Basketball and Sore Arms
I went to Gene's house last Saturday to watch a movie and do some homework. I know, I know, homework isn't what any normal person does on Saturday when school's out, and I know this simply cements my status as The Class Geek, but it happened. Anyway, I'd been planning to watch that movie for some time and when I got the chance, I took it.
The movie was Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events, and it was quite enjoyable, even if it did twist physics and biology in rather a Carrolline way. But I found it a little too dark, and then decided that my expectations had been quite absurd. (I'd been expecting a kind of tragicomedy.) But then, I can think of at least five people off-hand whom I'd like to throw into a lake of carnivorous leeches, so I shouldn't blame the movie for being murderously bloodthirsty.
Anyway, it turns out that Gene has a family who is pretty much all Phlegmatic. He obviously inherited it from one or both parents; I didn't see much of either, but from what I did see and hear, Phelgmatic-ness runs in that family.
Unfortunately, being Phlegmatic doesn't automatically entail indolence. It only means they don't particularly enjoy cataclysm. So I was properly surprised when I saw the hoop suspended on a board 2.5 metres above ground level, and even more so when Gene suggested a game of basketball. (I was wondering if he'd taken it upon himself to overcome my aversion to sports, but couldn't set up any experiments to prove or disprove it.)
I soon found myself lobbing shot after shot at the hoop while Gene hared round the porch (where we were playing) like a rabbit on steroids, pausing every so often to grab the ball and send it flying through the hoop. According to my estimations, my accuracy is about one in twenty or thirty, while Gene's is roughly one in three for two-pointer shots, one in four for three-pointers, and none at all for layups.
By the third attempted layup, I could see the origin of every single footprint on the wall.
I was saved from basketball by a sudden bout of diarrhoea, presumably brought on by the canteen food I'd eaten the night before; and when I came out of the toilet, Gene had abandoned the basketball.
I went back to the hostel at five with my file (full of math questions only half-heartedly answered) and a couple of books I'd borrowed from Gene. (I had never suspected Gene of having an interest in mythology or drawing horror manga before I laid eyes on those books--and he rapidly protested that he'd never read those books before.) I've read them both and I must say I don't know why he left those books to gather dust.
I am at the moment having a dull ache in my right arm, which was the one I used to lob all those shots on Saturday. I suppose that given my accuracy and that the number of shots I got in was 12, I had shot at least 360 shots. It serves me right. The next time anybody says basketball, I'm going to scream and run for my arm's sake.
Today was a typical Monday, in that I went to school and attended classes. Except for one thing.
In the lecture hall, the typical arrangement is that the First Class(business class?) occupies the first three rows of seats, after which the Second Class (my class) and the Third Class (economy class?) fill up the rest of the hall. Psycho decided to create a little chaos, and (proof of his Choleric half) organised the Second and Economy Classes into a little plan.
When the Business Class came in fashionably late, they found "their" territory occupied by everybody else, and were stuck in the last four rows, where they soon began nodding off. I postulate that this is because Psycho managed to keep the noise level so high that they couldn't hear anything the lecturer said and that their brains therefore shut down from sheer boredom.
I'm not sure I want to repeat this again, though; one of the lecturers has a serious verbal tic and adds a 'yeah' or an 'ok not' to every other sentence, probably unawares. It's quite horrible, and I found it difficult to keep a straight face the first few weeks in school. By now it's just annoying.
I hope that never happens to me.
I found out on Saturday that my old school has held some kind of prize-giving ceremony for the students who were best in various subjects. I've been used for the past few years to be there to collect the prize for having the best English in the form. This year, however--
Fire! Murder! Thieves! They gave my prize to some dwarfish little do-gooder!! My place as the English King has been usurped by some inferior pretender to the throne! Never in history has such grave injustice been perpetrated!
--I didn't get the prize. It went to--
Little brainbox, filling up that oversized head with useless facts and figures to gain points! Idiocy of the Ministry to put such meaninglessness, such incredible vanity into our syllabus! Turning a perfectly civilised language into a mere shadow of its true self, making it a mere litany of orisons, a sham and a shameful list of memorised facts! Mockery in the highest degree! To pretend that the little list of things to memorise could in any way make up for the knowledge and appreciation of a language!
--Pooh.
Injustice! Bias! Prejudice! To assume that merely knowing the expected answers equates to knowing a language! To pretentiously think that one's memory could in any way make one a linguist! To award more marks for spewing up the correct answers in photocopier-machine fashion, than for writing a good essay! Madness and utter folly!
--Obviously, I'm being very calm here. I'm sure they had their reasons for giving her the prize money, but it galls to think that I didn't get what I've come to think of as a kind of birthright--that my English is good, therefore that the prize should be mine.
Oh well. What's done is done. Now to more cheerful topics. I read Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World recently, and I found it quite worrying. Of course I realise that it's highly unlikely ever to happen--mother, a swearword? Father, an insult?--but in other ways it's worrying.
Like the implication that people will become so hedonistic and thick-skinned that they will see everything as existing to give them pleasure. Or that the world will be divided into caste systems, ostensibly based on brain capacity but really based on each individual's ability to go with the flow and not make waves. Or that the very idea of monogamy will be received with horror. Or that people will be so very thick-skinned that no heed will be paid to anybody else's grief, no matter how great; that they will assume that all grief or sorrow can be cured with drugs. A whole book, based on the idea that people will try to avoid negatives instead of facing them and fighting or submitting. And that one idea leads to a whole lot of implications and other ideas, which ends up with a brave new world.
New only in the sense that all old things have been abolished (the ancients, after all, experienced pain and a whole lot of other things that the future people would love very much not to deal with). Brave only in the sense that with nothing to fear, all things are permissible and can be done.
