Seven Hour Blink Blink
So yeah, it's Sunday now and my second-last paper, Biomol, is the day after tomorrow--I should be panickedly memorising orgachem formulae and various metabolic pathways, except I just can't seem to remember the hundred-or-so-odd names and things. Never mind that there's interconnections between the various pathways, they have like maybe three or four intermediates in common each--well if you don't count the electron donors/acceptors anyway. The body is amazing and all that, yes, and I don't just mean the outsides of people (although come to that, the skin is a pretty useful thing too).
Anyway, after Fluids... I had little to no study mood left. All taken away after possibly failing that, and Electronics two days before it too--I fail at Electronics, very much. Easy Kill doesn't--he's likely as anything to get an A+ in it and that's only because no higher grades are available--I'm likely to have to re-take this module next semester or whenever it's offered again, worse luck. And I studied so much for those, too! 12 hours running for Fluids the day before the exam--well, taking away the time on Fantastic Contraption and meals and general procrastination and moaning about having our ghosts haunt the relevant lecturer for the rest of his early life, it was maybe 7 or 8--and hald a day of staring at my screen memorising Electronics tutorials--all to little or no effect.
So I spent the remainder of that day, after Fluids, attempting to take a nap. Notice I said attempt: apparently, while I sleep, I send out some sort of telepathic contact-me message to people. In the space of the four hours I tried to sleep, I was woken by my ringing phone about once every half hour: once by an old friend from RBS who was here for a medical checkup and had time to kill and wanted to have dinner and catch up; and three from an acquaintance from forums--yes, the Corn, I now abide by your advice that people from forums can be very, very irritating people to be in real-life contact with, and will think many times before giving my phone number to people whom I don't already know in real life--who simply wouldn't take the hints of yawning and repeatedly saying "You woke me up" in icy-cold tones. I loathe being woken up forcibly and by a barrage of questions at that. I eventually was practically shouting "GO AWAY AND LET ME SLEEP!" into my pillow (and the phone) before they took the subtle hints. (Incidentally, my roomie does the same thing when answering phone calls in the early mornings: putting the head sideways so that the phone rests on top of one ear and the other ear is submerged in the pillow, it allows you to half-sleep while talking.)
So, yeah. I didn't sleep well, but I had a good time with the friend; he got lost on the way, but got a cab and we chatted all through dinner and I introduced him to the shaved-milk dessert at Can 2, though he's the first person to complain that they don't give enough of the milk. In his defense though, he'd asked for two toppings and the milk was barely enough to act as a good solvent for both the chocolate cream and the crushed chocolate chips. All the same we had a pretty good chitchat.
The next day began early--thus no chance of me paying back the sleep debt I ran up for Fluids. The parents have decided that I will spend December in Fifth Hun with them, as well as Gobbler; thus we had to get our visas done eventually and we agreed to get them done last Friday morning. The consul opens at 9: consequently we agreed to meet at 8 at Orchard: consequently I had to leave the hostel, without breakfast and with a mild throb in my temple, at 6-odd, and I still managed to arrive late. We went to the consul, lined up, found that he had forgotten his passport and so had a delay while I held our place in the line and he made a quick trip to get his passport from his room, and the whole thing was over with at 10-odd. At that point we demonstrated family similarity by agreeing that we both had work to get to, but neither of us wanted to go back to our rooms to work.
So we went strolling around town, ending up at a bookstore and proceeding to the graphic novels/manga/comics section where everything was wrapped up. Being us, we had a quick competition to see who could find the first unwrapped item on the shelves; he found a copy of A Guide to Graphic Novels and I found a copy of Calvin and Hobbes: The Complete Collection, leatherbound and very heavy and very expensive (so I won). I want that book very much, but won't get it in the conceivable future. While I suppose it's possible somebody will read this post and get it for me--even more so since I found out how to import posts from here to Facebook--nobody is likely to actually buy me the two volumes of that! *insert sound of hopes being dashed to rocks*
We soon got bored of sitting around surrounded by unopened stacks of illustrated things, and went to the nearest movie theater (I think it was called Cine-Leisure), cracking horrible puns about it on the way, and again demonstrating familial solidarity by getting lost. It was a little embarrassing, really, because we ended up stopping some girl for directions and she answered by pointing some distance behind us--a large sign, saying Cine-Leisure (let us assume that's the correct name), was behind us and pointing off to the left. We went there, got tickets to something called Body of Lies, and then figured we had an hour or so to kill before the thing started so we went to a nearby Burger King's to sit down and take up valuable table space (we didn't buy anything).
After that he insisted on getting me a new pair of flipflops since my old (then current) pair were all-plastic and the glued bits were starting to not be glued together anymore; so I have a new pair of flipflops whose straps seem to be made of frayed canvas and whose soles are, I think, soft foam or something. They're quite comfy but being cloth, I'm not about to wear them daily--not to the showers at any rate! Maybe only to semiformalish things, or classes if it doesn't look rainy. Then we got some drinks from the 7-11 (a Slurpee for him and a Big Gulp for me) and entered the theater with both of the aforementioned drinks carefully secreted away in opaque plastic bags.
The movie is okay; some bad science, lots of cliches and tropes, and a pretty irritating sort-of-happy-ending; but we had fun laughing at it. At least, I laughed at it and commented on it to him, and he laughed and agreed. But all the same if I hadn't got the student discount for it, I'd be pretty disappointed. At least I didn't get popcorn! I also dropped my handphone on the floor halfway through the movie by leaning way back in the chair which left my pocket more or less horizontal, so the phone slipped out and fell down, which I didn't notice 'til after a trip to the toilet (the Big Gulp cup was huge and I kept gulping) so I got Gobble to send me a message and I located my phone by the pulsing light on the floor indicating an unread message; I gambled that nobody else would be looking at the floor with explosions flashing across the screen. Still, we were only free to actually locate it after the movie, but at least the pulsing light told me the phone was still there.
