Vitamin Water, Elixir of the Immortals.

A certain wonderful lady friend of mine decided to send me a care package that embodies everything that I miss from back home. Now what would this magical substance exactly be?



You know it.

Now I've never been a very religious person (and I ascribe this to the fact that my parents made me go to a Christian preschool and a Buddhist Japanese saturday school when I was a kid). However, I do place a lot of faith in the healing powers of Vitamin Water, that it will revive me when I am wiped out from a particularly intense ping-pong game, give me endurance to scale the Himalayas and energy to finish this darn Power Point presentation I've been procrastinating on! Need I also mention just how clever these label-writers are? These clever labels make me feel like a clever person when I drink these drinks, and you can't really get any better than that.

The point being, I love Vitamin Water and if you supply me with it, I will love you forever.

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Life in Singapura has been pretty pleasant these days, in a lowkey kind of way. Buffet sushi, gay clubbing, chilling at the Boat Quay and whatnot. Went to the Chinese Botanical Garden to check out the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, which was rather anticlimactic, but provided amusing photo opportunities where we pretended to be fairies from the kingdom of Gay being born out of rainbow-colored flowers.



I know, there's definitely a recurring pattern in the EAP people I spend time with. They're big dorks, and they're fun.





P.S. Note: my beautiful new glasses. They look like candy. If they weren't so eyesight-improving, I would eat them!



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Maybe not so randomly, thanks to a classmate in my Southeast Asian Literature class, I am now a part of the Southeast Asian Studies Student Society. It's a rather small, cozy organization composed of Southeast Asian studies students and faculty, which is a great opportunity to meet really intelligent, interesting people.

Anyhow, I met a Japanese exchange student named Seitaro who is from Kyoto University. Seitaro asked me to meet up with him to help him with his English pronunciations. For an hour, we met up on campus where he already had a worksheet prepared for himself and for me. In very neat handwriting, he wrote out a list of paired words (raw / law, right / light, etc.), in which he would read one of the paired words and I would circle which word I thought he was pronouncing. Afterwards, we would compare results to see how he did with his self-imposed quiz.

By the way, the stereotype that Japanese people can't pronounce their letter r's worth shit is true. This is because Japanese is a highly phonetic language, so a lot of weird sounds like 'th' and 'r' force native Japanese speakers to shape their tongues and lips in really awkward, counterintuitive ways that they are simply not used to. The fact that in Japanese romanized script, the l sound is SPELLED with the letter r doesn't help much with this phenomenon.

Our "lesson" went something like this.

ME: Try saying the r sound. Rrrrrrrrrrr.

SEITARO: Llllllllllllluuu.

ME: RRRRRRRRR.

SEITARO: LLLLLLLLLLLUUUU.

ME: .... That's close enough.

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Everyone knows about American pop culture. In the heart of Melaka's historic district, you see posters of High School Musical on windows of random stores. Even in Singapore I have to fend off the one annoying question that shrivels the heart of every person who has grown up in Orange County: "So is the O.C. really like that?"

Studying abroad makes me realize just how horribly one-sided this influence is. Teenagers in Malaysia and Sri Lanka are well-versed in the melodrama of an American high school prom from all the bad teen movies that we export internationally, but no one back home cares to know what it's like to grow up in Thailand or Singapore.

I've had several international exchange students from various Asian countries tell me how much they envy my American accent. These symbols of power, however arbitrary, are so subconsciously ingrained into our minds it's almost disturbing.