Chasing the Deadline
[Tuesday, 20th March]
I still can't quite bring myself to believe that I've already been at work for almost a month now. But then I've fallen into the routine so easily that I might have been doing this forever. Of course I hardly see anybody outside my uncle's family now, except on weekends when I get into a flurry of social activity (which, rather unsurprisingly, includes staying on MSN Messenger into the wee hours of the night) or go shopping for whatever I think I want this week. There seems to be a bit of a sale on at the moment, though, so I don't eat into my finances too much.
...Right now seems like a pretty good time to go into depression, actually, what with the STPM and SPM results just coming out and my green-eyed monster going into hyperactivity. *sigh* I have a feeling I'm going to be struggling with this one for a long, long time. I don't like it--it's depressing and it always activates my inner Mom's voice ("If only you'd studied harder, applied for more scholarships, joined more extra-curricular activities, worked out 5 hours a day, eaten less, talked slower, bathed more, hadn't needed braces, studied harder, applied for more scholarships...!") which is even more depressing. Not to mention the what-if factor.
Well, of course I've got stuff to be grateful about. God has, indeed, been good to me--and naturally I don't know anything much about other people, so I can't just categorise them as "better in every aspect"--but why is it that every time I try to compare myself, I come off looking much the worse? No matter what aspect I want to consider, I have some lacking or deficiency that spoils the whole thing. It's horrible. More appropriately, I'm horrible. Isn't that very self-defeating? It's exactly what all the self-help gurus keep saying, isn't it--that whole mantra thing about I-am-wonderful-and-the-world-wouldn't-last-another-day-without-me?
Apparently I'm supposed to psyche myself into believing that I am wonderful.
But then I never trust self-help gurus anyway. They've got too much "bobance and bounce", as Puddleglum put it.
But I shouldn't bore you with my ramblings about the rotten-ness of me as compared to everyone else. I would imagine everybody already knows anyway. That's probably why everyone is bent on "improving" me--and when, or if, I ever comply to all they say--why, I'll be perfect to them, and I probably won't be human in the first place. But then whoever said being human was a good thing?
*sigh* Stupid Pig. He's the one who caused this whole train of thought... to be sure, he did it unwittingly, and quite likely he didn't intend for all this, but I am very easily depressed, and rather too competitive to boot. Anyway, he does deserve congratulations for getting so many As in his STPM--if, of course, I heard correctly. The connection is very bad, and my ears don't function the way they should. Reception is not as sharp as I'd like it to be... I always heard that it's terribly tough to get anything better than a C in the STPM, and here he is with three of those supposedly-hard-to-get As.
Looks like dropping Bio was a good move for him.
And here I am, with one miserable little A in Math, and all my sciences in Bs. It's enough to make me want to commit intellectual suicide and go book a room in the nearest insane asylum. And then I open the newspaper, and there is Way, with his 13 As in SPM (and sounding terribly un-depressed in the interview! but, true to form, he simply spouted some politically-correct nonsense, not to be followed by all the hopeful mothers and students out there). And all the people from RBS are reporting massive harvests of A1s or A2s in their SPMs. Of all the years I could've joined, I went and got into the genius class. And now I'm busy trying to comfort myself by saying, over and over again, that results aren't everything, intelligence simply cannot be defined by some little piece of paper, it's not what you know but how you use it, but everything is ringing hollow in my head.
I guess this is a whole new low for me: getting depressed by someone else's results! But to tell the truth... well, I just told it.
...and now I have to write the Pig a reference letter. Apparently he's applying for scholarships all over the place, and me being the only linguistic genius he knows, he spent the entire yesterday BubbleTalking to me to tell me what he wants on his resume. I suppose it was a nice chat, even if it was too full of his achievements since birth. Then again, since I'm supposed to be pretending to be Somebody in Authority who's known him since birth, I guess I needed the info. Our only problem now is how I'm going to get it to him... but that's his problem. Mine is figuring out what to write, and how to make it sound like a lot of good stuff without flattering him too much.
