Panthera Sapiens Ellipsis: The Blog

Yeah, I know, sorry I haven't updated here for ages. Yes, I know the blog is (by my standards anyway) almost dead of neglect. Yes, I know you're all rabid and eager for news of what's going on in my amazingly and impossibly exciting life, but all the same I haven't been able to update for awhile. The Gorillas' horrible connection probably has something to do with it: the rest is due to the fact that for the past few days, I've been really very busy and whatever time I spent online was taken up in DotA. Let's get back for a proper recap; after all, I haven't recorded anything for the past, maybe 2 weeks--gracious, it does seem ages--and so I've got plenty to write down here. And in any case I've got lots and lots of free time to do all the typing; let's just hope you've got heaps of patience, or you'll never get to the end of this post. You do realise, after all, that if I can type about 14 inches of post about one day's events, I ...

I just got back from the annual year-end camp that my church organises, and my goodness I'm aching all over from the past four days (including today) of hectic activity and incredible madness... I'll say, however, that I certainly don't regret it at all. It's been a great experience. And in fact right now I'm looking at my previous posts and wondering if they aren't, perhaps, a little off-topic. In fact they're terribly off-topic, because they don't seem to get to the main issue at all... It's surprising how one can get all tied up in little sidetracks (in my case, I seem to worry far too much about how much I demonstrate of God in my life) and totally forget that the whole affair only comes about because of God Himself. Because, of course, He was the One Who came to earth for us in the first place, and everything after that is merely responding to that initiative. Naturally, you can only respond appropriately if you know what happened and understan...

I've had to think quite a bit about the last post these days--well, naturally, I've had a lot of free time with which to think about it. It's the holiday season for me, after all. And come to think of it, the Corn was probably right when she chose to describe my life, as described on the blog, as rather bleak, although personally I think it's quite enough to keep anybody occupied during their non-free time. I know what I wrote last post about the little house was extremely defeatist-sounding. As if, having seen other people take a particularly tough exam and come out invariably with A+'es, one chose to look only at the exam and not at the superb scores, and based on the fear of the exam, chose not to take the offer of a guaranteed good grade. Or maybe it sounds as if one had enrolled for a course, where if one studied very hard and if one chose to go through a very difficult exam, one was promised stunning results--but one was just too lazy to do the studying or one...

I've just finished tidying up my entire semester's worth of notes and planning out my schedule for the next semester (it looks like no matter how I try to rearrange it, my Wednesdays persist in being class-free and my Tuesdays insist on being packed chock-full); the names are starting to sound much scarier than the ones I had this semester. Kind of a hint that things are only going to get more difficult, I should say; a very worrying sort of thing to one who rather dislikes stress... I went to the Corn's church yesterday for a visit. It's a very, very huge place; at least 4 times the area of the Methodist I've been going to for the entire semester, and about that many times the congregation too. Neither of these, I'm aware, indicates the "successfulness" of a church--not that that can be in any way measured by humans--but it does overwhelm one a little. Especially when the church has a bunch of cameras panning over the place and recording everything t...

I'm free. Isn't that a lovely thing to be able to say honestly? To be free of the gripping fear of the last three weeks. It's a wonderful thing to wake up in the morning and realise that all the paper strewn randomly around the room has just become obsolete. Well, not quite obsolete, but you get the idea. They'll not need to be studied again, and I really enjoy the feeling of relaxation. Very, very much. In any case, the past few nights have been a haze of sleeping late and waking early--4 hours of sleep every now and then in between a rush of papers and notes and scribbling more notes in cramped handwriting on the papers--which, at the moment, are started to look rather worn-out and crumply from over-handling. I suppose I should iron them out later, but I'm not quite so obsessive about the flatness of the paper I read. Just ask all my paperbacks: they've got cracked spines, every last one of them, and I hardly care. Books are for reading, people! Not for adorni...

I have another 45 hours in which to commit 13 weeks' worth of Biomol lectures to memory, word-perfect, before the exam. Since each week we actually have 3 hours of Biomol lectures, I actually have 39 hours' worth of lectures to study, which leaves me (if I had a photographic memory) 6 hours in the next two days to sleep, eat, etc. Can you tell I'm terrified? ...on a totally unrelated note, I ran into my Biomol lecturer at the swimming pool changing room yesterday. He didn't recognise me, of course, but I should say it's terribly unfair of him to be relaxing when he's responsible for such widespread stress amongst his students.

