ga ada apa-apa

Aku hanya sedikit menyayangkan kenapa enggak ada apa-apa..

flowers

I've just realized that the combination of the color of red roses and white orchid is very beautiful... :)

:):)

another piece from my childhood - dance :)

 Another piece from my childhood...
I'm a little bit bored reading an article on Dissociative Identity Disorder (or Multiple Personality Disorder or Split Personalities), so I've decided to write another post (esp. after I noticed that I only wrote 4 blog posts in January).

Let's talk about dance..
This semester bruises are my friends. The ones on my knees and ankle areas are from contemporary dance and the ones on my thigh are from Saman Dance, a traditional dance from Aceh. I remembered there was one time my manager in Yahoo! msg me then I told him to come to Eusoff Dance Production. Then, he replied, "Stop dancing and find real job." Hehehe. I guess dancing is not a real job for him :P

Ironically, if I were not in Spore, I would not continue dancing traditional dance (I think). The university that I was admitted into in Indonesia didn't have traditional dance CCA. Sometimes I wonder when I will stop dancing, whether one day I will give up dancing (or sacrifice? whatever it is), just like now when I give up my piano lesson. Playing piano was something important for me, then I stopped learning. I even stopped playing for fun (or maybe I only played piano for my lesson?not for fun)

Well, let's go back to dance. My first time dancing Hip Hop and Contemporary was here, in Eusoff Hall, in NUS. Back in high school, I never ever thought of doing modern dance. It was just "not Ferninda" hahaha.. But yeah..I always love traditional dance, but it's very hard to learn classical dance in Tangerang, my hometown. You have 'Sanggar' (the 'club' to take arts lesson), but either no teacher or no students. My only proper dance lesson was when I was in kindergarten, when 30-40 girls were trained in a big hall and we took exam every year (and I got D for 2 consecutive years! HAHAHAHAHA)

Tari Yapong from Jakarta, I was 5 years old, in my kindergarten :)

So I stopped dancing.. Then in Primary 4, I moved to Tangerang where I met new friends who also liked dancing. Vivi (the name of the friend) encouraged me to join traditional dance as CCA. So I started dancing again :) In primary 5 and 6, even though it was ONLY a CCA, the teachers were very strict. They always made sure that our postures were right and one of them liked to yell at us, "Mendak!! Mendak!!" (means: the lower position with the bended knees which makes ur legs ache after dancing). The nicest thing was we always performed twice a year.

Tari Merak (Peacock Dance), Yogyakarta version, primary school :)

Junior High School..
I continued taking traditional dance as CCA in my 3 years in Junior High School (except in the second year, coz there was no teacher that time). However, there were not any performances. Here I met another senior, she's very small (smaller than me, hahahaha), but well, that's not the point, she danced VERY WELL! and I learnt a lot from her. When I entered senior high school, she encouraged me to join again and of course I did :) In my first high school year, there was a school open house where they exhibited the CCAs (sth like Matriculation Fair in NUS). Apparently the traditional dance CCA didn't have enough people (as usual =.= ) so they wanted to choose some first year students. Guess what the dance was? SAMAN!!! yeah! (actually now I just realized that it means I've been dancing Saman Dance for 6 years with different versions hahaha)

Saman Dance (not the proper costume), with my seniors in high school

However, I didn't really like my dance teacher in high school. He always said, "Some of you do sth wrong. The position should be like A, but you do B. But I don't want to tell you who it is." I was like, "WHAT??" The problem with his style was most of the times, we are not conscious of our movements, so we need feedback. Hhh.. and somehow he taught the same dance for different years.
Well, but I still feel grateful coz he was the one who taught my batch "Tari Ngarojeng"(a dance from Betawi) and "Tari Piring" (Plate dance, from West Sumatra), the dance that I performed in NUANSA'09: Sitti Nurbaya.

OHhh..let me tell u sth..my junior high school dance teacher (a lady, different with high school teacher) was involved in her parish and she often asked me and my friends to dance for church events. The last dance that I did with here was for Christmas CHILDREN Liturgy. Why did I use capital letter? coz that time we tied our hair to two and wear ribbons etc with "Sleighride" song. Anyway, I was 'already' high school by that time and up to now, my senior in that parish often asked me, "Are you going back for Chirstmas and dance again?" and I said, "No....I am too 'old' to wear ribbons again.." hahaha..