After all, his girlfriend might get a touch of jealousy if I write a too-glowing essay on how great he is. In times like these, when everybody seems to be secretly suspecting each other of secretly being gay, it's rather dangerous to speak too well of another male. Why, I have no idea, but one notices that these days, very few guys say anything good about another guy. I mean personally: people speak plenty on the subject of achievements, abilities, etc. Even I do so: but very few guys say another guy is, say, "warm" or "sensitive" or other emo-ish terms. It's interesting. At least I find it so. But I think my main difficulty will be to keep a touch of sarcasm out of the writing. Fortunately for all concerned, tones of voice are difficult to communicate through paper, and even less so through electronic media: on paper, one can at least read the handwriting and guess at the mood of the writer: not if the writer happens to be typing onto a screen. So that's that as far as that is concerned.
But somehow I think the worst thing about this green-eyes thing is that...well, I suppose people with this kind of problem tend to miss out on a lot of the fun in life. It's much nicer, I would suppose, being able to rejoice in others' successes instead of wishing yourself into their shoes. Definitely it's much more socially acceptable to be high-fiving the winner of the race than to be cooking up a plot to lame him. (And besides such plots rarely succeed.)
I suppose I really ought to count my blessings, be grateful for what I have, and try to enjoy others' blessings as well; but it's so terribly difficult. But I gotta try, or else one fine day I'll find myself depressed beyond cure--and when that happens, goodness knows this blog is going to get impressively boring.
[Thursday]
I have a to-do list on my computer desktop screen. It's mainly so I don't forget what goes where--when you've got several hundred forms in front of you and they all look alike except for the numbers on them, it's useful to have something to remind you that Form 9 goes in the Secretarial file and Form B goes in the Personal Tax file and Form P goes in the Company Tax file and so on. So far I haven't had too many mix-ups... but I use it as a kind of log to make sure I'm working enough. Otherwise I tend to get bogged down in Hearts and stop work altogether.
(It's surprising, really, how engrossing Hearts can get, since the rules allow for a certain amount of cheating and manipulation. Even by computer players.)
Anyway, I have a progress marker on the list that tells me how many percent of the day's tasks I've done (or not done, as the case may be). It changed a lot depending on how much my workload for the day may be, and how many sudden tasks crop up. The most I've ever had was 11, but they were all little things so I finished that day with a 98% success rate. (Figures are rounded up.) And when I finish the task, I say so in little parentheses next to it. (Like this.) With comments beside, of course, stating any problems or further questions, or whatever I want.
Anyway... I've been working on a certain client's financial records for the last two weeks (7 working days). It's crazy: every time I thought I was about to get it all done, another file would pop up and I'd have to get an extension for another day. So far I've done 7 files already, comprising his entire purchasing record for 2006--and even then he left out various invoices and receipts. So I suppose it's understandable that when I got the last bit of file work for him done, I put a line of "woot!"s in parentheses behind the note for him, and then deleted the entire note with a great deal of glee.
Except that tomorrow will be spent in checking his chequebutts against the bank statement: which is basically another 13 to 20 pages' worth of eye-straining work. I think I have now got a rough idea of where my salary for the next few months is going. It's mad, but at least from now on anything that goes wrong is not my problem. Less responsibility for myself has always ranked high on my wish list, and my work... well, let's say that I hope I didn't enter any wrong information in the last 7 working days, or the client (and by extension, the company and I) is in trouble. But checking chequebutts oughtn't to be too tough. I've done it before, after all.
I just got off the phone with the Pig: I had to get more detailed information for the letter. Apparently now I've got to masquerade as one of his teachers from Form 6 and pretend to have been madly in love with him, because I have no idea how any normal teacher would know that a certain student of theirs sings tenor in church and is amazingly caring for the little kids he tends in the nursery or something. But... yes, you got it, it's another attack of the green eyes. Gah. I think I'll just leave out the human-interest bits and make it a dry informative letter. Make it sound perfectly canned: you know the type, the mass-produced tone. I ought to be quite good at that kind of thing by now, having received such letters before.