Well, it's the second week of exams--in fact I had Chem yesterday--and the Corn thoughtfully reminded me this morning that I've been awfully neglectful of the blog these few days. Well, I suppose I can claim busyness since I have had to study recently and there's been quite a bit of stress... Last week was Econs, I believe? ...yes, it was. It's always extremely annoying when one's memory starts to go on the blink--in fact I can't even remember the last time I bathed, although I'm sure the clothes I'm wearing are clean. Well, at least they were clean on... Tuesday. Yeah. Wait, that's bad, right? If the clothes I'm wearing were clean on Tuesday and are still on my back on Thursday and I didn't do laundry on Wednesday? ...I'll just bathe later. Anyway, the Econs was horrible. The first question alone was killer--in fact I spent more than an hour trying to get the appropriate graphs drawn, and to this day I've no idea whether I drew thos...

I'm just feeling very, very down right now. I don't know why. Maybe I need some sugar in my system or some chirpy songs or something, but then all the chirpy songs on my laptop--and believe me, I've got plenty of those... they simply irritate me for the moment. In fact at the moment, I'd rather like to find somewhere dank and cold and dark and huddle up in the fetal position and stay there, in that way, until this mood lifts. But, as Murphy's Law holds true, I can't afford to indulge myself at the moment with such things because I've got the Econs exam tomorrow afternoon and I can't afford to not revise my tutorials and the past-year papers... It's all the love that's swirling around like a poisonous gas, touching everybody around me and turning them into mindlessly happy little fountains that burble on and on about their partner. It's nice to know that the amount of happiness in the world is increasing, be it ever so little, and I suppose it...

Today is not a good day for me. First of all, I've got the Econs final the day after tomorrow and I'm only starting to cram today. Second, I woke up 2 hours ago (at 2pm) since it rained all night and apparently all morning, which has an extreme soporific effect on me. And third... Well, a couple weeks ago I had a biomol quiz. The thing about these quizzes is that they have an effect on the final grade we receive, and are supposed to ensure that the students don't resort to last-minute cramming. Personally I think they only force the students to change the schedule of said cramming, since we cram for the quizzes too. In any case, that particular quiz was on a terribly difficult topic, lots of protein names and mechanisms and processes and things to remember, and we had another quiz (Physics) on the same day, immediately after the biomol, which may have had an effect on the kind of studying that occurred. In any case I definitely recall sleeping late while cramming the two su...

Yes, yes, I know I've neglected posting for far too long, and even so right now is not the best time to be posting since I've got another 8 chapters of terribly frightening equations to learn in 2 weeks before the Math exam. Plus a bunch of biomol to memorise within the same time period. And I've still got to deal with the other 3 exams that, while less scary, are still definitely important enough to merit a few days of study themselves... It's been a blur, these past few months. Whoever said time crawls must have never been to university or they'd know time doesn't do that. It doesn't even fly. I swear it teleports: one moment it's Sunday, the next day it's Sunday again and you've no idea what happened in the past 6 days because it's just a hazy remembrance of classes and equations and trying to stuff everything in your head while not letting anything escape, and let me tell you that's exhausting work. I'm barely coherent now. I know...

Yes, well, sorry for the increasingly infrequent updates... my days are getting surprisingly packed full of perfectly unproductive activities: chatting, reading e-books, DotA, and the like. In fact I haven't swum for a month already and I'm starting to get an itch for the water, but I'll only go maybe this Friday after the two coming CAs and the speech. Last week was the economics test, which turned out to be rather simpler than I'd thought--then again it was all multiple-choice stuff. The real exam is expected to be full of calculations and subjective questions, like all the others, so it probably will require rather more in-depth study. This week? Insanity. I've got three things on the plate marked Thursday: the biomol CA, the physics CA, and the speech assignment I've got to prepare for the effective comm module (I've been calling it "effed comm" to the confusion of people around me). I think I'll talk about impromptu speeches; certainly I...

