ok so if you're wondering why i like watching SATC so much - yes i like the way they're so glam, and the clothes they wear etc, but i also feel pretty certain that i'm going to be single when i reach my mid-30s, and i need to know that you can still look that good and have fun and the world doesn't end etc when you get to that that age. no offense intended, not that anyone comes to visit my site anyway hah. ha ha hah.

So will wheaton won all the bloggy awards, who are these people who voted for him? startrek fans? people drawn to celebrity? i've visited the site quite a few times because its been linked to and talked about so much, but the site seems a little hokey to me. I did find out that he's married though, and he looks about 20 (and I also thought he looks a little girly)! well i haven't seen star trek in a long time now, so he might look a little different...

i watched sex and the city last night, and i realised that it must have been hair extensions what carrie was wearing cuz i'm sure her hair wasn't that long before. And how does she get her tummy so flat? damn! after a year of almost weekly martial arts class and my tummy's still drooping like i'm permanent bloated. so is there going to be a 'cheating on aidan with mr. big 2'? Plus she's such a bitch to aidan, and he just takes it! he could just start arguing back at her, but that wouldn't be much of a relationship, i guess.

I went to this talk today about 'writing your thesis'. At the end of the session, one of the speakers came up to say 'it's important to remember that no thesis is perfect, and you also should not become emotionally attatched to your thesis. at the end, it is your work and what you did for the past three years which will come under examination, and it is that which will be questioned and criticised, not you. I say this, as I have known two people who in the end failed to submit their thesis' because they were so emotionally attatched to them that they couldn't bear to have them criticised.' I just thought that was tragic, i mean what is the point of doing three years of hard work if you don't submit your thesis at the end of it all?

what must it be like for popular weblogger? Do you stay up at night thinking of what funny thing you can write down for your next post? as the day unfolds when some mildly interesting but otherwise insignificant thing happens to you, for example your cat knocking over and breaking your favourite cup, do you then think - Ooh! I can put that down in my blog! And then subsequently forget?

I saw Mulholland drive last night. wow! what a weird movie! fortunately i went with people who'd seen it before and knew what was going on. Its like a little puzzle, great movie. If you see it, i suggest seeing it with someone who knows what's going on, or read up about it (afterwards may be better) maybe here at salon.com, otherwise it'll just look like a load of crap.

oh god,
why
am I so much more sensitive than everybody else?
why
do I feel things so much more acutely than them,
and understand so much more.
I bet I'm the first person who's ever felt as rotten as this.
could it be
that I'm going to grow up
to be a great poet and thinker, and all those other wankers in my
class are going to have to work in factories or go on the dole?
yes, I think it could.

(via cheesedip)

News bites: (as lifted from the Evening Standard)

So Chelsea Clinton was photographed at gay London nightclub Heaven with a mystery guy. Good for you girl, way-hay. But maybe do without the trouser suit from dorothy perks. just a suggestion.

The shop at #6 gerrard st in chinatown (the one that sells all the kiddy crap) is citing the Human Rights Act to try and stop its landlord from moving it nextdoor to #4, which we all know is the chinese numerical equivilant of 666 (ok, not literally, but you get the picture). I thought that was quite interesting, as even I know that shop, having bought a powerpuff girls hairband at the rip off price of £3. They were for my sister, I was going to buy two of 'em, but found I couldn't afford it. They're saying they chose the shop location 20 years ago because it had good fung shui, and hence the reason behind its success. I've wondered myself how they've managed to stay in business for so long selling the overpriced tat that they do. well, I guess now I know.

London is the fifth most costly city in the world, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, preceded by Tokyo, Osaka, Hong Kong and Oslo. Are you telling me that London's more expensive to live in than New York? Now that is scary. I moan about London alot, well, I moan about england alot, but I would rather live in London than anywhere else in the UK.

