"He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed." -Albert Einstein

Hey remember this lady?

Mak Bedah campaign: "Shopping for a real candidate"!

On Tuesday, I attended a talk she gave at Monash - her name is Meera Samanther, and she's really cool and brave! If you're interested to know more and play your part in women's rights, just take a minute and click: http://www.wci2.org/index.php/who-is-mak-bedah.

One of my lecturers is also a member of the Women's Candidacy Institute! :D

One of the best things I love about Monash is that there are so many talks and workshops and fairs for students and staff to attend. It's really interesting - opens up a lot of doors that you otherwise wouldn't have the chance to even know existed. And these things are going on every week, not once-in-a-blue-moon types! :)

That aside - When it comes to networking, Facebook is a miracle worker. :)

And thanks to the new-age phenomenon of "Facebooking", I now have pictures of the play we watched at KLPac! :D Here's a shot of most of the cast, courtesy of a friend of a Facebook friend:

[Pic: Ujval Sidhu-Brar, Arthur Chia Tek, Juliana Ibrahim, Sharon Lam]

Today, I had my first School of A.S.S. presentation! :D It was for Contemporary Worlds 2, and my group's topic was "A Mobile World: Immigration, Refugees, and Domestic Politics". I wish I had a picture of my groupmates, but to my own disbelief, I don't! o_O Haha. I will take some next time kay.

THE CHALLENGE

Last night... I LOST MY VOICE. :'(

Why?

Because I ate nasi lemak for lunch at the uni cafeteria (SO DELICIOUS. YOU ALL MUST TRY IT! Only RM2.50 for ordinary nasi lemak PLUS potato sambal thing. One of the cheapest GOOD dishes you can get in the cafeteria!) and then I had curry chicken for dinner.

I have no idea how, after all the public-speaking competitions, choral-speaking competitions, choir competitions and voice-related competitions I've taken part in, I forgot the one cardinal rule of Do's & Don'ts before "The Big Day":

"NO SPICY FOOD."

;/

THE PREPARATION

Anyhow, I forced myself to practise the speech - I decided not to take the wild stab at "impromptu" for something that I'm only given 5 minutes for - and then, I had to freaking READ the other readings in the handbook.

Each group member presents 1 reading, you see. Mine was "Reasons for Migration" based on an article called "Why People Migrate" by Peter Stalker. I read Jasmine and Joanna's readings but decided to go to sleep and skip Wei Liang's reading, a really boring 8-page article on how migration has been since 1945. Poor Liang had to stay up all night working on his presentation! So I can't complain about my 2 a.m. bedtime compared to his. :/

Then this morning, I had to read some extra material for the topic before Feature Writing class - because after everyone does their individual presentations (worth 10%), there's a Q&A session worth another 10%. So needless to say, I concentrated proper for the first hour of Chin Huat's lecture, and then Ai (my South Korean buddy!!) and I were totally playing around for the second hour. Hahahaha. Then Joanna and I got permission to leave class early because we had to set up everything for the presentation.

Oh, my voice was better when I woke up, btw. :) Although it's still a wee bit hoarse now. I sound like a toad. Scratchy's the word. My voice sounds scratchy. :(

Like, right now. Still scratchy. Gonna need time to recover! Bah.

It didn't help that my "plan" to go on voice-rest after the presentation was immediately forgotten when I decided to hang out with some coursemates after the tutorial to chitchat and exchange gossip about life and college. Hahaha. Oh, but we were at the Book Fair - it was held right outside our tutorial room! :) We got to choose books for the library to buy! Cool, eh? I didn't lah, but it was a cool idea. Hehehe.

THE PRESENTATION

Anywayyy, Liang only gave Joanna his slides like 5 minutes before we went into the class - then at approx 11.15am (I'll remember the time because I remember staring at the clock wondering if the tutor was going to be mad we were being so late in starting), I started doing the Introduction for the whole group presentation. I was so nervous because I realised everyone was actually paying attention, but luckily I had cue cards and could remember more than half of what I was going to say...

Then Liang's turn, to present his reading. His presentation was SO FUNNY! I don't remember laughing so much for anyone's presentation before. He kept saying "Migration started ... blahblahblah" and "Ok I don't really understand this point - but look, let's say I'm General Liang, and I want to conquer - Austria -" and then the dreaded moment came when our tutor said "Liang, you have 1 minute left" ... and that's when he started skipping slides! Like, "Um, ok I don't really understand this - SKIP"... Ujval was laughing so hard at the back of the class - and then Liang goes "Err, I wanted to explain this but I'm already late, so -" and Ujval says, "You're already way past the time limit so you might as well explain it.."

So there... unfortunately, marks are deducted for exceeding the time limit. :( But otherwise, Liang's presentation was really funny. :)

After him was my presentation! I felt so unfunny having to follow such a funny act, especially since my presentations are NEVER funny - and true, it wasn't funny this time either - so I just presented lor... and I actually exceeded the time by a few seconds or something (because I heard the knock when I was giving my last 2 sentences) - but luckily, Ujval says he doesn't consider mine exceeding the limit. :) Yay.

Not that I'm incapable of being funny :( In the pic above, can you see the brown fuzz in the middle of a small bush? That's Bunny, impersonating a flower. HA HA HA.

After mine, Jasmine presented. Hers was good, as usual - she's really good at speaking impromptu (must learn from her! :D) but she prepared this time la, she had cue cards like me. Hehe. But then in the middle of her speech, the dreaded 5-minute knock on the table echoed from Ujval's seat at the back of the class. So 0.5% was deducted for going over. For last week's presenters, some got deducted 1%.
Last but not least, Joanna (who was worried she would exceed the 5 minutes) presented on racism - then 3/4 of the way into her speech, the 5-minute knock arrived! The horror! I could see The Grimace taking hold of her face when she heard the knock.

Capital T, capital G.

Then she did the conclusion for us, and Jasmine showed a video from YouTube about migration - unfortunately, first the computer jammed. Then, the video did NOT load fast enough (even though we had opened it for 20+ minutes already). So we basically showed 1 minute out of 5 minutes of a half-loaded video.

Hahahahaha. It felt so half-baked and catastrophic that I found it really funny.

Q&A

After the presentation was the Q&A session. Our fellow tutorial mates were really great, because they asked good questions and provoked further discussion. And Ujval asked 3-4 questions that weren't nearly as frightening as I thought they would be.

Unfortunately, I only spoke twice - Jasmine did 98% of the answering - and I just opened slides that were relevant to answer the question. Uh-oh. Hahaha. Hopefully the same Q&A mark is given to the whole group ... otherwise... oh well! :/ Learn from this lorh.

Must... open ... mouth ... and... let ... words ... come ... out! Hahaha.

The Feedback

The marks for the presentation will only be released after all groups have presented (so we'll have to wait until the last 2 weeks of semester, I guess - which is only a little over a month away, anyway) but, inter alia, the tutor said we did well. :)

Besides, I'm such a sucker for compliments!!

Lisa Arsenalia: Beany says:
hey girl! ur presentation was GREAT!!
Lisa Arsenalia: Beany says:
*two thumbs up*
Lisa Arsenalia: Beany says:
it was GREAT! :) one word: GREAT

Three cheers for nasi lemak, curry chicken, and presentations! :D

Seriously. You gotta try the nasi lemak. With the potato sambal thing!