[Friday]
I've done that letter. Of course I won't be able to get it to the Pig 'til tonight at earliest, but oh well. He knows it's done, since I provided him with a progress report: 396 words, which is a lot considering he only asked for slightly less than 150. I suppose this is going to add a few cents to the PosLaju fee, but hey, he's rich.
(Plus if I help him get that scholarship, he's going to save a lot more than a few cents anyway.)
The office is pretty much deserted. I guess that's the advantage of working in small companies: once the boss goes out and everybody else has appointments, you get the free run of the place. So now I'm playing songs that I haven't heard for ages because my uncle doesn't like drums or secular music, on a volume louder than I've had in ages (also because my uncle gets headaches easily), on real speakers no less (I've been stuck on the scratchy built-in things on the laptop so far).
Woot. You can't really appreciate Avril Lavigne until you've got really good speakers blasting your eardrums off. At least that's how it seems to be: her songs tend to have a pretty powerful bass line... I guess angsty people like the deeper tones.
I'm still working on that crazy client of mine; I'm just doing a different aspect now: bank reconciliations. If I had my way I'd abolish all cheques now, or else I'd make penmanship a compulsory subject in the SPM or something. Force everybody to write legibly, no matter how quickly or whatever: or else ban 'em from using cheques. That way I'd have much less trouble deciphering his writing.
What's worse, it's in Chinese, which means he could be writing hieroglyphs for all I can make of 'em. The only legible part, to me, is the numbers... and what's more he seems to send the cheques out a few months after writing them, so I end up double-recording the same stupid thing and winding myself into utter madness as far as his accounts are concerned. It's annoying, I tell you, utterly annoying!
I'm going to meet Einstein in three weeks! At least we're planning to: the two of us, you see, are massive fantasy-genre buffs, and we're planning a book-exchange thingy. If you happen to turn up at UCSI on Saturday, March 7th or 8th for the Tony Anthony thing, we'll be recognisable by the thick glasses, unfashionable haircuts, and bulging book bags. (I'll be passing him the EarthSea quartet--amazingly good writing, by the way, far far better than that Eragon stuff--and maybe the copy of Summerland that Jogger gave me for my birthday. It's another great book, very nicely done. It's one of the very few prize-winning books that I've enjoyed.)
And I'm hoping for some good stuff from him, too. Apparently some uncle of his dropped a bunch of oldies on him, and I'm hoping for there to be a few gems in there. Jack once lent me a bunch of Robert Ludlums and Anne McCaffreys (I hope I spelt that right) and that's how I realised that some old books are teh hawt. Really.
The office is going to get wireless! I can't wait to be able to be on MSN all day! (Of course I'll have to put the Busy status up, but rest assured I'll talk on occasion, except when I get the workaholic bug and go on a three- or four-hour typing spree and wind up finishing off a mountain of paperwork. It tends to happen after lunch.) Naturally, I'll have to get the laptop upgraded and repaired and stuff--at the moment it only has 5 GB total of memory--but that's a minor detail. Wireless! I can't wait!
Woot!
Hmmm. I got tagged by a meme a few weeks ago by God's Pencil... well, that's not her real name but it's the only way you're going to find her on my blog links, so I'll just call her that for now. Even if the name does seem a tad self-flattering... And anyway I got tagged through MSN Messenger, so it's not surprising that I forgot it; but here goes.
Various Weird Things About Me
1. I don't eat ice cream. I eat creamed ice-- made by mushing up ice cream until it's a kind of semi solid, rather resembling oatmeal. Also, for this reason, I avoid popsicles, aiskrim potong, and any frozen food on a stick.
2. I used to use the same water bottle for so long, without washing it, that it would turn green from accumulated mold. (Not anymore: I don't use water bottles now.)
3. On occasion, I let off steam by exchanging overly verbose insults with people over MSN. But I only do this to very few people.
