hello world! here i am, dutifully reporting for duty at blogger.com =] i have had quite a lovely week and i will recount in the pseudo-point-form style that you should all start getting used to:

1. yesterday my boss informed me that he's giving me monday and tuesday off (ie tomorrow and the day after) so i have Grand Plans to squander my two days of Paid Freedom. and hopefully he'll extend this to several more days. basically the reason is that the bank's having an audit and they don't really know how to explain my presence there and ... well there are several other things that i could say about the audit but i really don't want to be dooced three weeks before i leave the job. moral of story: my boss orders me to "chill at home", i conscientiously Chill At Home, or whichever part of singapore i choose to call home and chilling-conducive.

2. of course, before the boss pronounced the magical words "chill at home on monday and tuesday", i was thoroughly stressed out because i'd been called to work on a saturday so they could explain audit procedures and various other things, and i kept asking my boss to tell me what my role was going to be during the audit, and he kept ignoring me even though i urgently needed to leave at 3. and he finally walked in at 330 after i'd spent an hour cursing him under my breath and to anybody who'd listen to me, and he pronounced the magical words and i forgave him, thanked him profusely, grabbed my stuff and left.

3. why was i in such a hurry? because in the evening yesterday, i hosted a birthday party for an 8-year-old! it was terribly random -- i didn't even know the kid's name until i turned up an hour before the party, and the only times i've seen her and her sister are when they came for one of my mom's navrathri (indian festival ) functions and a couple of weeks ago when i went with them for the jugalbandhi (indian dance) performance. the kid's mom (Aarthi, let's call her, because that's her name) and my mom are good friends, and apparently another friend called gayathri had suggested me to host the party. so i hosted the party, along with a girl called maya. maya's very levelheaded, i see her about once a year on average and i like her very much. she's in the same class as my cousin at the american school, and i see my cousin less often and i also like her less.

so, the party? was Crazy. first of all, aarthi has a HUGE house on cluny road. yes she's freakishly rich, it's one of the enormous gujarathi families with a son in every country and a Matriarch in kenya. aarthi's husband grew up in kenya, therefore, and the huge house is full of amazing african artifacts and statues and stuff which must be quite scary to bump into at night. especially because it's one of those houses with an atrium thingy in the middle, which leads to the pool, and from the upstairs rooms you can see all the stuff downstairs. beautiful house, but i bet those two little girls never venture downstairs at night without one of the maids along with them. this huge house was made all the more crazy because Aarthi got a bunch of life-sized dolls - the size of little girls - dressed them up and placed them around the pool and the atrium. so when you're in the living room you keep thinking there're little unmoving girls standing by the french windows. and she had someone draw beauty products on large sheets and pasted them around near the poolhouse (yes, she has an actual Poolhouse. there's no ryan atwood inside, instead it's been converted into a playroom.)

randomly, there is a house on the same row as aarthi's which is like a miniature white house, with a huge fountain in front that lights up like nobody's business when it's dark out. and the house next door to it is like a spaceship, all weird curves and cantilevers and angles and it has a strange blue wall and it's very ugly. both are ostentatiously ugly in their own ways. the things people do with their money. but if there's one place i'd pick to live in singapore, it'd be the cluny park area. it's very silent, the houses are huge and (mostly) a feast for the eyes, there's tons of greenery and the botanic gardens are practically next door. only thing is you'd need to have or be a very good driver because the roads are totally winding all over the place and it's completely inaccessible to public transport of any kind.

the party had a DJ and about 30 little girls whom i had to command the attention of and host a little fashion show/beauty pageant for. so i had them parade around the pool, they all brought swimsuits so there was a swimsuit round, there was one bit where they posed for polaroid snapshots, another bit where i asked them questions and gave up after about ten because it's ridiculously hard to get an 8-year-old to answer a question. gayathri aunty's daughter was the best, really, she was very confident that she wanted to be a vet and she wanted a doggie for a pet and she's very upset with her mama because her mama won't let her have a doggie. she's the cutest thing ever and she had adorable hot pink boots on.

