Plant Press Stress

Last week was the most stressing week of three days I have had this year.

I am not sure why either, but I am sure that it had nothing to do with the following test week, because I had greater things going through my mind.

The burden befalled me on wednesday, when we returned to school after the Chinese New Year holidays. Due to my very short legs and very big steps lining the stairs down the track, I walked down the steps too hastily, and one of my knees hardly hit the ground. Defination (Hardly): To hit something with a lot of force. Antonymn: Barely. At least in this context.

First the skin went paper white, then pain seeped in, while blood oozed out. Great, another cut on the usual lucky spot of my knee, which always had a tendency to get injured. This time, it was a rather deep injury, it wasn't just surface blood, it was crimson red and staining the surrounding skin.

One of the horrible things about my school, is that it only had one washing hose in the middle of the track, which was bound to attract a lot of attention if I went there in the midst of assembly. So I went to the showering room to shower my wound which got my pants rather wet.

Not being able to walk properly for the following days was a rather big blow to my confidence. I could not run during P.E, but still got forced to run, typical of the lousiest teacher in the school. And I lost that happy energy in my footsteps. Not moving is one thing. Knowing that you can't run around even if you wanted to is much worse.

Horrible start, isn't it?

Cell biology article review was due on Friday, and for the whole holidays, I have not touched a single piece of work. Searching through many interesting articles, I either had nothing to write about them, or was doubtful about its relevance to cell biology. I finally completed it at 12midnight, really late for me considering that I usually slept latest at 10pm. And then one gigantic burden looming over me for the day before was finally lifted. But I was still feeling stressed. What could the source be?

Unknowingly, I had a really bad feeling about plant press project, which I have kind of forgotton about the approaching deadline, yet a subconcious mind was sending me a warning. I had better start.

A few weeks ago, I went to Botanic gardens to get plants specimens with my friends, where the scientific names were readily available on a mind-soothing little rectangular plate at the base of the plant. However, I forgot to add a layer of paper while pressing them and put the leaves under my textbook. Thus they turned black over the days and started describing themselves with tiny white rings on the contrasting black background. Since then, I threw that project out of my mind along with the leaves.

And it has been unconciously haunting me since.

I finally figured out the complex mathematics on friday, and I got so freaked out that I started taking out my notebook and planning each detail of my weekend frantically.

Plan: Biology Plant Press starts on Saturday.

Where in the world would I cook up 10 plants with their scientific names without the assistance of botanists? Ben's book was not being too helpful as the variety of plants within were not too wide. I decided that I needed a more rigorous and determined approach.

I cried for help.

Actually, I went to meet Benjamin at Simei, where he gave me some plant specimens from his home. I am really grateful to that, because not only had that contributed to my plant collection, it had also given me a huge morale boost which was at level 0 when I walked about aimlessly around Pasir Ris Mrt Station fruitlessly trying to identify the plants with Ben's book.

I went to the library and borrowed a book titled "1001 Garden plants in singapore" which added to my confidence. That afternoon, I did a lot of cross referencing from difference sources which included yahoo images, wikipedia, scientific resarch of plants on the net, those books and my common sense. The next day, as I was browsing through the 1001 plant book, I came across two plants which I had, which felt like a real miracle. By the end of the weekend, I have identified (or at least relatively sure) 8 plants.

Woohoo!

Now that my wound is also gradually healing, I am starting to see light through the windows along the sides of a dark tunnel.