Ok, UKOK? o please, who was the genious who came up with that inspirational logo? surely you'd get something more imaginative in a primary school art class. I sense another millenium dome like hit with this one.

my own happenings: I went to a dinner party thing last night in the murder capital of east london, dalston. Our secretary lady Luce (italian for 'light') had moved into this flat there some months ago, so it was a little get together to show off her place. she pays the same rent as me, but she gets a much bigger space, a proper living room, a proper bedroom, a nice little bathroom with a bath, and everything is new. however, you have to go into this pitch black alleyway which lead behind some shops on a high street, in order to access her flat.
there were about 10 people there, so kind of a small get together, it was people from our department, one guy who lived downstairs, one really strange guy from birmingham, and husband and friends of Nadia, another PhD student from the dept. The guy who lived downstairs was an ubergeek canadian, and was a teaching professor at kings college, teaching film studies. I know, doesn't that sound cool? I love talking about movies, but we didn't really converse much over the evening, as everybody else thought it was cool as well, so he'd be sucked in to these long conversations about different movies that people came up with. he was asked to explin what the f*** was going on in david lynch's mulholland drive, he was asked whether he'd seen this french move called jonny goes on the road (or something), and he was asked to talk about female porn movies (and that was only the stuff I heard) Oh excuse me, i mean erotica, ofcourse. The only movie related comment I mad to him was the observation that the average running time of movies just seemed to be getting longer and longer. And he said that in fact movie lengths tend to go up and down, and that short movies of 90 minutes tend to be comedies and horrors. I thought that was quite interesting.
As for the birmingham guy, yikes was he strange. Our very first minutes of conversation were literally like,
(me first:) 'so, where did you meet Luce?'
' we're both buddhists. yeah, let me see, what can i say about it? let me think, its all about looking for happiness in our lives, yeah, that's all i can think to say about it really, d'you know what I mean? So whereabouts are you from? are you chinese, japanese, korean, taiwanese, or what? or are you english?'
'well, i'm british chinese.'
'o right, british chinese. i'm actually half white and half jamaican. yeah, my father was black jamaican and my mother is white english. Yeah, my parents divorced when i was four, and then my mum married a white english vicor, who was also a solicitor. yeah, he used to make bucket loads of money.'
'o right.' then i legged it. Well, ofcourse i couldn't avoid him all evening. he'd just suddenly launch into what he did for a living:
'yeah, i'm a mediator, i work with mentally disabled children. I earn £35 an hour, that's alot of money isn't it? and I don't even have to do anything, I just take these kids out to the cinema, to the pub, and all expenses paid for. But these kids'll never change you know. i've been doing this for 14 years, and everybody's saying to me, that sounds like a great job, but I hate it, its really doing my head in, i'm 37, y'know. it's just depressing, d'you know what I mean sharon? No, you don't know what I mean do you?'
Very, very strange, i felt really sorry for him. he was obviously on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but he was obviously not quite right in the head either. He spent some time seriously trying to discuss what the difference was between a motion picture and a still picture with the film professor guy. And it was the most stupid question, and he spent the rest of the discussion justifying it. The evening ended at 2am, with everybody working out how to get home. I hadn't planned to stay, but at 3am, i didn't particularly want to brave the streets of dalston on my own, so i stayed over. that crazy birmingham guy stayed over as well, but had got up at the crack of dawn to catch a train back up north. I told Luce later that I thought he was very strange, and she agreed with me, she hardly knew him herself, and was glad when I decided to stay over at her place last night.

Planning to see Mulholland Drive tonight, as there was so much talk about it last night. I was assured it wasn't sick or cruel or horrible, and i guess it can't be too disturbing if its rated 15, so i'm gonna go check it out.

Raji phoned me last night. She's got the whole of next week off and she wants to do something. i think she must have gone on a phoning spree, because we don't often talk on the phone. She's a nice girl, but once you get to know her, or maybe its just me, you get exposed to her super mood swings. So now i have to think of something we can go do, so I resorted to looking up stuff in the evening standard's hot tickets for inspiration. i've seen a couple of possibles. I am definitely not going to suggest clubbing. I never really got into clubbing, I always felt like a bit of a prat prancing about with a bunch of sweaty strangers not making eye contact. Plus you can't talk in those places, or is that why the kids like them so much? No wonder kids take drugs to keep on doing it. Its probably much better with good friends who love it, my friends however don't. Well, tell a lie, raji's into clubbing, which is one of the reasons I like her, she's different that way.

I finally did my taxes last night, in the end it took me 10 minutes. I considered fiddling my figures so that my final earning would come out to be less than £4,400, but in the end i looked at my conscience and decided I couldn't do it. I hope you're proud of me. Well, plus I earned about 3k more than than the cut off limit, and I couldn't just pretend it just never existed.

