A Psalm of Overworkedness
My bag hath my schedule; I shall not be in tardiness.
It maketh me to lie down in my nice warm bed: it leadeth me to procrastinate.
It destroyeth my determination: it leadeth me in the paths of deep snoring for my beauty sleep's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of tardiness, I will fear no deadlines: for it is near me; my timetable and my clock they comfort me.
It preparest a calendar before me in the presence of mine in-box: it places responsibilities on my head; my plate runneth over.
Surely tiredness and headaches shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in mounds of paperwork forever.
If you want to see the actual, non-parodied psalm, go to BibleGateway.com and look up Psalm 23 in the King James Version--but you'll probably only want to do that for context.
At the moment, a couple days in bed is terribly appealing, and I'd seriously consider it if it weren't for the fact that I have school and myriad other things to be done, spanning a wide range of relative importances and urgencies. At any rate, I spent the weekend sleeping late and I still have a headache from not enough sleep. That ought to give you an idea of the kind of life I lead.
My To-Do list, at the moment, stretches several miles long and would probably give me a heart attack if I ever found the time to actually put it down on paper: it doesn't comprise too many items, but then most of them aren't one-off things like "Take out the trash"--which I did on Saturday, but that's another story.
Most of them are things like "Study" and "Go for choir practice" and "Take vitamins" and I really haven't the faintest idea how I'm ever going to get around to doing them when I haven't even enough time to sleep--and goodness knows my body happens to be a very physically weak specimen and simply cannot do without the nightly eight or nine or ten...
Well, I'll just have to find a way to get everything done. So far my revision is pretty much non-existent, apart from what is done in school--past-year papers and suchlike--but I'm going to work on that. Other things are more worrying, like leading the church youth in caroling. Apparently my church finds me perfectly footloose and fancy free, so they asked me to do it "since everyone else is busy".
I said yes too fast, apparently, since the job entails selecting carols to be caroled, training the carolers, conducting the carolers, and ye gads, they'll probably want me to prepare the route to travel too. At least selecting the carols will be easy, since (being what I am) I have a long list of favourite songs, most of them either in the minor key or very fast. The difficult part will be training the carolers, since most of them (from what I hear) have little or no ear for notes. Oh, they can carry a tune: the problem is that when you have sopranos, altoes, tenors, and basses singing together, inevitably somebody forgets themself and begins singing to a different tune: and equally inevitably the whole thing disintegrates into senseless giggling and blushes. And also, four-part harmony requires everybody to sing in tune and on-key, both of which are difficlt for anyone without formal music training. In fact they're difficult for people even with formal music training: I remember my first piano teacher storming at some unfortunate pupil who was preparing for an examination and apparently was unable to repeat a section of a score the teacher was playing.
Never mind. I'll let the stress come when it does: right now my most pressing duty is to study, so study I must. I won't enjoy it, though.
Certain parties in my class and the Third Class seem to have experienced a strange (but perfectly amusing) regression to primary schooldays. If you're Malaysian, you probably remember that at the end of each year, people would produce little notebooks with Little Bobdog or Hello Kitty or some such cutesy character, and pass them around for people to scribble in for a remembrance (although what the use of such things was, when everybody would just meet up again the next year, is uncertain). Most people, I think, put down a pre-formatted list of name, age, date of birth, house phone number (nobody had handphones then), address, family tree dating back three generations or so, birth certificate number, blood type, favourite food/drink/hobby/cartoon character/friend (!)/actor/song/whatever, and usually they added at the very end some well-meant (but stale) advice.
One of the most memorable was "Blood is red, heart is red, never let your grades be red!" or something similar. I remember it because it was the most common piece of advice (my class being, for the most part, insufferably grade-obsessed). I never did do very many of these things, since I have never been a social butterfly-type and because most of my friends were(are) male (and so didn't bother with cutesy notebooks embossed with Crayon ShinChan).
Well, right now those little notebooks are making a resurgence amongst my classmates and a couple of people in the Third Class. It's not epidemic-level yet, at least not from what I can see, but it's prevalent enough to be eyebrow-raising. At least now they've more sense than to buy Doraemon- or Power Rangers-printed books: in at least two cases, the asker is asking people to supply their own A4-sized paper.
Perhaps, however, this time it does make sense. After all, in two months' time, we'll be scattered all over the country (in some cases, world or continent), and maybe then the books really will be the only thing left connecting us together (although with the existence of Friendster and email and MSN, that's unlikely). Who knows? I certainly don't. And if one of them dies or is otherwise rendered permanently inaccessible, the books may be a small consolation.
