After two consecutive weeks of uncontrollable sobbing from the Idol contestants who are sad to see the next guy/gal go home, you’ve got to hand it to eliminated Idol Emilee Kang for urging her fellow Idol contestants not to cry at the results show last night.

Someone is sniffing this morning, and it’s fallen Idol Emilee Kang, 28.

Talk about formidable mind prowess. For weeks, Emilee suppressed the flu in her body from manifesting itself so the quality of her performances in the competition wouldn’t be clouded.

Resistance was indeed not futile — at least up until yesterday night. When Emilee was announced as the next homebound one, the flu virus finally broke loose in her.

“I think it’s all in the mind. I guess there was no need for me to stay healthy any more.”

We make a mental note not to mistake her wet nose today for a sad soul. Emilee is the third contestant to be eliminated off Singapore Idol 2, following funky soul trooper Gayle Nerva last week and Norman Then, the boy with a choir voice.

Throughout our interview at the MediaCorp reception this morning, she continues to chirp as best as she can, while looking somewhat beaten down by flu. When we remark that her spirits look good despite her oust, she shoots back in a serious tone, “You have to be optimistic or you’ll be nothing in life.”

“Even now, I’m not giving up. It’s a competition, you need to have sportsmanship. Roll with it.”

So sporting was Emilee, that she made a conscious decision not to cry following her elimination last night, and urged the rest not to cry for her either.

This was probably why TV viewers saw nary a sobbing face on the ‘LIVE’ results show yesterday.

“I won’t break down ‘cos I don’t feel a need to. I don’t even feel like crying because I’ve done my best. I’ve no regrets. So I told all of them on stage not to cry — there’s nothing to cry about!”

Her performance of Rod Stewart’s cheeky number Makin’ Whoopee, according to her, was her best performance by far since the start of the competition, despite it being her last attempt to do a jazz song.

“I’ve been improving every week from working very hard. Right now, a lot of people are shocked that I was voted out. Which is good — I didn’t want people to think, ‘This Emilee got voted off because she was lousy.’”

Making a conscious choice to try out different styles every week, she was ready to do anything from dancing with a stick (the only thing she lacked was a bowler hat, but that’s just our un-expert opinion) in her last performance to loading up the vamp factor for an angsty number.

In the previous week, she was the only contestant who attempted to dance, leading a bewildered Ken Lim to say, “You look ridiculous with the stick.”

“You might call me a chameleon ‘cos I’m always changing. I always get into the character of the song.”

But Emilee knows one thing: “I left not because I didn’t do well.”

If any hint of regret of going home shows, it’s when Emilee bemoans how she would have loved to be the next Singapore Idol and be a role model for youth.

“It would have been an ideal way to be a role model for kids. I’d have encouraged them never to give up, to follow through (with your dreams) and to do your best.”

Now that her Idol dreams are no more, she says she would really like to see local audiences vote sensibly, rather than looking out for, well, looks.

“People who don’t know me and see me on TV, they just judge me on how I look. They go, ‘She sucks, she’s bad, she’s ugly.’ They focus too much on looks. A lot of very important people are not supermodels. What’s this preoccupation with looks?”

“I really want the viewers of Singapore to vote wisely and think about what they really want Singapore to be modeled into our kids. They’re the pillars of our future.”

She also feels that misperceptions of her might have been detrimental, whether it was of Dick Lee’s comment that she looked like a getai singer in her piano show performance (“It just escalated and spread around, got out of hand and before you knew it, people were saying that I actually sing on a getai stage!”) or of her age.

At 28, Emilee is the oldest of the Top 12 contestants. Jay Lim is the second oldest at 27. But age, Emilee says, never stopped her from pursuing her dreams.

“It’s just that people out there insist it is a problem, which I find strange. It’s quite shallow to think that way.”

Emilee begs to differ that Singapore Idol is solely a singing competition: “That would completely belittle the Singapore Idol name.”

She feels that NUS university undergraduate Jonathan Leong has a very high chance of making it all the way to the end, while her ex-bandmate Hady Mirza, whom she used to play with in the same band, is another strong contender.

“Hady is the most fantastic singer. I’ve listened to his voice for so many years and I’ve never gotten sick of it. If he records an album, I’d listen to it on repeat!”