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...