i had a good time bag-spotting -- the rich mothers sported guccis and tods and chanels and fendis galore. there was one beautiful olive-green ostrich leather bag that i have seen SOMEWHERE before and am completely annoyed with myself that i can't identify it. it's my version of OCD, i will be thinking about that bag until i can figure out what it is. i keep thinking prada because for some reason ostrich leather goes with prada in my head, and the shape is potentially a prada, but it didn't have an ostentatious prada logo on it. so yes i will keep going through bag labels in my head until i arrive at the correct conclusion. also there was a very covetable bottega sported by a woman i can only describe as a MILF, if i were so inclined. she also had humongous solitaire earrings and her daughter's a knockout at 8 years of age. god the sort of people at the party are astonishingly privileged. i hope they're as happy as they're stylish and beautiful.

and then aarthi was So Nice she gave maya and me $50 borders vouchers each. probably in anticipation of a very good show which i didn't think we delivered on but the girls seemed to have a blast and the mothers thought the show was good or they were lying. but the whole experience was totally cool. i like aarthi very much and hope to host more parties for her, exhausting though they may be =]

4. in my exhausted state, my parents dragged me to a dinner party. i only wanted to go home and fall asleep even though it was only about 9pm, but i was dragged mercilessly. the kids were all watching White Chicks which was and still is one of the most painfully gross movies around, not least because the first time i watched it the evening after receiving my incredibly math promo grade in 2004. but at that time it was a sort of gross escape from reality, and last night it was a fairly relaxing way to spend a dinner party. and there was isha whom i haven't met since tioman, because on the rare occasions that i turn up for a bridge lunch/dinner she isn't there, and on the rare occasions that she turns up, i'm not there. this one, however, was at her place so we actually were in the same place at the same time. and there was ashwin whom i haven't seen since... forever. the last time i remember seeing him is at the HP charlie's angels premiere in july 2003. and before that i only remember both of us getting pasta fresca membership cards and walking around clarke quay. which must've been a REALLY long time ago because i don't think there's a pasta fresca in that area anymore and i can't remember where it was anyway. i thought ashwin was the same age as me but he's just finishing up at uwc now, and he's one of those crazy 45-pointers who've been accepted at Imperial for medicine. but refreshingly normal for a genius type, because i'm pretty sure it's harder to be a topper at uwc than at rj, and also avoid being a total social outcast. he was at tanglin before uwc and he knows/knew perry's daughter!

that was saturday. work, birthday party, dinner party, all in a row and home a little past midnight, i don't think i've ever been so tired in my life. but in a nice kind of i-did-exhausting-but-fun-things today way.

today i did nothing except bum at home and get very stupidly, crazily, STUPIDLY worried over a columbia applicantID. so i will recount the rest of the week.

5. friday i went for doubt with kelly, claud and vaish. great play, the script is beyond amazing but i felt let down by the acting. i was the only one, however, and i think it's because i would've interpreted the script differently, so the play is still very good. before that dinner at menotti's which was good as usual, they have a lovely caffe latte and the best paninis although i've had the orto too many times to still like it. just like the penne at marmalade pantry, you absolutely love it the first time you have it and all the times after that it will just be disappointing.

6. thursday i was supposed to have dinner with vid but i took a rain check because i recall that from the moment i woke up, all i could do was fervently wish it was evening and i was back home asleep under the covers.

7. this was because wednesday night i got home around midnight after nasty's birthday dinner at the esplanade, and then i had the good sense to give nasty a happy-birthday-it's-after-midnight-call, which, as i should've expected, turned into a very long conversation. atleast it was two hours and not three, but going to work on 5 hours of sleep is not something i do well.

8. nasty's birthday dinner itself: i'm quite pleased with how it turned out overall and i liked the food (and the long island iced tea) at via mar very much, but it was a bit of an uneven night. it got pretty good at some parts, though :D especially when i coerced nasty, shooj and adeline to leave at 1130 because it's hard to get cabs in that area, and when we got to the cab stand there were three empty cabs waiting patiently and no queue. and of course being lazy bums the opp cost of just getting in a cab and going home was less than walking back and sitting down for another 15 minutes.

7. monday and tuesday -- all i can recall is not wanting to be back after my one-week break, and being relentlessly given piles of work and having to stay late at work. but it paid off because i've managed to get through almost all of the 80 forms backlog i initially had to take care of, and meanwhile i've been given about 25 forms here and there and all i have left to take care of are about ten, so work should get a little bit easier. and during the audit i'm not allowed to process forms i think, and the audit lasts two weeks minimum and my stint at citibank ends in three weeks, so i'm not going to have a whole lot of work left to do (i hope/pray).

ok now i'm done with my recap =)