4. I enjoy reading epitaphs and sometimes laugh while doing so. Also I occasionally laugh when a death happens to strike me as amusing.
5. My family is more worried about my future than I am. In fact I could sum up my plans for the future as: Whatever will be, will be.
6. In reading any manga or watching any TV show, my sympathies inevitably gravitate to the first person I see with spectacles. I have no idea why: quite likely because I wear spectacles myself.
7. I find men's magazines depressing because of the shape of the models. I also find girls' magazines depressing when they feature a "Hunk of the Month" section, also because of the shape of the "Hunk". But the depression is generally allayed by my convincing myself that the aforementioned "Hunk" or model probably couldn't integrate a quadratic equation to save his life. (And even if they could, I like to think they'd get it wrong. Fifteen times in a row.)
8. I eat extremely quickly; often I find myself finishing off a second helping while others have barely begun. And since I don't like to let others eat alone, I sometimes eat more than I should. (Fine, not sometimes. A lot.)
9. I like to sometimes detach myself from my surroundings and simply watch things go on without participating. These times are often while I'm looking at cats or other small animals. They also happen sometimes when I see bubbles or during captain's ball games.
10. I have the ability to attract vast amounts of dust and assorted debris to any area where I live for any amount of time. Given enough time and little interference (eg brooms and mops), I can transform the cleanest, emptiest room into a space where everything is strewn everywhere... and I can still find anything I want within 5 minutes.
11. I changed the title from "Ten Weird Things..." to "Various Weird Things..." so I could add more items to the list.
12. I have a mild allergy to seafood that I occasionally exploit (when the seafood in question looks unappetising) or occasionally ignore (when eating la-la clams). In fact I've found that the allergy attack is quite easily alleviated by drinking some water... but I find it useful sometimes.
13. When sleeping in cold places, I usually locate the nearest warm human body and try to huddle up against it to conserve my own body heat. So sue me, I don't like the cold. This doesn't, of course, occur often. For one thing, extremely thick blankets exist.
14. Some of the most enjoyable experiences in high school for me were the dissections of various rats and frogs. For some reason I found them very appealing, although it was disturbing when the Form 3 girls began to take the frog's eyeballs apart. I remember them squealing in delight when they finally pried the lens off.
15. I like strings and knots--in fact I have a collection of wires, strings, laces etc--but I abhor ties.
16. I use words like "abhor"...in casual typing.
17. I find it difficult to resist tests that purport to reveal some hidden aspect of one's character, even if they are obviously for entertainment purposes only.
18. When drawing, I tend to draw faces turning to the left. When I draw them facing right, they usually turn out looking rather rough and unbalanced. And I draw 'em fully done, not the way you see it on TV (circles, then lines here and there and then only the ink and figure).
19. In fact I only began drawing because my mom put a blanket ban on comics in the house when I was young. The way I saw it was, if you can't buy 'em, make 'em. (And I also bought newspapers with my allowance for the daily comics.)
20. I have almost no memories of anything that occurred before I was 15 or 16. As a result, I have no idea who my primary schoolmates were, or who my secondary schoolmates were, unless they happened to be particularly memorable. This makes for some awkward moments sometimes when people come up to me and ask if they've ever known me before, because I certainly don't know them.
21. I also don't know the names of half my cousins. And of those I do know, I don't communicate with them much. In fact I'd probably forget all about them if they weren't listed in my phone's memory and my MSN Contacts list.
22. Apparently I physically resemble my father to a great extent. I also sound like him. I have seen his college photos and I can safely say that we do look very much alike. Except that he used to be skinnier than I am now. (And he had a lot more hair, and wore the clunkiest spectacles I have ever seen in a yellowed photo.) And as a side-effect, my most talked-about feature (when introduced to my parents' friends) was this resemblance. Obviously they couldn't find anything else good to talk about.
23. I become very polite when angry. I also use physical force if necessary, but I very seldom raise my voice. I find it causes me a sore throat: deeply unpleasant.