Dunno..really dunno..will I stop dancing? Let's see... :)
Nitez and Happy Valentine's Day :):)
ps.my Valentine's Day event = presentation meeting in a psychology lab for Thursday presentation!! JIAYOU!!

Tari Ngarojeng, from Jakarta. We were in a dance competition organized by the Diocese. Guess what? The competition was in GUYS SCHOOL. (Edbert's school!)

 

Eusoff Dance Production 2011 :) my first and Last DP :)

Dementia

Hello! I promised you to write about dementia, didn't I?
Here it is... :)
Dementia actually means a syndrome of acquired cognitive impairment due to brain dysfunction that is of sufficient severity to interfere with usual social or occupational functioning. In the lecture yesterday, the group mentioned that there are two types of dementia: cortical or subcortical. Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is associated with cortical dementia, while Parkinson's Disease (PD) is associated with subcortical dementia. 
Maybe you are wondering, what are the differences between dementia and normal aging? How about the difference between dementia in AD and PD?

In normal older adults, their ability to do tasks that involve immediate recall of a large number of items (eg 7 or more words or digits) is lower than younger adult. However, when the older adults were asked to learn a list of 15 words over five trials and then recall them 30 minutes later, their result is comparable with younger adults, while patients with dementia cannot do delayed recall task. 
In normal older adults, vocabulary levels remain stable, while it is impaired in patients with dementia. Abstract reasoning also declines in normal older adults, but it is not obvious in daily life because they can compensate by experience and acumen over a lifetime, while in patients with dementia, you can see the abstract reasoning skill is impaired even in daily life.

Next, how about the difference between AD and PD? First of all, let's study the definition of these two disorders. AD is a progressive degenerative brain disorder characterized by neuronal atrophy, synapse loss, and the abnormal accumulation of diffuse and neuritic plaqes and neurofibrillary tangles. PD is a neurodegenerative disorder consisting of symptoms of parkinsonism ( a cluster of motor symptoms consisting of slowness of movement, difficulty initiating movement, hypokinetic speech, masked facies, muscular rigidity, a shuffling or unsteady gait, abnormal posture, and disturbances in equilibrium) PLUS a pill-rolling type of resting tremor. Second, if you remember, I mentioned that AD and PD were associated with dementia, BUT... dementia is a condition that is much wider than AD and PD. AD and PD are causes of dementia, but there are other kinds of dementia and not all PD patient has dementia. As I said, AD is correlated with cortical dementia, while PD is correlated with subcortical dementia. This correlation can be seen from the different features of both disorders.

First, in general, memory disorder is more prominent in AD rather than in PD, while frontal lobe related-tasks (planning, sequencing multiple steps, set-shifting) is more prominent in PD than in AD. Why?? pls remember this : cortical dementia --> AD --> changes in medial lemboral limbic structures (entorhinal cortex, hipocampus) then the association cortices of the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes. MOST SUBCORTICAL STRUCTURES and primary motor and sensory cortices are intact. 

Second, in terms of language ability, during the early onset of AD, phonemic fluency is intact in AD. AD patients are severely impaired in word finding ability, language comprehension, and naming, while PD patients have dysarthic speech and their semantic and phonemic fluency are impaired. Dysarthic speech is characterized by poor articulation (this is not the case in AD perhaps because primary motor and sensory cortices are not affected).

Third, attention is not affected in AD, while in PD there is a fluctuation of alertness. Fourth, even though memory disorder is more prominent in AD, in both AD and PD, memory is affected. However, AD patient is still poorer on delayed recall and recognition or retrieval test. Last but not least, the visuospatial ability is intact in both disorder, but in PD, it's more affected earlier compared with AD.

fiuhh... Hope you are not confused by this post. Just as an extra, there are other types of dementia..(let me know if you want to know about this too..hehehe)

