Tagged by Kristen:

7 things that scare me:

1. Cockroaches.
2. Centipedes.
3. Cockroaches.
4. The hour after I watch a really scary flick.
5. My computer dying.
6. Cockroaches.
7. My Cabbage Patch Kids coming to life (when I had them, that is).

(Yeah, I’m really terrified of cockroaches.)

7 things that I like most:

1. Neil.
2. Food.
3. Sleep.
4. The Internet for providing the ability to find truly weird shite.
5. Good quality socks (for dolls).
6. Music.
7. My camera(s).

7 important things in my room:

1. Eye mask to block out that damn flickering ceiling light.
2. Closet with all my clothes in it.
3. Doona.
4. Bedside table with my mobile phone / alarm clock.
5. The ensuite!
6. Neil (but not his farts).
7. The bed, but I’d like it better if it wasn’t rock hard.

7 random facts about me:

1. I practically have no eyebrows — actually, I have two half-brows.
2. I have no tattoos on my ankles or wrists (yet?).
3. I wear my watch on my right wrist.
4. I have eight ear piercings.
5. I look dead dorky with a fringe.
6. I think I look older when I wear my contact lenses instead of my glasses.
7. My tongue piercing is slightly crooked.

7 things I plan to do before I die:

1. Fix my myopia.
2. Explore Europe.
3. Complete my tattoos (not that there’s a plan or anything).
4. Drive through the United States.
5. See Indochina.
6. Write a book (this does not equal ‘find a publisher’).
7. Learn to surf.

7 things I can do:

1. Annoy people by cracking my knuckles.
2. Bending my elbows the wrong way and nauseating all present.
3. Eat a hella lot of barbecue.
4. Make sock dolls.
5. Say fuck in Chinese (I just learned that).
6. Say ‘fuck your mum’s smelly bits’ in Hokkien and Cantonese.
7. Complain a lot (I’m Singaporean, it’s genetic).

7 things I can’t do:

1. Sit still.
2. Admit I’m wrong (sometimes it’s grudgingly admitted, but not often).
3. Draw.
4. Use a sewing machine.
5. Eat chilli (well, that’s more a won’t).
6. Programme anything in any programming language.
7. Remember how to spell ‘manoeuvre’ (I just had to look it up).

7 things I say the most:

1. ‘Like’ (unfortunately).
2. ‘Apparently’.
3. ‘I’m hungry’.
4. ‘I want barbecue’.
5. ‘What do you want for dinner?’
6. ‘No, what do you want for dinner?’
7. ‘How are we getting there?’

7 Celebrity Crushes:

1. Drew Barrymore
2. Jonny Lee Miller
3. Angelina Jolie (from her Hackers days)
4. Ryan Reynolds
5. Katie Holmes (before her current… taste in men plummeted)
6. Patrick Stewart
7. Carly Pope

7 people who could do this:
I dunno. Anyone who wants to, I guess.

All my life, I’ve avoided a certain activity, something lots of other people do, something lots of other people really enjoy. There’s just always been something about it that makes me uncomfortable, that makes me feel like it’s a very wrong thing to get involved in:

As a person who actively stays away from anything that might bestow any public attention on oneself (when I played drums in the school ‘rock’ band, I requested that I be positioned as far back as possible so no one could see me), doing anything that requires one to get up, hold a microphone, and be seen and heard is equivalent to asking me if I’d like a dose of gonorrhea to go with my Bloody Mary. In other words, I’m kind of shy.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not afraid of singing. I sing all the time. I sing along in pubs and clubs when it’s so loud hardly anyone can hear me, I’ll sing along to my CDs playing at home, I’d even been in the choir back when I had no other ECAs left to join. But to pick up a mike and croon into it? No thank you.

KTV bars in Singapore have also left me with the impression that they are mostly pretty seedy, full of lounge hostesses who, for the right price, will do pretty much anything for you — not that I’ve been to one in Singapore, but baby, the stories I’ve heard! If I ever have to listen to another tale about a KTV hostess giving a blowjob in front of assembled guests it will be too soon.

So it was with great trepidation that I went along to the karaoke this evening just past. It was in celebration of Winki’s birthday, and I felt that it would be kind of poor manners to excuse myself from the evening’s entertainment after a long meal at the Indian restaurant.

(I don’t think Neil shares the same feelings for the same reasons as I about karaoke, but since he only sings when he has surpassed the so-drunk-he-dances phase, he’s not its biggest fan.)

I saved myself (mostly) by being the only person who could read the Chinese characters on the keypad and computer screen, so I literally became the KTV GOD. And it was sort of worth it, because apparently, one line of Kylie’s I Should Be So Lucky is actually:

Dirty, dirty girl. Or dirty, dirty Stock, Aitken, and Waterman.

Yes, I sang along now and again. Yes, I pushed the mike away every time it was proffered. I may have popped my KTV cherry last night, but some things will never change.

(Photos.)

Via Terry, it turns out that most London cabbies and other ‘barometers of popular trends’ have no idea what podcasting and blogging is; in fact, many think blogging is the same as dogging. If you think about it, it’s not totally inaccurate a misconception.

Dear Lucy,

Please say Happy Birthday to Winki when she meets you tonight, mmm’kay? You were made as her birthday present. She wanted a Princess Someone-Else-No-One-Wants-To-Leia, but I can’t really make a second doll based on the same idea, so the idea of a raver kid came up and I had to work out how to make a few pairs of socks look like an electronically- and chemically-fuelled good time.

