merry is love ;

American TV junkie

I don't think I've met another person as crazy about American television series like I am. I must have spent hundreds of hours just watching them the past 3 years. I've never tried counting how many series I've completed or am still watching but I shall attempt to do it now.

Ongoing series and still watching:
1. Grey's Anatomy
2. Private Practice
3. Scandal
4. 2 Broke Girls
5. New Girl
6. Glee
7. Nikita
8. Cougar Town
9. Modern Family
10. Walking Dead
11. The Big Bang Theory
12. Gossip Girl
13. Drop Dead Diva
14. The Office

Past series and still watching:
1. Judging Amy
2. Sex and the City

Past series and completed:
1. Veronica Mars
2. Desperate Housewives
3. One Tree Hill
4. Ally Mcbeal
5. Friends
6. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
7. Ugly Betty
8. Flash Forward
9. Brothers and Sisters

*Will be editing this list as and when.

Oh my gosh. Currently catching 14 + 2 = 16 shows?! It didn't seem so many while I was watching. What a big waste of time.

But at the same time, I can't pull away because I've already identified with all the characters in the shows and thus would want to know how it turns out for them. I always feel a tinge of sadness when a show I've been following ends. On the other hand, there is much exasperation when I have to wait for the next episode so what I do now is catch already completed series in between.

This cannot do.

No more new series until at least one gets struck off the list. The next season of Gossip Girl is its last so that's one. When the time comes, I already have in mind what shows to start on: How I Met Your Mother, Vampire Diaries, Weeds and House.

7 years and going

It struck me how much I have neglected this blog.

I had just noticed that the description on the right side still said. "An undergrad having the time of her life. Once disillusioned that college will be easy peasy, she has since realised it is the exact opposite. She absolutely loves her people and is still having her share of fun though!"

That must been written, what, 3 years ago?

I have since entered another phase of my life and I feel a tad guilty that I haven't been updating as often as I should presently as evident from the non-appearance of some months in the archives listing. This is after all my journal and I'd love to be able to reminisce about all the bits and pieces of my current life in the future.

Aim: To update at least once every fortnight.

Draft - 12 Aug 09

The below is an unedited draft Ihave had in my Blogger account since 12 Aug 09. I can't remember where I got the paragraph from but I must have found it meaningful enough to actually save it. 2.5 years on and it's still as relevant as before.

*****

It's amazing how fast things have changed. Not only don't we have Wordsworth and Coleridge anymore, we don't even have Jerry and George. Today, Ross and Chandler would be writing on each other's walls. Carrie and the girls would be posting status updates, and if they did manage to find the time for lunch, they'd be too busy checking their BlackBerrys to have a real conversation. Sex and Friends went off the air just five years ago, and already we live in a different world. Friendship (like activism) has been smoothly integrated into our new electronic lifestyles. We're too busy to spare our friends more time than it takes to send a text. We're too busy, sending texts. And what happens when we do find the time to get together? I asked a woman I know whether her teenage daughters and their friends still have the kind of intense friendships that kids once did. Yes, she said, but they go about them differently. They still stay up talking in their rooms, but they're also online with three other friends, and texting with another three. Video chatting is more intimate, in theory, than speaking on the phone, but not if you're doing it with four people at once. And teenagers are just an early version of the rest of us. A study found that one American in four reported having no close confidants, up from one in 10 in 1985. The figures date from 2004, and there's little doubt that Facebook and texting and all the rest of it have already exacerbated the situation. The more people we know, the lonelier we get.

Quarter-life crisis

Last week, I was introduced to Busy Travel Bee and I devoured the details of her 15-month round-the-world trip in 1.5 days. I just couldn't stop reading - day after day, places after places, experiences, people. I took them in, all the time imagining myself in her shoes.

How I wish.

Here was a mid-lifer, Singaporean woman, travelling solo through Africa, Middle East, Europe, Latin America, Central America, and even Antartica. It seems all at once so attainable yet unreachable at the same time.

In between then and now, Sissy S and I have booked ourselves on return air tickets to Ho Chi Minh city (HCMC), for a 16-day round Vietnam trip from late October to mid-November. We are intending to rough it out in true backpacker style with hostels, public transport, tons of walking, and lots of discovering on a shoestring budget.

We had contemplated a trip to Taiwan but all the promo tickets were sold out. We also considered going to Cambodia or Myanmar but really, the tickets to HCMC were too cheap to be ignored. At SGD239 nett for both of us, they were a steal! Besides, I've been longing to visit Halong Bay after seeing how picturesque it is on photos posted on Facebook, blogs, and the TV.

Friends I speak to said 16 days is way too long for travelling in Vietnam. I try to convince them by highlighting that long-term travellers usually spend at least a month exploring Vietnam alone. They don't get why but I guess it's because they are usually exposed to the 4 day 3 nights guided tours to HCMC or Hanoi advertisements by tour agencies.

I've also just realised that a one-way Hanoi-HCMC train journey takes 33 hours! Being the bargain hunters that we were, we'd bought return tickets which implies we'll have to do a loop circuit instead of a Hanoi-HCMC or HCMC-Hanoi route. That means 2 legs of 33 hours train ride, 66 hours, and 3 days gone. Gosh. Who said 16 days is enough?

So the travel bug has bitten me pretty hard this time. I think this is the worst case of wanderlust I can remember. Truly. I've been reading a couple of travel blogs which make long-term travel appear so possible and it is ever so tempting to just up and go. Some of them are:

The Lost Girls
Nomadic Chick
Adventurous Kate
Legal Nomads

I've always known that I want to live abroad, even if it's for a short period of time, in the future. It is 2012 and I am turning 25 this year. There is no better time to buckle down and figure out how I am going to do it. I've always assumed it was going to be for the purpose of study but I have since learnt that there are alternatives to that. I need to ascertain what is it that I hope to gain from going overseas and set a path from there.