...and whaddaya know, that's about it.
I still can't quite bring myself to believe that I've already been at work for almost a month now. But then I've fallen into the routine so easily that I might have been doing this forever. Of course I hardly see anybody outside my uncle's family now, except on weekends when I get into a flurry of social activity (which, rather unsurprisingly, includes staying on MSN Messenger into the wee hours of the night) or go shopping for whatever I think I want this week. There seems to be a bit of a sale on at the moment, though, so I don't eat into my finances too much.
...Right now seems like a pretty good time to go into depression, actually, what with the STPM and SPM results just coming out and my green-eyed monster going into hyperactivity. *sigh* I have a feeling I'm going to be struggling with this one for a long, long time. I don't like it--it's depressing and it always activates my inner Mom's voice ("If only you'd studied harder, applied for more scholarships, joined more extra-curricular activities, worked out 5 hours a day, eaten less, talked slower, bathed more, hadn't needed braces, studied harder, applied for more scholarships...!") which is even more depressing. Not to mention the what-if factor.
Well, of course I've got stuff to be grateful about. God has, indeed, been good to me--and naturally I don't know anything much about other people, so I can't just categorise them as "better in every aspect"--but why is it that every time I try to compare myself, I come off looking much the worse? No matter what aspect I want to consider, I have some lacking or deficiency that spoils the whole thing. It's horrible. More appropriately, I'm horrible. Isn't that very self-defeating? It's exactly what all the self-help gurus keep saying, isn't it--that whole mantra thing about I-am-wonderful-and-the-world-wouldn't-last-another-day-without-me?
Apparently I'm supposed to psyche myself into believing that I am wonderful.
But then I never trust self-help gurus anyway. They've got too much "bobance and bounce", as Puddleglum put it.
But I shouldn't bore you with my ramblings about the rotten-ness of me as compared to everyone else. I would imagine everybody already knows anyway. That's probably why everyone is bent on "improving" me--and when, or if, I ever comply to all they say--why, I'll be perfect to them, and I probably won't be human in the first place. But then whoever said being human was a good thing?
*sigh* Stupid Pig. He's the one who caused this whole train of thought... to be sure, he did it unwittingly, and quite likely he didn't intend for all this, but I am very easily depressed, and rather too competitive to boot. Anyway, he does deserve congratulations for getting so many As in his STPM--if, of course, I heard correctly. The connection is very bad, and my ears don't function the way they should. Reception is not as sharp as I'd like it to be... I always heard that it's terribly tough to get anything better than a C in the STPM, and here he is with three of those supposedly-hard-to-get As.
Looks like dropping Bio was a good move for him.
And here I am, with one miserable little A in Math, and all my sciences in Bs. It's enough to make me want to commit intellectual suicide and go book a room in the nearest insane asylum. And then I open the newspaper, and there is Way, with his 13 As in SPM (and sounding terribly un-depressed in the interview! but, true to form, he simply spouted some politically-correct nonsense, not to be followed by all the hopeful mothers and students out there). And all the people from RBS are reporting massive harvests of A1s or A2s in their SPMs. Of all the years I could've joined, I went and got into the genius class. And now I'm busy trying to comfort myself by saying, over and over again, that results aren't everything, intelligence simply cannot be defined by some little piece of paper, it's not what you know but how you use it, but everything is ringing hollow in my head.
I guess this is a whole new low for me: getting depressed by someone else's results! But to tell the truth... well, I just told it.
...and now I have to write the Pig a reference letter. Apparently he's applying for scholarships all over the place, and me being the only linguistic genius he knows, he spent the entire yesterday BubbleTalking to me to tell me what he wants on his resume. I suppose it was a nice chat, even if it was too full of his achievements since birth. Then again, since I'm supposed to be pretending to be Somebody in Authority who's known him since birth, I guess I needed the info. Our only problem now is how I'm going to get it to him... but that's his problem. Mine is figuring out what to write, and how to make it sound like a lot of good stuff without flattering him too much.