I'm very tired at the moment. In fact I've been tired for quite awhile, but it hasn't got to such epic proportions before... I suppose all the weeks of 7-hours-of-sleep-a-day have finally taken their toll, because right now all I want to do is set my alarm for next week, curl up in my bed, and go dreamily off to happy land. After all, I've got a headache and my eyes simply refuse to go for more than 2 minutes without a hard blink (I get this weird tic when I suffer from lack of sleep--I blink extra hard and for much longer than the usual 1/16th of a second). So you understand my bed is extremely attractive right now. Of course, I can't do that. Not with the Econs test on Thursday (and 5 lectures to revise for it); the Biomol and Physics tests next week (and since we don't know when the Biomol quiz will be, it could for all we know be on the same day as the Physics); and then Chem the week after that. At least one prof has said that the lectures will soon cease w...

I had the second cooking lesson just now, for dinner. My tutor was the Corn, and one of the judges, so to speak, was Hair Twist. Well, actually it was more like one of those cooking show on TV where the tutor actually does all the cooking... The Corn is quite definitely a Choleric Melancholy, judging from the fact that she absolutely hates coddling weak people and goes straight to the point, while occasionally displaying feats of intelligence and being decidedly emotional at times--which, really, ought to weaken the Choleric hypothesis. In any case it helps explain why she didn't let me touch the ingredients except for grunt work (skinning garlic, stirring carrots etc) while she took over most of the actual cooking. Still, considering she was about to eat it, it was probably wise of her not to let me do too much. All the cooking was done with an inductive cooker; we would have used the gas stove, but it was out of gas and hasn't been replenished yet. In any case it probably red...

I just wasted half an hour of my time walking up and down a slope to get my schoolbag back from where I'd forgotten it. Fortunately nobody else had seen it and the contents were all intact... It's been a weird week. First off, I guess there was that Math test on Tuesday--all the mugging seems to have paid off a little, since this time the complaint is there wasn't enough time to do it all, rather than that I forgot all the necessary formulae. Well, actually I did forget some of those formulae, except that I managed to remember them again with about ten minutes left to do them with; so I ran out of time before managing to apply them. Rather frustrating really. And then that night, I got introduced (through Silver D and Clay Sister) to Brain Rink, which set off a bunch of decidedly strange happenings. Because, you see, Brain Rink is also in Spore, and although she's 21 and Muslim, she's definitely very, hmmm, liberated: her conversation tends, more often than not, to ...

It appears that my mind is breaking down: I find myself sleeping at random times of the day, my memory functions are severely malfunctioning, and my ability to concentrate has been so badly impaired that I can't even focus on one page of my notes before I get the urge to read a blog, look at some manga, or go through MSN to see who's online and can be chatted to. (As a side-note: people don't seem to pay particular attention to the little Status thing; there've been a few who insisted to talking to me while it was Busy and my nickname was complaining about exams to mug for... I guess the habit of not reading prevails even amongst my contacts...) I'm not even focusing properly on typing this post: I used to be able to crank the whole thing out before bothering with other pages, but right now I'm checking my forums and looking for the latest chapter of Bleach. The ctrl-Tab shortcut is well-used on my computer, second only to the alt-Tab one... At any rate, I'v...

Today was the first... well, actually it was my second time cooking, the first time was a long time ago. Today was my first time cooking unsupervised (last time I had the Empress to help chop stuff and generally repair my damage), and I must say I'm inordinately pleased with how it's turned out. The actual first time I cooked was when I took it into my head to make lunch for my siblings, my parents being somewhere else at the time. (I don't remember where they were exactly.) So I told everybody to expect fried rice for lunch the next day, and then made up a recipe based on what I thought fried rice should include: fried onions, eggs, sausages, stuff like that. And at the time I had a microwave available, so that's how I did the sausages and mixed veggies; my sister helped with the eggs and the fried onions were done by my maternal grandmother, so all I really did was make rice and throw everything into the wok, then stir occasionally while adding soy sauce for flavour. ...

