Waffles, et cetera.

This picture is so self-contained it does not need a caption.

For an off-campus late night dessert on a Tuesday night, you can easily take the 200 Bus Route from Heng Mui Terrace to Holland Village, a former home of British soldiers that has now turned into a rather yuppie expat stronghold catering to the very Westernized tourist. Once you arrive, you can go to a dessert cafe (its name currently escapes me) and buy waffles and ice cream for half the regular price, which comes out to roughly three to five sing dollars.

I plan on going back there eventually to get my non-Asian food fix. As weird as it sounds, I really miss eating spaghetti and pasta.

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Today, I had lunch with a Malay boy living in my hall whom I grew to immediately like only because he does not like participating in hall activities, and the sixteen-year-old loser in me always feels an immediate pang of sympathy for antisocial people forced into hyper-social situations.

He also dons longish hair and chipped black nail polish, and carries around a small notebook of poems scrawled meticulously in tiny handwriting. Somehow, knowing that emo people exist in Malaysia cheers me for no apparent reason.

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While I dearly love my Southeast Asian Literature class, all my other classes (or modules, as they call it here) feel like a rehash of every other general education course I've bullshitted my way through freshman and sophomore year of college.

I don't really have a problem with this. Studying abroad is an oxymoron.

During my Chinese Studies lecture, I finished rereading The Giver, a book that I haven't read since I was probably eleven. Revisiting a book from childhood through a more adult perspective is an odd feeling. It's somewhat akin to reading a letter that you wrote to yourself sealed in a time capsule to be opened several years later, but then maybe not.

When I was eleven, I had really big glasses and long hair. I liked to rollerblade a lot, and I had a crush on my next-door neighbor. I liked math, the color purple and Italian food.

It's never too late to read The Giver. It can easily be read in one sitting, or several inconsequential lectures.

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I already booked my plane tickets to Thailand for the weeklong semester break at the end of September. Technically, this window of time is supposed to be treated more as a study session for midterms and projects, but bloody hell to that.

I think about many of you quite dearly.