Flash of inspiration: will do a poem about menopausal bibiks.
Link

Gonna pack my huge backpack for this week's expedition now!

And the ratatouille came out gorgeous. Zucchinis rawkszszxxszxor<3TTM. Shall make it in event of potluck, with wild mushroom soup and rosemary flatbread.

Little victories aside, I'm thinking of doing a gap year after NS, where I recover from The Madness by backpacking/working at a cool bookshop in the Village/taking a culinary course/doing some travel writing thing, and return home enlightened and rejuvenated for the perils of real life. This would, of course, depend on parental opinion/scholarship requirements/finances and might fall through.

Also, I'm finishing Norwegian Wood soon. Like most Murakami novels, the plot centres around the themes of love and loss. The protagonist, Watanabe, remembers the suicide of his best friend at 17 and leads a promiscuous, emotionally-disconnected, life in the years to follow. Anyway, my point is this - why do teenage characters in the realm of the fictitious exist as happening, independent individuals who lead amazingly exciting lives? Think teenage pregnancy in Juno, saving the planet from certain destruction in Transformers or saving yourself from destruction a la Gossip Girl. And let's not even go into the wildly varied life of Hannah Montana. I'm 17 but all I can say is I've survived flu pandemics and I sometime like to read and go out. Please tell me everyone else is glued to facebook or watching TV too, and not out at Fort Canning playing folk music, or solving a murder or being part of a secret underground counterculture.

In other news, I heard on the grapevine that holidays may be extended given the current H1N1 situation... though MOE still has yet to send out the updates.