strange. i mean, it's not like she spent all the money and by some screwup some sections of the place ended up black. she actually wanted it that way, because she likes black. i wonder if my mom's just exaggerating because she herself detests black.

anyway, because mommy insists, i now have to go and atleast put up a pretense of studying. i don't feel like studying at all. i'm considering having a nervous breakdown. i'm hardly on the verge of one, but it would be so much easier than panicking about all the studying i ought to do, you know?