:):) HAPPY SUNDAY!!
recommended book: The Notebook. Allison, the main female character, has Alzheimer's Disease. It can reach a point when someone cannot remember the family. The book describes the disease better than the movie (coz when I watched the movie, I didn't realize that Alison had hallucination, it is part of the symptom of AD)
to know more about parkinsonism, u can watch the movie: Awakenings.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FURflBxeTyI
The Notebook and AWakenings movies are very inspiring and touching. At the end of the day, it's all about human dignity. That's why we learn psychology. We might not be able to cure the patient (just like what Oliver Sacks experienced in Awakenings) *oops sorry spoiler*, but at the end of the day, how do we treat other people as fully human with heart and soul? :):)

hot head

I don't think that the term exists in English, but I don't care. Hahaha. In Indo, I told my mom, "My head is hot!!aarggghh." (urggh, it sounds very funny when I translate it to English). Well, this is what your brain does after 3hours of clinical neuropsychology-supposedly-seminar-but-I-think-it's-a-lecture. Hot head. I can feel the smoke is coming out of my ears now. There were two presentations: one on dementia and another one on epilepsy, plus the lecturer's own seminar on aphasia. Thank God I survived. I fell sleepy, but I think I survived the seminar :)


After each group's presentation, there were a lot of people asking about the material. At that moment, I realized that "Yeah...it's a REAL seminar-class." My second thought, "Wew..this is level-4000 class." My third thought, "The questions are very interesting." My last thought, "Oh no...now I'm very scared for my presentation next week coz the guy with mustache asked difficult question after every presentation and he's very smart :(". I feel excited, but scared at the same time. I couldn't imagine how I will write my paper review and do my exam for this module. There were just too many things that I need to comprehend and I don't know how I'm going to write critique on paper about neuropsychology.

The first group showed us this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iXPHhfk_7E

After the presentation, a guy asked the group, "Is the video reflect the real thing about dementia that someone can suddenly reach the stage of not-remembering people's face in one night? Coz the children of the old woman do not seem realize that the old woman had dementia." Then the guy with mustache asked them something about how some research showed that people with high cognitive reserve develop dementia at later age, but with more rapid decline and how they can explain this.
Well, I think the question was tough.

Now my head is still hot, so I'll post later about dementia and epilepsy,ok? gonna rest for a while..zzzzzzzzz...tutttt tuttttt (old train sounds with the smoke coming out to reflect the smoke which is coming out from my ears)

my CNY part 2 - CNY = Chinese New Year

hello hello. Let me continue the story of my CNY.
Yesterday me and Legionaries visited Archbishop at the Cathedral. It was the first time for me. Hehehe. We got blessing from Archbishop. YEAY! :)

Coming back from Cathedral, I joined Evi, Payoga, Ian, and Ci Tania again for lunch. They were cooking fried rice because we had lots of leftover rice from CNY Eve. After having lunch, we 'forced' ourselves to study together. It was only 3hours-studying coz I went out (again) to meet up with Andrew, Long Yuan, and Andrew's housemates for PRAWN-FISHING!! :) hahahaha..

Today me and Legionaries visited Sr. Jocelyn's house in the morning :) Then we went to Cheryl's place. I really had lots of fun today. Instead of learning to play mahjong like the initial plan, I ended up playing nintendo wii (of course I failed most of the times :P). Hahahaha..

Hmmm...Actually I don't have many words to describe the CNY this year. I would like to conclude that this is the best CNY in Singapore that I've ever had (well, I only spent 2 CNYs in Spore, but still it's the best). Even though I'm far from home, I still have a chance to spend time with my good friends, especially my schoolmates, my seniors, and the Legionaries. I could feel the warmth of their home and families and I'm really thankful for having this opportunity. Thank you, Lord :)

my CNY

Two days before CNY, I did not feel anything. The only thing that came to my mind was "I will have a super-long break, YEAY!" (considering last year's public holiday which always fell on Saturday or recess week, this year's long weekend is a LONG break). I know that a lot of people are going home, but I feel less sad compared with December 'emo-ness'. hehehe..

CNY - 1
I spent the morning playing badminton with Ci Tania and Payoga. Three of us are from the same high school. I felt so happy to be sweating again..HAHAHA..it's been years since the last time I played badminton :P

CNY eve
COOKING TIME!!! Nothing to describe this cooking experience except we had lots of fun. our main chef was Ian. Most of the time, I didn't do much :P Ian and Evi led the cooking process, while Ricky was in charge of taking photos. Ci Tania, me, and Payoga were just assigned according to Ian's and Evi's plan. In the same kitchen, some Chinese students were also cooking steamboat. they started later than us, but by the time they already washed their utensils, me and my friends just started eating. it took 3 hours to cook 7 dishes with 2 super-slow electric stoves HAHAHAHAHA

I will continue writing tomorrow. Hehehe.. For now, just wanna say that I'm so glad to spend time with them on CNY :)