十字路口

我迷路了，

不知该往哪一个方向走。

我不需要找新的路走，从新开始。

只想走回原点，走回属于我的地方。　

Offscript

Went to UCC to watch Raffles Hall annual productions. The story was interesting enough, one of a recursive loop. After the rehearsal comes the actual play, or sometimes, the play is spontaneously acted out in the rehearsal, and it keeps changing and going on, in a never-ending cycle, if I've intepreted it correctly. The director acted really well! It was a little choppy towards the end but who cares. It was a really enjoyable night.

Went back to the hall to get supper a few days ago. They renovated the hall. However, the old juxtaposed with the new, mades the hall look a little weird. The feeling of homeliness of the hall is half-gone. The nice old red brick walls looks nice. The new modern door looks nice. But mix them both together and either the walls or door look a little out-of-place. The toilets were great though! I miss the look of the old hall.

I miss the dinners I had there too. They were simple and restful, a sort of quiet happiness. What a far contrast from dinners i have now in nus. Its getting a little boring to eat alone and then madly dash up to the lab to attend to my experiment once again.

I miss the people, its old look, the dinners and the hall alot.

Life is a chemistry experiment

Chemistry between two people is like chemistry between two molecules. This thing called love, requires an appropriate environment and an appropriate time for it to bloom. Love does not conquer all if these two factors do not exist. The same thing applies to my molecules, my BODIPY scaffold and alkyne are supposed to love each other and click instantly as implied by the process that it undergoes called ‘click chemistry’. Love between this two is supposed to happen at first sight. However, it doesn’t! Leaving me, its creator to find the suitable environments, temperature and length of time for the experiment to happen through trial and error. Love requires a catalyst at times, to speed up things which might never happen for a certain activation energy barrier prevents it from so. It might be a matchmaker, a turn of events that leads to that realization or something else. And it’s the same for my experiment, how important is copper catalyst for my reaction or else it will never happen even if you leave the solution mixture reacting for days or even years by which time the reaction mixture would have degraded into nothing-ness as how love will if you do nothing about it.

Life is not a straight road, there are various forks in the road of life, you never know what you get. The future is completely unpredictable. We might plan to go one way but circumstances take us another way. And it’s the same for my experiment. For two whole months, I’ve been working towards synthesizing a certain library of molecules. Yesterday, I synthesized my very first molecules. But alas, one pyrimidine group has displaced the chloro side chain making it slightly different from my intended molecule which makes a whole lot of difference as they are two different entities no matter how similar they are. Yet, this unexpected shock of a surprise might all be for the better as it makes the molecule more polar such that it makes entry into cells easier as it’s more soluble in water. And then, maybe life is like that too, life very often does not go the way we want it to be or expect it to be, but it might all be for the better in the end.

Studying is comparatively easier now that I have started doing lab work. For studying, its just a matter of understanding the material given and apply it onto exam papers when the time comes. There is a definite answer. Its not exactly the same in lab. There are many questions, but few with answers. Perhaps, that’s the same in life, where there are few answers and even fewer satisfactory answers to the questions we ask ourselves everyday.

On this day of your life, Huimin, we believe God wants you to know

... that it's OK.

This message is from a facebook application. And the message continues...

Just rest for a moment. It's OK. Yes, things are crazy, yes, the world is going nuts. Yet, deep underneath the stormy waves, there, in the core of your being, there is pure silence, pure love. And ... it's ... just ... OK.

I hope so and believe so too even if I cannot see it at the moment.

Lab

I feel like some walking hazard in lab. The other day, I broke a flask containing my compound. I took 6 days to synthesize that compound!

In some attempt to console me, a senior told me that he once dropped his compound into 5 litres of water in the rotary evaporator bath. However, he had to retrieve it as it took days for him to synthesize it! That is akin to looking for a needle in a haystack. In fact, its worse than that for needles and hay are both solid immiscible with each other while his compound was soluble in water which turned into one big homogeneous solution. I have no idea how he did that in the end. The best most commonsensical way of retrieving a few hundred milligrams of solute from 5 litres of water that I can think of is to let the water evaporate off slowly and happily out in the open, in the sun.

I feel incredibly tired these few months, both mentally and physically. I have this increasing tendency to just be able to fall asleep till dawn when I only meant to lie down for a while to rest. It happened again yesterday, and I slept from 7pm to 7am. I feel lonely, with the work I do. Thankfully, I don’t feel lonely even though I am all alone in school.

Changi airport

CW went SEP-ing to america. Have fun and come back soon.

I will miss you.

The fleetingness of life

I still feel very lost. Admist this sadness, I gained so much. Maybe happiness is really relative. To feel happy, you need to know what sadness is.

I am still young. I am so lucky. I love my parents. I am free to love others.

And I hope to find my way again.