Read more.

I’m going fucking bonkers with this sock doll making. And I have lots of ideas for more. Insane in the membrane.

Dear Toofty,

As the sock doll that was hot on the heels of the little savage, you are a little neglected… except in my heart.

Gag me with a spoon, will ya?

Read more.

Dear savage,

You were made as a present — a birthday present. Gary was turning 32, and what do you get the bloke who has everything?

Gary is the youngest crusty old fella one could ever hope (or want) to ever meet, grumbling that any music other than Motown or Elvis Presley is a bloody row, and was amazed at 19-year old adolescents’ capacity for food. Savages, they were. One couldn’t get anywhere near the food when they were there.

Hence, Neil floated the idea of making a special little savage just for Gary, and you were born.

Read more.

• went to Gary’s birthday barbecue
• got rained on getting home
• went to check out a Chinese tattoo parlour with Winki, Lindsay, and Nicky (no thank you, their autoclave looks like a toaster oven)
• shopped a little (those three shopped a lot)
• had dinner at a Xinjiang restaurant (fantastic food)
• had a hot chocolate at Javaromas
• had a few drinks (mainly non-alcoholic!) at The Londoner
• made a new sock doll
• went on a mission for sock doll supplies (not socks)
• ate pizza
• met up with Winki and her siblings to check out the dog Mofo and the cat Tuna (they get along)
• watched Without a Paddle

A fine example of why any translation into English must be checked by a native speaker:

You just can’t make this shit up.

Via Tutu, this is the next wave of reality teevee, I reckon: watching your own plane on satellite news as it touches down, on fire.

You know you’re in China when your DVD store shelves Boogie Nights in the kid’s section because the cover is illustrated.

Terry says:

Bigger! You have to make the sock puppets bigger!

Artists erect giant pink bunny on mountain — will Terry knit giant socks for me?

… has moved to WordPress. Don’t worry, Krissy, WP is easy to learn and you’ll be stylin’ those themes in no time.

… can’t really remember what we did (in order) — Neil usually helps to remind me, but he’s asleep right now. There were two nights of drinks at The House, a dinner at a Shanghai restaurant, steak and onion pie at The Londoner, Indian curries, Frequency on DVD, and just generally doing nothing as well.

Mr See Leong Kit comes out fighting in this open letter to prime minister Lee Hsien Loong. I’m impressed; but his introductory remarks won’t exactly make PM Lee receptive (if he was going to be at all) to his impassioned words.

This does not mean I’m now unblocked, but Neil chuckled so much at these videos that they have to be linked. Presenting Dolmio’s with a Scottish twist:

• Fanny baws’s got more’n me
• Get us two tenner bags
• Aye, then the boss says to me this mornin’
• I’m brilliant at hidey
• Lalalalalalala… aw, for fuck’s sake, them chickens are back again

Classic.

Sigh. I’ll be back soon.

My morning at the gym was bad today. I was late because I’d called my sister with SkypeOut (to try and use my credit before SkypeOut is blocked in Xiamen, destroying market order my arse).

So here’s a tangent. If they block me from using SkypeOut in Xiamen, the time limit on my credit will expire, and I will have wasted Euros for a service I cannot use, because the monopolistic incumbent cannot handle any hint of competition. Useless bastards.

After all my gabbing with my sister, I got to the gym and found myself feeling a little thirsty. So what do I do? I down half a cup of water.

BIG MISTAKE should have scrolled across the projector screen in the treadmill room at that point.

I got a stitch. I am a complete wimp when it comes to stitches; they are worse than a sprained ankle, because they hurt like fuck but technically do not affect how my feet and legs move. When I was in school, my athletics coach advised sucking your gut in when you got a stitch while running. I’ve been trying that trick for years. What she didn’t say was that after you think it’s gone away and you relax, its wee brother (or sister, it’s hard to tell) comes by to exact revenge because you killed their hero.

Try to explain to your guilty conscience that exercise-related transient abdominal pain has caused you to dramatically decrease your speed on the treadmill. I was wracked, wracked, I tell you. Or it could just be the stitch that was wracking, I’m not sure.

On top of having to watch myself very carefully to make sure I don’t fall off the bloody treadmill by having my ankle or knee collapse (and this could definitely happen), I now have to attempt to focus on my breathing to become a ‘left footed exhaler’ and figure out how to breathe with my diaphragm as naturally as possible (I can do it with some concentration, two years in the school choir have finally come to some use).

I’m not the most coordinated person on the planet, so this should be fun. For the studio audience. Goddamn, they won’t even need a laugh track.

Fine words: “If elected officials hear enough insistent yet polite voices tell them that they expect an independent Katrina investigation, that the votes these insistent yet polite voices hold will depend on whether or not there is an independent Katrina investigation, then there will be an independent Katrina investigation.” — Marn’s Big Adventure

• had dinner at Tutto Bene with Gary and Georgie
• had a few drinks at The Londoner
• had a final drink at Glass House
• did nothing all day
• had dinner at a Korean restaurant we’d never tried before
• had a hot chocolate at Javaromas (and started reading Snow Falling on Cedars)
• watched The Blues Brothers on DVD
• lazed around all morning
• went for a walk around the back streets of Xiamen
• went over to Gary and Georgie’s for dinner (Neil fixed the barbecue on which our dinner was prepared)