After all, his girlfriend might get a touch of jealousy if I write a too-glowing essay on how great he is. In times like these, when everybody seems to be secretly suspecting each other of secretly being gay, it's rather dangerous to speak too well of another male. Why, I have no idea, but one notices that these days, very few guys say anything good about another guy. I mean personally: people speak plenty on the subject of achievements, abilities, etc. Even I do so: but very few guys say another guy is, say, "warm" or "sensitive" or other emo-ish terms. It's interesting. At least I find it so. But I think my main difficulty will be to keep a touch of sarcasm out of the writing. Fortunately for all concerned, tones of voice are difficult to communicate through paper, and even less so through electronic media: on paper, one can at least read the handwriting and guess at the mood of the writer: not if the writer happens to be typing onto a screen. So that's that as far as that is concerned.
But somehow I think the worst thing about this green-eyes thing is that...well, I suppose people with this kind of problem tend to miss out on a lot of the fun in life. It's much nicer, I would suppose, being able to rejoice in others' successes instead of wishing yourself into their shoes. Definitely it's much more socially acceptable to be high-fiving the winner of the race than to be cooking up a plot to lame him. (And besides such plots rarely succeed.)
I suppose I really ought to count my blessings, be grateful for what I have, and try to enjoy others' blessings as well; but it's so terribly difficult. But I gotta try, or else one fine day I'll find myself depressed beyond cure--and when that happens, goodness knows this blog is going to get impressively boring.
[Thursday]
I have a to-do list on my computer desktop screen. It's mainly so I don't forget what goes where--when you've got several hundred forms in front of you and they all look alike except for the numbers on them, it's useful to have something to remind you that Form 9 goes in the Secretarial file and Form B goes in the Personal Tax file and Form P goes in the Company Tax file and so on. So far I haven't had too many mix-ups... but I use it as a kind of log to make sure I'm working enough. Otherwise I tend to get bogged down in Hearts and stop work altogether.
(It's surprising, really, how engrossing Hearts can get, since the rules allow for a certain amount of cheating and manipulation. Even by computer players.)
Anyway, I have a progress marker on the list that tells me how many percent of the day's tasks I've done (or not done, as the case may be). It changed a lot depending on how much my workload for the day may be, and how many sudden tasks crop up. The most I've ever had was 11, but they were all little things so I finished that day with a 98% success rate. (Figures are rounded up.) And when I finish the task, I say so in little parentheses next to it. (Like this.) With comments beside, of course, stating any problems or further questions, or whatever I want.
Anyway... I've been working on a certain client's financial records for the last two weeks (7 working days). It's crazy: every time I thought I was about to get it all done, another file would pop up and I'd have to get an extension for another day. So far I've done 7 files already, comprising his entire purchasing record for 2006--and even then he left out various invoices and receipts. So I suppose it's understandable that when I got the last bit of file work for him done, I put a line of "woot!"s in parentheses behind the note for him, and then deleted the entire note with a great deal of glee.
Except that tomorrow will be spent in checking his chequebutts against the bank statement: which is basically another 13 to 20 pages' worth of eye-straining work. I think I have now got a rough idea of where my salary for the next few months is going. It's mad, but at least from now on anything that goes wrong is not my problem. Less responsibility for myself has always ranked high on my wish list, and my work... well, let's say that I hope I didn't enter any wrong information in the last 7 working days, or the client (and by extension, the company and I) is in trouble. But checking chequebutts oughtn't to be too tough. I've done it before, after all.
I just got off the phone with the Pig: I had to get more detailed information for the letter. Apparently now I've got to masquerade as one of his teachers from Form 6 and pretend to have been madly in love with him, because I have no idea how any normal teacher would know that a certain student of theirs sings tenor in church and is amazingly caring for the little kids he tends in the nursery or something. But... yes, you got it, it's another attack of the green eyes. Gah. I think I'll just leave out the human-interest bits and make it a dry informative letter. Make it sound perfectly canned: you know the type, the mass-produced tone. I ought to be quite good at that kind of thing by now, having received such letters before.
