Here’s what happens on normal sundays.

Maid goes out, come back by 1630hrs to prepare dinner for my brother. Then I ask her if they are eating, she says “should be”. So I give him a call, 4/7 times, they are actually eating. The other 3 times, they either made plans to bring everyone out to dinner, planned to go out for dinner themselves or just plain not eating. See… The reason why my maid prepares them dinner is that they naturally come over for dinner on Sundays! It has come to a point where they don’t call to say whether or not they are eating. We only know when I call them. When they say they are not eating, the food is left to waste.

Then, there’s my mum who recently told me not to eat at home on sundays, give my maid some rest. Obviously not realising that she’s not cooking for me, but my brother and his useless family. When I do bring this point up to my mum, she says, “then when they are not eating give her some rest…” Right, so this is where I stand in the family, at the lowest priority.

7am: wake up, prepare to go to Kong Kong’s place

8am: Arrive at Kong Kong’s place; parents leave for work

7pm: mum comes home, but wait, mum does not want to see the kids! She’s telling their maid to not tell them she’s back!

7.30pm: mum eats dinner, kids realise she’s home. mum tells them not to disturb her, she’s eating! So maid takes them away to watch tv

8pm: she’s finally free. Ready for dad to come for dinner and send them home.

8.30pm: reach home

9pm: sleep

A total of 3 hours spent looking at the parents, 2 hours spent interacting

On an odd day, where the mother is on leave (maternity leave on paper)

7am: wake up

9am: send kids over, dad does this

12pm: mum comes over for lunch and some interaction

1pm: kids go for nap nap, so does mum. mum puts them to bed, after which she goes to the guest room to sleep

3pm: kids wake up, shhh. don’t disturb mum, she’s asleep (don’t care about uncle who is also asleep)

5pm: mum wakes up, let’s go to the playground!

5.30pm: come back! mum needs to do some work now, maid takes kids away

6.30pm: dinner time, eat together. you’d think mum will feed the kids, WRONG. maid feeds them. she needs to eat and not waste time feeding them.

the rest of the evening is the same

total time 4 hours.

It seems that this may be very common in households these days… Parents producing children and having someone else take care of them while they are at work. However, note how my sister-in-law makes a conscious effort to avoid them. Taking the wonderful maternity leave (that is supposed to be used on spending time with kids) to sleep and do more work.

If that’s not enough, there’s the ever so common, church going priority. My brother and sister-in-law have this tendency to leave their children at my place while they go to church/bible study. Then there’s the “couple time” they like to have every other week, again, my place while the go off and have a nice dinner or trip (in which the children spend the whole time at my place).

argh… then there’s the “one kid is sick” issue… to quarantine their other non-sick child, the sick one is left at my place. regardless of me complaining that I don’t want to fall sick!

I know my brother lives really close to me. I also know that there are many young couples out there who seek domestic help to handle the workload. Seriously, you can get a maid, nanny, babysitter, etc. Do you really have to leave the entourage at my place??? burdening me, an undergrad, making me sick and disrupting me of my sleep/study.

I have begun to take the stance that they do not belong in this house. They can visit, but not stay here more than they have to. I am their uncle and I should be seeing less of them than their own bloody parents. From now on, everyday I see them, I’ll be reminding them of how their parents don’t care enough for them to take care of them and how I don’t give a shit about them as well. My mum says that they can’t handle the 2 kids on their own, but for some strange reason, they are having their 3rd! So I’m ignoring my mum’s comments on this.

My dad will continue to scold the shit out of them, while I continue to remind them that they are not loved by the people who brought them into this world.

//welcome message

//lcd_puts(“BEE BEE!!!”);

//lcd_goto2(1);

//lcd_puts(“I LOVE YOU!!!”);

Right, there’s nothing much happening so far, but this is big news… The little boy decides that nothing is more fun than watching Playhouse Disney while stroking his new found friend. Just the other day, Winnie and I were having dinner and he slowly comes up to us and say, “Uncle Jem, I am watching TV (while stroking his new found friend).” Me being the loving uncle, “Ok.” That’s one account. Winnie had it worse, “Auntie Winnie, come watch with me (again, with his new found friend).” Winnie being the future auntie that she is, “ok…” Of course, at heart, we don’t give a shit.

Today coincidentally was the day we were both having separate job interviews and at 8am, the nephew starts crying his ass off! For what reason? His baby sister was watching Barney and he wanted to watch Playhouse Disney! So, after his maid switched the channels, he continues to cry!!! (while stroking his new found friend) So, me being the loving uncle, caring for his wellbeing, went up to him and asked (with a 60dB voice) “what do you want?” All he says is, “I don’t want!!! I don’t want……. etc. (while stroking his new found friend).” Since the noise level was too high, I decided to throw him out of the house and have breakfast. Thing is, he could have simply opened the door, but he chose to bounce around outside the door screaming and throwing himself onto the door (while stroking his new found friend). He eventually opened the door by chance and he continues to cry! Only after threatening to slap him in the face that he decided to shut up and watch TV…

That’s just my interaction with him. Over the past few weeks, Winnie and I have been observing him and his interactions and have noticed that no one really gives a shit about him and likewise, he does not give a shit about anyone! When I come home, not a word from him, when my dad comes home, nothing and when his parents come home, nothing! Even after his parents ask him to greet, nothing! If that’s not enough, he continues to watch TV while stroking his new found friend!?