Maybe I won't mock them this time. Memories, after all, ought to be preserved.
It maketh me to lie down in my nice warm bed: it leadeth me to procrastinate.
It destroyeth my determination: it leadeth me in the paths of deep snoring for my beauty sleep's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of tardiness, I will fear no deadlines: for it is near me; my timetable and my clock they comfort me.
It preparest a calendar before me in the presence of mine in-box: it places responsibilities on my head; my plate runneth over.
Surely tiredness and headaches shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in mounds of paperwork forever.
If you want to see the actual, non-parodied psalm, go to BibleGateway.com and look up Psalm 23 in the King James Version--but you'll probably only want to do that for context.
At the moment, a couple days in bed is terribly appealing, and I'd seriously consider it if it weren't for the fact that I have school and myriad other things to be done, spanning a wide range of relative importances and urgencies. At any rate, I spent the weekend sleeping late and I still have a headache from not enough sleep. That ought to give you an idea of the kind of life I lead.
My To-Do list, at the moment, stretches several miles long and would probably give me a heart attack if I ever found the time to actually put it down on paper: it doesn't comprise too many items, but then most of them aren't one-off things like "Take out the trash"--which I did on Saturday, but that's another story.
Most of them are things like "Study" and "Go for choir practice" and "Take vitamins" and I really haven't the faintest idea how I'm ever going to get around to doing them when I haven't even enough time to sleep--and goodness knows my body happens to be a very physically weak specimen and simply cannot do without the nightly eight or nine or ten...
Well, I'll just have to find a way to get everything done. So far my revision is pretty much non-existent, apart from what is done in school--past-year papers and suchlike--but I'm going to work on that. Other things are more worrying, like leading the church youth in caroling. Apparently my church finds me perfectly footloose and fancy free, so they asked me to do it "since everyone else is busy".
I said yes too fast, apparently, since the job entails selecting carols to be caroled, training the carolers, conducting the carolers, and ye gads, they'll probably want me to prepare the route to travel too. At least selecting the carols will be easy, since (being what I am) I have a long list of favourite songs, most of them either in the minor key or very fast. The difficult part will be training the carolers, since most of them (from what I hear) have little or no ear for notes. Oh, they can carry a tune: the problem is that when you have sopranos, altoes, tenors, and basses singing together, inevitably somebody forgets themself and begins singing to a different tune: and equally inevitably the whole thing disintegrates into senseless giggling and blushes. And also, four-part harmony requires everybody to sing in tune and on-key, both of which are difficlt for anyone without formal music training. In fact they're difficult for people even with formal music training: I remember my first piano teacher storming at some unfortunate pupil who was preparing for an examination and apparently was unable to repeat a section of a score the teacher was playing.
Never mind. I'll let the stress come when it does: right now my most pressing duty is to study, so study I must. I won't enjoy it, though.
Certain parties in my class and the Third Class seem to have experienced a strange (but perfectly amusing) regression to primary schooldays. If you're Malaysian, you probably remember that at the end of each year, people would produce little notebooks with Little Bobdog or Hello Kitty or some such cutesy character, and pass them around for people to scribble in for a remembrance (although what the use of such things was, when everybody would just meet up again the next year, is uncertain). Most people, I think, put down a pre-formatted list of name, age, date of birth, house phone number (nobody had handphones then), address, family tree dating back three generations or so, birth certificate number, blood type, favourite food/drink/hobby/cartoon character/friend (!)/actor/song/whatever, and usually they added at the very end some well-meant (but stale) advice.
One of the most memorable was "Blood is red, heart is red, never let your grades be red!" or something similar. I remember it because it was the most common piece of advice (my class being, for the most part, insufferably grade-obsessed). I never did do very many of these things, since I have never been a social butterfly-type and because most of my friends were(are) male (and so didn't bother with cutesy notebooks embossed with Crayon ShinChan).
Well, right now those little notebooks are making a resurgence amongst my classmates and a couple of people in the Third Class. It's not epidemic-level yet, at least not from what I can see, but it's prevalent enough to be eyebrow-raising. At least now they've more sense than to buy Doraemon- or Power Rangers-printed books: in at least two cases, the asker is asking people to supply their own A4-sized paper.
Perhaps, however, this time it does make sense. After all, in two months' time, we'll be scattered all over the country (in some cases, world or continent), and maybe then the books really will be the only thing left connecting us together (although with the existence of Friendster and email and MSN, that's unlikely). Who knows? I certainly don't. And if one of them dies or is otherwise rendered permanently inaccessible, the books may be a small consolation.
Maybe I won't mock them this time. Memories, after all, ought to be preserved.
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