[Friday]
I've done that letter. Of course I won't be able to get it to the Pig 'til tonight at earliest, but oh well. He knows it's done, since I provided him with a progress report: 396 words, which is a lot considering he only asked for slightly less than 150. I suppose this is going to add a few cents to the PosLaju fee, but hey, he's rich.
(Plus if I help him get that scholarship, he's going to save a lot more than a few cents anyway.)
The office is pretty much deserted. I guess that's the advantage of working in small companies: once the boss goes out and everybody else has appointments, you get the free run of the place. So now I'm playing songs that I haven't heard for ages because my uncle doesn't like drums or secular music, on a volume louder than I've had in ages (also because my uncle gets headaches easily), on real speakers no less (I've been stuck on the scratchy built-in things on the laptop so far).
Woot. You can't really appreciate Avril Lavigne until you've got really good speakers blasting your eardrums off. At least that's how it seems to be: her songs tend to have a pretty powerful bass line... I guess angsty people like the deeper tones.
I'm still working on that crazy client of mine; I'm just doing a different aspect now: bank reconciliations. If I had my way I'd abolish all cheques now, or else I'd make penmanship a compulsory subject in the SPM or something. Force everybody to write legibly, no matter how quickly or whatever: or else ban 'em from using cheques. That way I'd have much less trouble deciphering his writing.
What's worse, it's in Chinese, which means he could be writing hieroglyphs for all I can make of 'em. The only legible part, to me, is the numbers... and what's more he seems to send the cheques out a few months after writing them, so I end up double-recording the same stupid thing and winding myself into utter madness as far as his accounts are concerned. It's annoying, I tell you, utterly annoying!
I'm going to meet Einstein in three weeks! At least we're planning to: the two of us, you see, are massive fantasy-genre buffs, and we're planning a book-exchange thingy. If you happen to turn up at UCSI on Saturday, March 7th or 8th for the Tony Anthony thing, we'll be recognisable by the thick glasses, unfashionable haircuts, and bulging book bags. (I'll be passing him the EarthSea quartet--amazingly good writing, by the way, far far better than that Eragon stuff--and maybe the copy of Summerland that Jogger gave me for my birthday. It's another great book, very nicely done. It's one of the very few prize-winning books that I've enjoyed.)
And I'm hoping for some good stuff from him, too. Apparently some uncle of his dropped a bunch of oldies on him, and I'm hoping for there to be a few gems in there. Jack once lent me a bunch of Robert Ludlums and Anne McCaffreys (I hope I spelt that right) and that's how I realised that some old books are teh hawt. Really.
The office is going to get wireless! I can't wait to be able to be on MSN all day! (Of course I'll have to put the Busy status up, but rest assured I'll talk on occasion, except when I get the workaholic bug and go on a three- or four-hour typing spree and wind up finishing off a mountain of paperwork. It tends to happen after lunch.) Naturally, I'll have to get the laptop upgraded and repaired and stuff--at the moment it only has 5 GB total of memory--but that's a minor detail. Wireless! I can't wait!
Woot!
Hmmm. I got tagged by a meme a few weeks ago by God's Pencil... well, that's not her real name but it's the only way you're going to find her on my blog links, so I'll just call her that for now. Even if the name does seem a tad self-flattering... And anyway I got tagged through MSN Messenger, so it's not surprising that I forgot it; but here goes.
Various Weird Things About Me
1. I don't eat ice cream. I eat creamed ice-- made by mushing up ice cream until it's a kind of semi solid, rather resembling oatmeal. Also, for this reason, I avoid popsicles, aiskrim potong, and any frozen food on a stick.
2. I used to use the same water bottle for so long, without washing it, that it would turn green from accumulated mold. (Not anymore: I don't use water bottles now.)
3. On occasion, I let off steam by exchanging overly verbose insults with people over MSN. But I only do this to very few people.
