Suaku in winterland

It snowed on Tuesday night, and it was truly beautiful. It was easy to forget that snow is nothing but frozen rain, until I trudged through puddles of half-melted snow/ice to politics seminar the next morning. I love the scenery, but it will be great if it isn't so cold this week, when I spent most of my nights trudging around Earlsdon and coughing, sneezing and wheezing away.

In fact this is the first night in a week when I actually got to have the night to myself. Not that the people I'm house-hunting with are bad company, I'm just incredibly tired. Somehow I wonder if I'm losing the can-do attitude here. I used to promise myself to be back on track by the next day whenever I fall sick, and always managed. The last time I didn't quite scold myself for grinding my life to a halt by falling sick was some time in JC, when school for a while felt rather robotic and meaningless. It took me a whole year to feel alive again, and am not quite ready to get back to the zombie-like and half-comatose state.

Speaking of the nearly-a-year hiatus from school, it seems like I have forgotten how to study. Years and years of essay, note-taking and summarising training have gone with the wind in the face of disparate and disjointed readings which are making less and less sense. I must seat myself down and get disciplined once more, revert to the student mentality of just processing every piece of information methodologically, aka. mechanically.

University life is stressful: must study like a student but deal with adult issues like housing, and at the same time, get half the things you think you know thrown out of the window.
Revised perceptions this week:

1. It doesn't mean that if someone is English, he/she speaks and writes perfect English. Example: "The EU was started from 25 countries." Does this remind you of Singlish?

2. Age is an absolute number, but a relative concept.

3. My dad has his reasons for hating to move house.

Enough of depressing random ideas for now, I present pictures of snow outside my hostel. :D

P.S. Rat, please own up! I have narrowed down the possible scope of people, and your repeated appearance has made it impossible to treat it as tagboard spam. I detest people who post anonymously. Dare to write, dare to sign off with your BIG name.

crazy world

Only in this crazy world do you buy tickets to your own event.

Only in this mad place do you pay to work, in uniform, on a weekend. And to make it worse, you cannot enjoy it in peace.

Make all the money you like, but don't cannibalise your kind.

Idiots.

rubbish - random thoughts

1. Francis Fukuyama is right. We have reached the "End of History and the Last of Man". It is not utopia, rather, man, not god, is dead.
2. I might be becoming dyslexic, if that's possible, making a lot of typo errors recently. Outrageous ones too.
3. The scariest thing that can ever happen to you, is to be/become the very person you hate.
4. The best thing about No. 3 is that you will never know. Others would know. It goes by the name of hypocrisy.
5. essay research suffers from the cobweb effect. Word limit high, research more to meet high demand, realises word limit actually does not allow you to write loads, shrinks every argument, then falls way short of word limit.
6. I'm no longer capable of long sentences. Victorian English no more. Am wondering if I should relearn that ability to sound impressive.

The reason for not being able to write a proper post is that I'm incredibly tired. I've got homework to finish, largely because I'm a procrastinator and never gets things done at other people's speeds. Sigh. It also does not help that I've a really short attention span.

What's making it worse is, on top of trying to finish everything, and probably having half the world sniggering at my inability to finish, this term is house-hunting season (yes, not fox-hunting.)! The problem is compounded by three voracious space monsters (we eat space, not from outer space!) who wants everything in a house.

I'm being lame and excessively random. A sign of extreme mental restlessness and need of sleep.

2007

No New Year's resolution for me, because I never keep to them. If there is one for this blog, it will probably be "blog more regularly" and "with more pictures". Somehow after more than one month without an entry, people still come to check and read, and I really appreciate it.

Have gone Missing-In-Action largely because I was having too much fun. From where I left off the last time, I spent the next two weeks keeping insane nights to finish all my homework by end of term. Then I went home for three weeks. Going home is so much fun, though sometimes it is just parents and brother squabbling, in any combination. And of course, me getting to squabble with them in person, rather than over MSN or skype. Somehow you don't miss it, until you have been away from it at length. We went Genting, KL and Malacca, the first two we have gone a number of times, but it is still very enjoyable, not in the exciting-Lake-District sense, but more of spending time together away from work, people and irritating phone calls. Going home also means I can take a break from completely taking charge of my life. Once I step onto the plane, it basically means "on my own". It's independence, but as Spiderman says, "with power, comes responsibility."

2006 can be called "the year of too many changes, too fast". Fresh out of school, went to work. Boss promised that the job will "make you grow up", and I think I did. It was not too hard coping there once I figured out what was happening, it was a lot of fun and the greatest pain about the job was leaving it and the people there. Just when I thought it was enough excitement for one year, I happily uprooted myself to England. You can tell I have a lot of fun, but it is always cold and can get lonely sometimes. At one point was thinking of packing up and going home, since school is essentially readings and more readings which i can do in a warmer place. BUT JW once said to stick to decisions made "come hail or high waters", and I figured I'm not going to get frozen out of school. I'm going to stick here and enjoy it. (I'm the opposite of an electron, always choose the path of most resistance.)

So 2007 now I'm back on campus, and won't be back in sg till at least another half a year. Everyone moves on with their lives, but I'm really hoping I will still be able to catch up where we left off in 2006 for people who I didn't spend enough time with or didn't get to meet during Christmas vacation or wh0 just move too fast in half a year!

Lake District

I climbed a mountain, and the highest one in England at that. Am back from Lake District, an amazingly beautiful place! Went with 9 other Singaporeans and had a lot of fun, though I was struggling like crazy in the beginning. Must really thank my climbing buddy, Yan, and Nicfoo, Ben and Jiawei for helping me along a lot of the way. Actually would have given up very early if not because the group is big. In my normal frame of mind, I would think twice, thrice, multiple times before climbing up a scree slope and crossing streams. Walking in a field of rocks with much clouds and rain is plainly crazy. But three hours later, just stop thinking about the rain, wind and rocks, but to enjoy the experience and scenery. Anyway, finished it relatively casualty-free, just odd bruises here and there and blue-black toenails (take it as nail-polish!)
Then we had a huge turkey dinner and a turkey-eating competition between ben and jiawei which was hilarious and a zongjimima game which was even funnier (don't ask why.) Saw a real fireplace and played jenga with blocks thicker than my wrist!
Today we drove back, got lost while trying to get to cheshire oaks, but eventually got back to town at 6 plus. Had buffet dinner at wingwah, followed by karaoke, which involves us yelling rather than singing... taste degenerated to "ten little indians".
At 2.20am UK time, I'm getting a bit incoherent. If all of these does not make sense, just check out the pictures at my flickr site!

Had a really great weekend, but now have to make up for lost time.

Things to do:
1. world econs essay
2. philo essay
3. cda
4. hcnite webbie
5. find ip anonymiser (non-urgent, strictly for amusement)