Panthera Sapiens Ellipsis: The Blog

I just passed my driving test. It seems incredible that I could’ve passed, and I have sneaking suspicions that my instructor has been passing money around behind my back to get me through the exams; but since he hasn’t confessed, and I haven’t any idea how to prove it (if it’s true), I’ll just live with it. In any case, the examiner said I can drive pretty well when I’m not busy trembling in fear. (What he thinks about my braking the car, you will see.) The Section Two was easy enough: going up and down a man-made mountain, side-parking, the triangle maneuver (although the mountain was scary, and I did backslide once—but they allow each candidate two tries before failing them), all were completed in a little less than three minutes. Section Three was my bane: the on-road section! I memorized the map (they were kind enough to tack up a map of the route to take) and then mentally went over my routine. I find it helps if I think of this the way I think of piano exams: go in, smile,...

I’m going to dedicate this, my wonderful new template, to some HTML-loving genius at blogskins.com. If not for him/her (the nickname and avatar were androgynous), I’d never have gotten it to work at all. Kelvin also gets some credit for pointing me in that direction. (You see, MSN chats can be educational after all.) However, I must say that this whole thing was sparked off by the person at deviantart.com who drew that Nazi spoof. It’s a lovely picture—and, you know, awfully telling about my personality, especially the “Death to Typos!” statement. My grandmother is back at my house now after a stay in Plant, her hometown. As a result, (to her) I have just arrived, and so (to her) I am still underfed, malnourished, and languishing for home-cooked food, even though I’ve been eating nothing else (well, almost nothing else) for the past week. Everything’s settling back down into its pre-me-going-away rhythm: grandmother dominating the TV with her soaps, my mother as busy as ever w...

It’s now roughly one week (one week and a day, actually) since I’ve been back from KL to Patience, and I’ve racked up enough annoyances to last me the rest of the holidays. Well, nobody ever said my life is a bed of roses. And in any case anything that has the word roses in it usually has thorns in it as well. Well, it’s nice, of course, that I’ve been able to meet up with some of my old friends in Patience. This has, unfortunately, been limited so far to my church friends since most of my old classmates are in Shining Institute and facing exams. Maybe I’ll try and meet them up after their holidays start. (For some unknown aberration of reason, their holidays are determined by the school itself, while my holidays are very sensibly timed to coincide exactly with government schools’.) And I’m not going to complain about the weather. It’s absolutely heavenly, sunshine and rain coming down in good quantity and in pretty good proportions, too. No haze, what’s more: no need to worry a...

I just got my hair highlighted. I’ve been planning it for almost three months now, and accordingly my hair hasn’t yet been cut since August when I went down to So Hour. Well, it hasn’t been cut until two hours ago, anyway. However, I’ve been asking for opinions from people since the idea occurred to me. Most of them decided that I should get something more conventional, conservative, or normal. (By normal and conservative, most of them meant red, yellow, or green.) My mother said I should get something that stands out against black (so everybody knows I’ve been spending money on such frivolous things as hair!) like red, yellow, or green. My reasoning went something like this: red, yellow, and green are accepted as the colors ‘cool’ people use. I am most definitely not ‘cool’. As such, it’s only fitting that I choose the color most opposite those, right on the other end of the spectrum. So when I went to the shop this morning, I told the hairdresser to thin my hair down, leave...

As of today, I have five days left before I step onto a plane and go back to Patience. It's a night flight, so it'll be six days before I arrive home. So far I've been advertising it on my MSN nickname (14 Days! 12 Days! 10 Days! 7 Days!) but now that it's less than a week to go, I'm getting a bit nervous. After all, there're so many things that can possibly go wrong! I refuse to dwell on the possibility of missing the flight or getting lost in the airport or missing luggage or any such dismal thoughts. Homecomings are supposed to be happy times, not times when you exclaim, "Oh poop! I've gone and forgotten my toothbrush." Of course, it depends on your actually arriving safe and sound and in one piece. And besides, I've still got plenty of things on my itinerary. There's the exams (English essay tomorrow and Chemistry some time this week), hostel fee payment (I'll rant in depth on this later), and of course the packing itself. So far I...

Some of my papers came back on Monday, but since the school's computer lab closed early that day (stitch Deeper Valley!) I couldn't post them up to gloat. But since I've got a few free hours before class begins today I'll put them up. So far I'm guaranteed to pass Math, since half the paper came back and I'm somewhere in the top ten, I believe. Biology also came back, for which I'm second in class--a first! What's more, I've lost to Jowl. He's this quiet guy, quite stocky (about 70 kilos if he was right) and about half a head shorter than I am. You can picture him... oh, and he's the closest thing to a metrosexual I've seen so far. I mean, who else would carry around a comb in their wallet for those awkward moments when the wind blows your hair three millimetres out of line? He'd probably carry a protractor if he could too, just to make sure his hair curved exactly so many degrees and no more... but I won't criticise. If he can ge...