[26th September, Wednesday] I'm typing this from my grandparents' place in So Hour; it's a great thing to have a laptop handy, even though my battery life insists on fluctuating between 3 hours and 6. In any case I'm quite stuffed full of food, in the usual tradition... I went up to KL last Saturday with the Corn and the Emoticon for a shopping spree (for me) and a holiday (for the two of them). We chose to go by train, and Hair Twist opted to come along, so we ended up with four berths on opposite ends of the same cabin. In retrospect, I think the Corn rather regretted booking those berths so late, because we didn't get to spend the whole night listening to each other snore. (The Corn and Hair Twist took two berths opposite each other, and I slept opposite the Emoticon.) Hair Twist separated from us to go to her own house at the end of the train ride. We spent all Saturday and Sunday shopping, with occasional breaks for food and church (on Sunday morning), and I...

I just got the news a few days ago. It seems my family's going to be separated yet again--the Empress has decided to go to Hertfordshire, in the UK, to do nursing... it's a rather quick decision as far as I can tell, almost nothing is quite settled yet--including her accommodation. It's quite worrying, but I talked it over with the Corn and she says to leave everything to God, which does make sense... After all, I can't do anything to help the Empress in this situation except support her decision... But it's still rather unsettling news; it's as if myself and my siblings are taking after my father's example and sending ourselves flying off all over the globe. In his family, my father was the first and only one to leave the orchards and farms and go get an education (and by extension a little more money than his 11 siblings); now here we are, doing much the same thing. If this trend goes on, it won't be too long before not a single one of us is in the sam...

Both Marsh and Easy Kill have made statements to the effect that I appear to be completely relaxed and stress-free. I didn't know that--and in any case anybody who reads this should know by now that I worry too much about too many things... apparently neither of them reads, though. Easy Kill spends a lot of time online and Marsh... well, Marsh is going the way of Gene. Apparently my habit of sleeping through uninteresting classes (Economics and Chemistry, so far) has given them the erroneous impression that I'm perfectly able to cope with anything the professors happen to throw at us in the way of information, and now they seem to regard me as some sort of incredibly lazy demi-genius. I had to shatter that impression, but it made me wonder how I gave it off in the first place... It's easy to see that Marsh is stressed out; he insists on telling everybody he meets that "it's all about the effort you put in", that "school is difficult", that "he...

Is it not obvious yet that I have a math quiz tomorrow? I should be consolidating my scant knowledge of exact linear first-order ordinary differential equations by doing practice questions, but I'll be satisfied with knowing the principles and methods behind it... for now anyway. If I ever have the time to--or if I ever make the time to--I shall fill up my logbook with those questions. But now isn't the time to do that... In fact now isn't even the best time to blog, but I see my blog very often and not having something new up there rankles somehow. And besides, going on an unannounced hiatus would defeat my purpose of having this blog in the first place. Even if said hiatus was caused by exams or whatever. It's been slightly more than a month now since I and a whole slew of freshies arrived in NTU, and... the changes are startling. People are falling back into the old routines of study life, while somehow balancing it with suppers and extra-curricular activities, and m...

I'm supposed to be studying for a Physics quiz tomorrow that's supposed to make up about 5% of my final score this semester or something like that. I think I'll study later, but that raises the question of whether I'll even study at all. In fact the plan was for me to be studying with Marsh in the library, but he bailed out suddenly because he wanted dinner. He seems to develop food cravings at the oddest of hours. Anyway... thus far little has occurred that seems to be of moment. I've been having chats with the Corn and the Emoticon and a bunch of other people who found their way onto my MSN contact list; I've gotten used to the Corn's opinion that Malaysian guys should become a little more vain than they are now (her points being that they should buff up and wear nice clothes); I've done some studying and, to my horror, I'm starting to understand some of what the professors are saying; I've gotten used to Marsh's method of starting a chat o...

I woke up at 1pm today, after 5 hours of sleep. You got that right: I went to sleep at 8am this morning. It's not the first time; after all, I did it once before. I merely did it this time with different people. It turns out the Emoticon and the Corn have taken a strong liking to each other, and since the Corn is (or was; I don't know if she won the election) on the Hall Committee and was finishing off a Vote-For-Me poster late last night, she somehow dragged the Emoticon out of his room, two blocks away, to accompany her in the TV room while she painted. And since my room commands a very convenient view of that particular TV room (and vice versa), I got dragged out of my room too, to accompany them. I didn't complain too much since I wasn't doing much more than playing BeJeweled and Virtual Villagers at the time. So we sat around and and chitchatted, excepting the time when the Corn's foot (my goodness, what a pun) got stuck to some wet paint and she had to find so...