I watched 'sex and the city' last night. Lucky ol' Carrie eh? Aidan looked really, really, ni-hice.

I really, really have to do my tax return now, this is just getting ridiculous.

On the plus side, I kicked ass last night.

it is past the 6oclock hour now, and alas i must leave to do some ass kicking. But rest assured, i shall be thinking of you until I come back.

oops, i just encountered another blog that had chosen the same template as me, and here I'd fooled myself into thinking i held some token of originality, when the cold, hard, actual truth is i don't. but what am i talking about, a weblog is hardly the most original of ideas.

Kottke.org seems to be a really popular weblog, or prestigious or high-profile, or whatever. I've had a look at it a few times, so its not like I didn't give it a few goes, but it just doesn't seem to do anything for me.

Heh. I've just realised that all the hits that have registered on the sitemeter were done by me. Booyah!

talking shop:So i went to imperial college under duress of having to get a paper from the Journal of Liquid Chromatography of all places. All because this Hostettman guy has previously isolated one of my hard earned compounds that I spent months working on. And its not even a phytochemical paper either, its a chromatography article, its like adding insult to injury. So for the pleasure I shelled out £2.30 for the tube ride, and 1and 1/2 hours out of my day, plus 70p for the photocopying.

Eeeeew, yuck! I came into the lab at 10.30 this morning, and the first thing I did was check my e-mail. And lo I got a forward from my ex-boyfriend whom I have officially cut out of my life and had put up a filter two months ago to delete his mail. The guy has obviously changed something in his address so that the filter didn't recognise it. What a grade A creep. Ick. I had to go through one of the messiest break-ups to gid rid of him, but in the end the only way I could get rid of him was to change two phone numbers to stop the f***er from effing calling me. I'm sorry, got a bit emotional there. Let me tell you guys, desperation and obsessiveness are serious, serious turn offs.

So do you ever sometimes look at yourself in the mirror and find yourself taken aback by how stunningly attractive you look? Because usually when you look at yourself in the mirror all you can see is this troll? Yes, that happened to me this morning as I was putting moisturiser on my face.

One of the perks of being a self-employed locum pharmacist is doing your own taxes. I meant that sarcastically, ofcourse. My tax return is due in at the tax office by the 31 of Jan, and I still haven't done it yet. I'm in a quandry, I've worked out how much tax I should pay, about £400, which isn't much. But should I pay it? Or should I pretend that I didn't earn enough for that year to pay tax? I mean I am a full time student after all. Should I? Shouldn't I? should i? shouldn't i? I probably will. But there'll be indignation in every stroke of my pen as I write in those figures on my tax return.

it is now 10.30pm, and i am still in the lab, waiting for my plant extract to dry down, how sad is that? i'm tellin you my life is just one long par-tay

i went to martial arts last night, didn't really think I did did any major hard gruelling training, and yet this morning couldn't get out of bed till 9.30. and i hurt in some strange places, like the little toe on my right foot, and the big knuckle on my middle finger of my left hand.

I came into school and made this inane small talk with the porter at the lodge, and i left him with the profound words - yes, we love life, we are life-lovers.

I've listened to Aaliyah for a long time now. i think the first time I heard her music was when i was 19, I was on holiday in Vancouver at the time, staying with my cousins. It was the summer time, and I think one of her songs (i forget which one) must have got to no. 1 at the time, because they were playing her song everywhere, in shops, you could hear it playing from car radios as you stood on the pavement, and i loved it. I bought her album - 'age ain't nothin but a number' on that old fashioned medium, the cassette tape. I can't remember where I bought it, and i don't know where it is now, but i listened to it loads at the time. loved that song that was in Dr. Dolittle, tried to get it, but couldn't seem to find it in the UK. I saw her in romeo must die - well with Jet Li in it, that was a must, thought she was pretty good in that. And then that tragic accident happened - and I have to say I was shocked, and I couldn't believe it at first - I know this is a cliche, but she had so much talent, and it was like she had only just started, she had so much more to give. I bought the Romeo must Die soundtrack in germany last september whilst i was attending a conference. I thought about buying her Aaliyah album, but i didn't because it made me feel so sad. I felt sad listening to the Romeo album, at first. But its a nice cd - it sounds a little dated now though, I have to say.
But now, her single's been released over here, 'more than a woman', and its a lovely song. It is so poignant, because its like she's singing to you from beyond the grave, and i'm moved whenever i hear it. That girl really had talent. Aaliyah, i salute you, wherever you are.

so its 6.30pm, and i was supposed to be out of the lab by 6. so that I can eat by 7, and then go do kung fu at 8. will i do it ladies and gentlemen? or will i not? even i don't know. oh wait, it looks as thought i might actually do it.. ciao babes.