So in essence, I look forward to seeing him grow up and wonder what kind of child he would turn out to be. I strongly believe that he would make a good psych case study and that some graduates should consider taking him on for their PhD thesis.

Because of bloody football loving morons, Starhub sports channels cost a bomb. Now, Singtel sports channels will cost a bomb too! All this fighting is rubbish. Look at what Fifa is asking of us now! $100 million for bloody World Cup? No doubt, I’d watch a little of it, or perhaps try to keep track of what’s going on, but if it’s going to cause me to pay an extra buck (whether I like it or not), then forget it! FIFA is clearly out of line here, asking for almost 8 times the previous amount! Bloody World cup only lasts for a few weeks and we’re paying more that what EPL is giving us…

We should all just stop watching football and make FIFA realise that we will not fall victim to capitalistic greed…

Knowing myself, I am want a decent job, one that challenges me and at the same time, one that I know I am capable of doing… I’m not willing to settle for a simple job that just pays me.

Along with something else…

Making the whole set up look like so…

So… This was a relaxing evening.

Fresh Oysters FTW!

Aside from that, we had a good taste/reminder of what Singaporean Kiasuism is like… Queues after queues for black pepper crabs! The crabs kept running out, along with baked scallops and the oysters just came at a really slow pace. Even Winnie’s sister (Wendy) joined in the “fun” by spotting when the crabs were replenished.

Nutcracker got pawned...

There was one particular crab though, that was really tough to whack, my usual chewing on the shells didn’t work and I had to resort to the nutcracker… That didn’t go so well.

Anyway, the kids weren’t there but their absence allowed us to kick back and just have fun, without having to watch over someone! A great afternoon! Thanks Winston for the treat!

Back in mid October, NUS decided to implement this thing called e-Learning week, where students should not be in class, but conduct self-study using materials by the lecturers online. The reason for e-Learning week was that they wanted students to isolate themselves away from the H1N1 threat and get better… So what actually happened. Students had an extra week of holidays, lecturers had to re-order their lectures to ensure students don’t get too lost, students continued to go out and party and get even more sick… On top of that, NUS issued out another advice stating that students should access their materials during the normal lecture times to reduce the load on the servers; not that bad, except that no one actually logged in during the normal times. Even better still, most of the material had to be accessed on-campus or via NUS-VPN. NUS-VPN kept getting congested and going to campus kind of eliminated the purpose for e-Learning and self-quarantine…

Sometime in the first week of December, NUS announces that they will be porting over all the student accounts to some new University environment called myISIS (my, Integrated Student Information System). By doing so, it somewhat provides a centralised location for students to access all their personal information, from tuition fees to exam results. On top of it, they sugarcoat the announcement with butt loads of good points and good reasons for doing so, trying to hide the fact that the servers would be down for a week and that the exchange server will be highly inaccessible. However, upon logging in, this is what you see…

myISIS home screen

I assure you, there’s nothing else on the home screen… So much for the hype. What they advertised is still there, but this is what awaits you when you log in, a boring little search box… Not even categories or other shortcuts to any useful information.

Then comes December 22, the release of examination results! So what happened this time was that students had to log in to the exams directory and fetch their results. However, students who are attempting to access their results off-campus had to log in via NUS-VPN, sounds simple enough, but the servers were full! Everyone I knew, including myself decided to just wait the extra hour and SMS in for our results. By doing so, we still had to wait about half-an-hour before we actually got our results!

Now, it’s time for the most stressful period of any NUS student’s life, aside from exams, MODULE BIDDING… This is what happened at the scheduled time that CORS would be open. Server is down and we can’t log in! When we actually managed to connect about 3 hours later, all our info is messed up, by my own calculations, I have obtained a total of 144 MCs allowing me to file for graduation, instead it was reflected that I had only obtained 132, though it allowed me to file for graduation, it set me into a state of panic as I wasn’t sure how many more modules I was required to take! I figured that they hadn’t updated the modules that I had taken last semester… The same story mentioned among my friends and lo-and-behold, I seem to have only accumulated 98 MCs!!! Good job CORS! You never fail to surprise me!

On another note, I will say this and not to anyone in particular, since I have had to deal with multiple parties before… Studying in NUS is NOT FUN and though many NUS students are seen having fun, when it comes to studying, we have to work our asses off just to earn our honours! For those coming from foreign universities, ask yourselves this, why did you even go there… There can only be so many reasons that point back to the fact that Singaporean Universities are not as easy.

Let me help you with some options:

- Did not do as well for A-levels/Diploma

- Wanted a more relaxed study environment

- You got an overseas scholarship

- You wanted to experience other cultures (and why would you actually want to experience other cultures?)

- You want to get a degree from a more prestigious University

- You just want to study modules/subjects that are only relevant to your course of study

I’m trying to be nice… Seriously, when your friends from local universities bitch about how stressful Student life is, please just try to be understanding and don’t say such things like “studying is fun”, especially if your reason for not studying locally is the first two…