Merry Christmas! Two days late. It's come to be a part of me so I've stopped trying to fight it altogether.

Nice Christmas party on the 25th with the whole family...I helped PY wrap his present for the Secret Santa game and I did it really well! I think I can work at Takashimaya next year at the gift wrap counter. I guarantee you your recipient will never guess what's inside! Which basically means I make this great big bag to dump the gift in...pretty ingenious huh.

School's reopening in a few days' time. I've tried (seventeen whole years) but I can't face it with a positive, optimistic attitude. And I'm getting so sick of the whole routine I can't even practise a Can't Care Less outlook. I won't even be apathetic, for Pete's sake. This is getting to be worse than my last post. I think a large part is due to the fact that I feel like I wasn't supposed to be in JC in the first place. I seriously think that's why this whole year has been screwed up...it's me protesting this whole crap of an education I'm getting. I have great friends and a passable school to say the least but honestly school life has sucked for the most part this year.

Hmm. I'm not really feeling all christmassy this year. You know you are when you feel all floaty and you can't get Rudolph out of your head. Well. Maybe not yet. But I DO have a Christmas wishlist. Duh. I have one all the time! Here goes.

1. Marc by Marc Jacobs watch

2. G-Star plaid top

3. Paul Smith jacket

4. Paul Smith sneakers

5. Prada glasses

6. Ted Baker bag

7. Dries Van Noten SS08 Collection shorts

8. Vivienne Westwood tartan yellow wallet

Today, Rachel did the unthinkable. She bought the Backstreet Boys' new album. OMGGG did I just say that? And worse still, do that? I'm pretty sure someone hypnotised me into doing it. I should have worn a paper bag over my head when I paid for it! Or. I can just plain proclaim that I kind of (okay. DO) like them all over again and try to make it seem like it's actually a really cool thing to do that now. Go, power pop!

Anyway. I should really start talking about THE SECOND DAY in NY. Somehow, I have this feeling that I'm not going to finish this NY recap. I mean, we spent 10 days there, and now I'm only at day 2. It's kind of sad. This totally proves that I should talk less and practice harder at being more concise.

We went to see the Statue of Liberty! It's pretty awesome. I love the colour. We took a cruise (hello fat seagulls!) to Liberty Island, where it's situated. Besides taking tons of pictures of the statue, we also had a Dead Leaves Party. Actually, it's more like we had a lot of fun playing with all the fallen leaves (there are that many) there. I got a really cool SoL bobblehead pen for BFF Charles at the souvenir shop. He's going to love it. After the cruise, we went to this shopping mall near the Brooklyn Bridge for lunch. We had Nathan's Hotdogs. Nathan's Hotdogs=YUM. Seriously. But there was no time to shop! Because we (I'm acutally not really part of that 'we') thought that we couldn't miss out on a photo op with the bridge in the background. Okay, it was pretty fun. After that, our Lower Manhattan tour guide (he's Chinese and has been living in NY for years. But he's actually not that fluent in English. Mmm hmm) brought us to Wall Street, past the Trump Building (Hi Mr Trump!), the NY Stock Exchange, and to Ground Zero. Oh. And along the way, our tour guide lost us. I know. How is that even possible?? Thank God for handphones.

At night, we went to Parsons the New School for Design. I was so excited. Tim Gunn practically has his footsteps all over that place! I only mildly worship the guy, okay? Then I realised that the school is actually split up into different buildings which are all over the place. Riiight. And then WE realised that the Graduate Open Studios we were going to view was actually meant to be an invitation/expectation-only event. But...we basically crashed the whole thing. Most of us weren't too thrilled with that prospect, but the works we saw were really, really fabulous and will definitely go into the Big Idea Vault for coursework 2008. We would have missed out on a lot if we hadn't gone ahead. The works were really experimental and original, even though the final pieces weren't all huge and imposing and flawless-looking. Each student had their own space to show off their prep work too and they are so so so creative BOTH in ideas AND process I wanted to hang my head in shame. It was pretty exciting and nice to talk to some of them (and steal their ideas). The cheesecloth and plaster guy was really nice.

I just had to talk about those awesome Prada glasses first. Tee hee. Anyway. New York.

ILOVENEWYORK!!!!

Okay, I've calmed myself down. I didn't blog about it sooner because I've been sufferring from a really horrible case of jet lag. We touched down in Singapore on the 10th at 2am and I only went to bed at 5am. Then I woke up at 5pm. And I went back to bed at about 8pm. After which I woke up at 4am. And everything has been screwed up after that. I think I'm secretly (maybe not so secretly) longing to go back to NY. It's beeyoutiful! And now, for a very long recap of the trip...brace yourselves! Actually...I think I might just do ONE (pathetic) day at a go, because I have so much to say. No surprise there.

See you later (like later-later), Singapore. The 17 hour plane ride from Bangkok (we transited there) to NY was unbearable. Period. I didn't really fancy the movie selection and ended up watching Grey's Anatomy, but staring at a tiny screen gets kind of boring after, what, 5 hours? Which still leaves 12 hours! I didn't sleep much. Couldn't. Too excited? Probably. When our plane finally flew into NY, the sky outside was already awesome. It was blue-green-yellow-red and totally breathtaking. And yay! We were actually IN NY for real, AT LAST. It was around 8 in the morning. The cold hit us in the face the moment we stepped outside the airport...a real departure (pardon the bad pun!) from Singapore! We took a fairly long bus ride to our hostel, HI-NY, which is at Amsterdam Avenue, near the 103rd St subway station. We dumped our suitcases in our 6-bed (bunk system) room and headed out again to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, which I knew nuts about. Little did I know that it's an arts school and a very fabulous one at that! How fabulous? Let's just say I want to study there. Very much. Student guide and fashion major John (check out http://www.johnrenaud.com/ which is his professional website-his collections are impressive...why does that sound like an understatement?) showed us around the campus, which is really pretty. There are sculptures and installations all over campus. I loved the whole feel of it. The fashion design course is really prestigious-out of 3000 applications, they only take in about 80, so I can carry on dreaming. John got to be an intern for Daniel Vosovic! The guy from Project Runway 2. Total wowness. He took us to the library, class/workrooms, cafeteria, sports hall, dorms and the exciting career centre. WELL, it looks ordinary, but it's fantastic because the school has really extensive (read: good, useful) connections and the centre helps hook students up with all these great companies after they graduate.

On a separate note, lunch was grab-and-go. I had a gigantic pizza slice. Buffalo chicken. Very cheesy and rich and more than enough to fill me to the brim. Yum. Anyways. After Pratt we headed down to Rockefeller Centre for the christmas tree lightup! Yay! Not. There were so many people there that the place had to be barricaded. It's a huge thing. When we got there Ashley Tisdale was singing, but we couldn't see a thing. We were really far back. And we waited. And waited. It was 7, going on 7.30. Then I heard someone talking to a police officer, who said the lightup was only going to be at 9. I almost died right there! We decided that we didn't want to be waiting any longer. It was really cold, we were getting sardined, and we couldn't see anything anyway. So off we headed back to the hostel to get some rest.

Coming up next...Pills! Heights! Hot chocolate! I just love New York.