Tim Henman lost to Jonas Bjorkman in straight sets! I just knew it. All these people talking about him, saying that he's got what it takes to win built my hopes up. Do they really think he can win a slam, or are they just biased and overly optimistic? I personally like the guy, I would love it if he won, but i don't think he's good enought to beat the top players.

i told myself last night: you will wake up at 8, you will wake up at 8, and this morning, I could not get out of bed at 8! I have some serious motivation issues.

welcome welcome! my first ever post on my own weblog, wow! as you can see i am easily pleased and exciteable. And I also don't check my spelling, so don't think i'm dumb if i spell something really obvious wrong. Although what you think of me will depend on who you are, but let me just say now that nobody's perfect, ok?

A little introduction, i think is in order, although it may not end up as being little by the time i'm finished, as i tend to ramble alot. I am a british born chinese female, 26, god, i still can't believe i'm 26, i have to keep reminding myself. i'll probably carry on not accepting it until i'm 27 (aaarh freeak!!) I was born in North-West London, (Northwick park hospital, for those who know the area), and have lived here pretty much most of my life. I did live for about 7 years in Hong Kong pre-11 years old, but that was a lifetime ago. I speak a little cantonese, but english is my first language, even though I have been told on various occassions that I have an american or an australian accent. The american one is easier to explain, I used to go to an american school when I was in HK. The aussie one? who knows. maybe its in anticipation of when I eventually go there, which'll be not too far in the distant future me hopes. Otherwise I would say I have a pretty public school londoner accent, which in itself has been made fun of, so there's just no pleasing anyone. Anyway to cut a long story short, after year upon year of traumatic state school education, two years of private school, three years of uni (did pharmacy [parental pressure]), one year of pre-registration training (which was particularly stressful), i became a pharmacist, for my sins. And because I always wanted to, I am now doing a PhD - in Pharmacognosy (go look it up), and should hopefully wrap up my three years of labwork in 8 months time. I have to confess, the stress hasn't kicked in yet, although i must be in denial.
I am currently doing Kung Fu, with the Zhuan Shu Kuan association, and our Sifu is a kick ass instructor who teaches us really kick ass stuff including Kung Fu, Chinese boxing and Kickboxing. I've only been doing it for a year, so i'm not Michelle Kwan, but I love it.
I am also quite attatched to the tv, and avidily watch ER, Sex and the City, Ally McBeal, X-files, stuff like that. Recently I have become engrossed in the plotline in Hollyoaks. This was quite unintentional, it started off with sunday morning lie-ins, with the tv automatically on, and as it turned out Hollyoaks was the only watcheable thing on, and not only that, it's on for two hours, so before you know it, you're sucked in, and you know every dirty little secret of every character.
I am also a book reader, although i will be doing no impressing of the literary boffs, as i pretty much only read pulp, and terry pratchett (yeah, great stuff). Although i do occassionally read these book prize winners, but quite often find myself unimpressed. So far books I can recommend are The Beach, and White Teeth (Zadie Smith). Read into that what you will.
I also do a bit of a websurfing, i'm not hardcore. when I first started looking around, I encountered scores of depressing, sad little weblogs/websites, but now only stick to three that I check up on an almost daily basis - voxmachina by the excellent zannah, Jish.nu by lovely Jish, and Little Yellow Different by Ernie, who's just in a class of his own. And I have looked around for others, really, but these are the only three that stick. The thing about these guys, is that they're all american/canadian, and it would be nice to read stuff by someone on this side of the pond. And also, I think I have something. Something, as in, hey, I can do this, I have something to say, and I think I'd like to share as well, y'know? You must know, there are millions of bloggers out there.
So, that's me. my name's sharon, by the way. That's my real name, but being british, i'd like to withold my last name, you understand. :)