4. I enjoy reading epitaphs and sometimes laugh while doing so. Also I occasionally laugh when a death happens to strike me as amusing.
5. My family is more worried about my future than I am. In fact I could sum up my plans for the future as: Whatever will be, will be.
6. In reading any manga or watching any TV show, my sympathies inevitably gravitate to the first person I see with spectacles. I have no idea why: quite likely because I wear spectacles myself.
7. I find men's magazines depressing because of the shape of the models. I also find girls' magazines depressing when they feature a "Hunk of the Month" section, also because of the shape of the "Hunk". But the depression is generally allayed by my convincing myself that the aforementioned "Hunk" or model probably couldn't integrate a quadratic equation to save his life. (And even if they could, I like to think they'd get it wrong. Fifteen times in a row.)
8. I eat extremely quickly; often I find myself finishing off a second helping while others have barely begun. And since I don't like to let others eat alone, I sometimes eat more than I should. (Fine, not sometimes. A lot.)
9. I like to sometimes detach myself from my surroundings and simply watch things go on without participating. These times are often while I'm looking at cats or other small animals. They also happen sometimes when I see bubbles or during captain's ball games.
10. I have the ability to attract vast amounts of dust and assorted debris to any area where I live for any amount of time. Given enough time and little interference (eg brooms and mops), I can transform the cleanest, emptiest room into a space where everything is strewn everywhere... and I can still find anything I want within 5 minutes.
11. I changed the title from "Ten Weird Things..." to "Various Weird Things..." so I could add more items to the list.
12. I have a mild allergy to seafood that I occasionally exploit (when the seafood in question looks unappetising) or occasionally ignore (when eating la-la clams). In fact I've found that the allergy attack is quite easily alleviated by drinking some water... but I find it useful sometimes.
13. When sleeping in cold places, I usually locate the nearest warm human body and try to huddle up against it to conserve my own body heat. So sue me, I don't like the cold. This doesn't, of course, occur often. For one thing, extremely thick blankets exist.
14. Some of the most enjoyable experiences in high school for me were the dissections of various rats and frogs. For some reason I found them very appealing, although it was disturbing when the Form 3 girls began to take the frog's eyeballs apart. I remember them squealing in delight when they finally pried the lens off.
15. I like strings and knots--in fact I have a collection of wires, strings, laces etc--but I abhor ties.
16. I use words like "abhor"...in casual typing.
17. I find it difficult to resist tests that purport to reveal some hidden aspect of one's character, even if they are obviously for entertainment purposes only.
18. When drawing, I tend to draw faces turning to the left. When I draw them facing right, they usually turn out looking rather rough and unbalanced. And I draw 'em fully done, not the way you see it on TV (circles, then lines here and there and then only the ink and figure).
19. In fact I only began drawing because my mom put a blanket ban on comics in the house when I was young. The way I saw it was, if you can't buy 'em, make 'em. (And I also bought newspapers with my allowance for the daily comics.)
20. I have almost no memories of anything that occurred before I was 15 or 16. As a result, I have no idea who my primary schoolmates were, or who my secondary schoolmates were, unless they happened to be particularly memorable. This makes for some awkward moments sometimes when people come up to me and ask if they've ever known me before, because I certainly don't know them.
21. I also don't know the names of half my cousins. And of those I do know, I don't communicate with them much. In fact I'd probably forget all about them if they weren't listed in my phone's memory and my MSN Contacts list.
22. Apparently I physically resemble my father to a great extent. I also sound like him. I have seen his college photos and I can safely say that we do look very much alike. Except that he used to be skinnier than I am now. (And he had a lot more hair, and wore the clunkiest spectacles I have ever seen in a yellowed photo.) And as a side-effect, my most talked-about feature (when introduced to my parents' friends) was this resemblance. Obviously they couldn't find anything else good to talk about.
23. I become very polite when angry. I also use physical force if necessary, but I very seldom raise my voice. I find it causes me a sore throat: deeply unpleasant.
...and whaddaya know, that's about it.
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