All very worrying. I very much hope I never live to see this! On the other hand, given that I do have a tendency to get into trouble, I'm not likely to see it anyway. I'll probably be executed long before it ever occurs.
The movie was Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events, and it was quite enjoyable, even if it did twist physics and biology in rather a Carrolline way. But I found it a little too dark, and then decided that my expectations had been quite absurd. (I'd been expecting a kind of tragicomedy.) But then, I can think of at least five people off-hand whom I'd like to throw into a lake of carnivorous leeches, so I shouldn't blame the movie for being murderously bloodthirsty.
Anyway, it turns out that Gene has a family who is pretty much all Phlegmatic. He obviously inherited it from one or both parents; I didn't see much of either, but from what I did see and hear, Phelgmatic-ness runs in that family.
Unfortunately, being Phlegmatic doesn't automatically entail indolence. It only means they don't particularly enjoy cataclysm. So I was properly surprised when I saw the hoop suspended on a board 2.5 metres above ground level, and even more so when Gene suggested a game of basketball. (I was wondering if he'd taken it upon himself to overcome my aversion to sports, but couldn't set up any experiments to prove or disprove it.)
I soon found myself lobbing shot after shot at the hoop while Gene hared round the porch (where we were playing) like a rabbit on steroids, pausing every so often to grab the ball and send it flying through the hoop. According to my estimations, my accuracy is about one in twenty or thirty, while Gene's is roughly one in three for two-pointer shots, one in four for three-pointers, and none at all for layups.
By the third attempted layup, I could see the origin of every single footprint on the wall.
I was saved from basketball by a sudden bout of diarrhoea, presumably brought on by the canteen food I'd eaten the night before; and when I came out of the toilet, Gene had abandoned the basketball.
I went back to the hostel at five with my file (full of math questions only half-heartedly answered) and a couple of books I'd borrowed from Gene. (I had never suspected Gene of having an interest in mythology or drawing horror manga before I laid eyes on those books--and he rapidly protested that he'd never read those books before.) I've read them both and I must say I don't know why he left those books to gather dust.
I am at the moment having a dull ache in my right arm, which was the one I used to lob all those shots on Saturday. I suppose that given my accuracy and that the number of shots I got in was 12, I had shot at least 360 shots. It serves me right. The next time anybody says basketball, I'm going to scream and run for my arm's sake.
Today was a typical Monday, in that I went to school and attended classes. Except for one thing.
In the lecture hall, the typical arrangement is that the First Class(business class?) occupies the first three rows of seats, after which the Second Class (my class) and the Third Class (economy class?) fill up the rest of the hall. Psycho decided to create a little chaos, and (proof of his Choleric half) organised the Second and Economy Classes into a little plan.
When the Business Class came in fashionably late, they found "their" territory occupied by everybody else, and were stuck in the last four rows, where they soon began nodding off. I postulate that this is because Psycho managed to keep the noise level so high that they couldn't hear anything the lecturer said and that their brains therefore shut down from sheer boredom.
I'm not sure I want to repeat this again, though; one of the lecturers has a serious verbal tic and adds a 'yeah' or an 'ok not' to every other sentence, probably unawares. It's quite horrible, and I found it difficult to keep a straight face the first few weeks in school. By now it's just annoying.
I hope that never happens to me.
I found out on Saturday that my old school has held some kind of prize-giving ceremony for the students who were best in various subjects. I've been used for the past few years to be there to collect the prize for having the best English in the form. This year, however--
Fire! Murder! Thieves! They gave my prize to some dwarfish little do-gooder!! My place as the English King has been usurped by some inferior pretender to the throne! Never in history has such grave injustice been perpetrated!
--I didn't get the prize. It went to--
Little brainbox, filling up that oversized head with useless facts and figures to gain points! Idiocy of the Ministry to put such meaninglessness, such incredible vanity into our syllabus! Turning a perfectly civilised language into a mere shadow of its true self, making it a mere litany of orisons, a sham and a shameful list of memorised facts! Mockery in the highest degree! To pretend that the little list of things to memorise could in any way make up for the knowledge and appreciation of a language!
--Pooh.
Injustice! Bias! Prejudice! To assume that merely knowing the expected answers equates to knowing a language! To pretentiously think that one's memory could in any way make one a linguist! To award more marks for spewing up the correct answers in photocopier-machine fashion, than for writing a good essay! Madness and utter folly!
--Obviously, I'm being very calm here. I'm sure they had their reasons for giving her the prize money, but it galls to think that I didn't get what I've come to think of as a kind of birthright--that my English is good, therefore that the prize should be mine.
Oh well. What's done is done. Now to more cheerful topics. I read Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World recently, and I found it quite worrying. Of course I realise that it's highly unlikely ever to happen--mother, a swearword? Father, an insult?--but in other ways it's worrying.
Like the implication that people will become so hedonistic and thick-skinned that they will see everything as existing to give them pleasure. Or that the world will be divided into caste systems, ostensibly based on brain capacity but really based on each individual's ability to go with the flow and not make waves. Or that the very idea of monogamy will be received with horror. Or that people will be so very thick-skinned that no heed will be paid to anybody else's grief, no matter how great; that they will assume that all grief or sorrow can be cured with drugs. A whole book, based on the idea that people will try to avoid negatives instead of facing them and fighting or submitting. And that one idea leads to a whole lot of implications and other ideas, which ends up with a brave new world.
New only in the sense that all old things have been abolished (the ancients, after all, experienced pain and a whole lot of other things that the future people would love very much not to deal with). Brave only in the sense that with nothing to fear, all things are permissible and can be done.
All very worrying. I very much hope I never live to see this! On the other hand, given that I do have a tendency to get into trouble, I'm not likely to see it anyway. I'll probably be executed long before it ever occurs.
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