The movie ended at 3.30; we got donuts and separated, and I arrived at my room circa 5.30 before making a somewhat lackadaisical attempt to study. That lackadaisical-ness has been with me until now, which is why you've got a long long post detailing my Friday morning and afternoon, instead of a long detailed summary of the various mechanisms and enzymes involved in, say, the ornithine cycle.
Anyway, after Fluids... I had little to no study mood left. All taken away after possibly failing that, and Electronics two days before it too--I fail at Electronics, very much. Easy Kill doesn't--he's likely as anything to get an A+ in it and that's only because no higher grades are available--I'm likely to have to re-take this module next semester or whenever it's offered again, worse luck. And I studied so much for those, too! 12 hours running for Fluids the day before the exam--well, taking away the time on Fantastic Contraption and meals and general procrastination and moaning about having our ghosts haunt the relevant lecturer for the rest of his early life, it was maybe 7 or 8--and hald a day of staring at my screen memorising Electronics tutorials--all to little or no effect.
So I spent the remainder of that day, after Fluids, attempting to take a nap. Notice I said attempt: apparently, while I sleep, I send out some sort of telepathic contact-me message to people. In the space of the four hours I tried to sleep, I was woken by my ringing phone about once every half hour: once by an old friend from RBS who was here for a medical checkup and had time to kill and wanted to have dinner and catch up; and three from an acquaintance from forums--yes, the Corn, I now abide by your advice that people from forums can be very, very irritating people to be in real-life contact with, and will think many times before giving my phone number to people whom I don't already know in real life--who simply wouldn't take the hints of yawning and repeatedly saying "You woke me up" in icy-cold tones. I loathe being woken up forcibly and by a barrage of questions at that. I eventually was practically shouting "GO AWAY AND LET ME SLEEP!" into my pillow (and the phone) before they took the subtle hints. (Incidentally, my roomie does the same thing when answering phone calls in the early mornings: putting the head sideways so that the phone rests on top of one ear and the other ear is submerged in the pillow, it allows you to half-sleep while talking.)
So, yeah. I didn't sleep well, but I had a good time with the friend; he got lost on the way, but got a cab and we chatted all through dinner and I introduced him to the shaved-milk dessert at Can 2, though he's the first person to complain that they don't give enough of the milk. In his defense though, he'd asked for two toppings and the milk was barely enough to act as a good solvent for both the chocolate cream and the crushed chocolate chips. All the same we had a pretty good chitchat.
The next day began early--thus no chance of me paying back the sleep debt I ran up for Fluids. The parents have decided that I will spend December in Fifth Hun with them, as well as Gobbler; thus we had to get our visas done eventually and we agreed to get them done last Friday morning. The consul opens at 9: consequently we agreed to meet at 8 at Orchard: consequently I had to leave the hostel, without breakfast and with a mild throb in my temple, at 6-odd, and I still managed to arrive late. We went to the consul, lined up, found that he had forgotten his passport and so had a delay while I held our place in the line and he made a quick trip to get his passport from his room, and the whole thing was over with at 10-odd. At that point we demonstrated family similarity by agreeing that we both had work to get to, but neither of us wanted to go back to our rooms to work.
So we went strolling around town, ending up at a bookstore and proceeding to the graphic novels/manga/comics section where everything was wrapped up. Being us, we had a quick competition to see who could find the first unwrapped item on the shelves; he found a copy of A Guide to Graphic Novels and I found a copy of Calvin and Hobbes: The Complete Collection, leatherbound and very heavy and very expensive (so I won). I want that book very much, but won't get it in the conceivable future. While I suppose it's possible somebody will read this post and get it for me--even more so since I found out how to import posts from here to Facebook--nobody is likely to actually buy me the two volumes of that! *insert sound of hopes being dashed to rocks*
We soon got bored of sitting around surrounded by unopened stacks of illustrated things, and went to the nearest movie theater (I think it was called Cine-Leisure), cracking horrible puns about it on the way, and again demonstrating familial solidarity by getting lost. It was a little embarrassing, really, because we ended up stopping some girl for directions and she answered by pointing some distance behind us--a large sign, saying Cine-Leisure (let us assume that's the correct name), was behind us and pointing off to the left. We went there, got tickets to something called Body of Lies, and then figured we had an hour or so to kill before the thing started so we went to a nearby Burger King's to sit down and take up valuable table space (we didn't buy anything).
After that he insisted on getting me a new pair of flipflops since my old (then current) pair were all-plastic and the glued bits were starting to not be glued together anymore; so I have a new pair of flipflops whose straps seem to be made of frayed canvas and whose soles are, I think, soft foam or something. They're quite comfy but being cloth, I'm not about to wear them daily--not to the showers at any rate! Maybe only to semiformalish things, or classes if it doesn't look rainy. Then we got some drinks from the 7-11 (a Slurpee for him and a Big Gulp for me) and entered the theater with both of the aforementioned drinks carefully secreted away in opaque plastic bags.
The movie is okay; some bad science, lots of cliches and tropes, and a pretty irritating sort-of-happy-ending; but we had fun laughing at it. At least, I laughed at it and commented on it to him, and he laughed and agreed. But all the same if I hadn't got the student discount for it, I'd be pretty disappointed. At least I didn't get popcorn! I also dropped my handphone on the floor halfway through the movie by leaning way back in the chair which left my pocket more or less horizontal, so the phone slipped out and fell down, which I didn't notice 'til after a trip to the toilet (the Big Gulp cup was huge and I kept gulping) so I got Gobble to send me a message and I located my phone by the pulsing light on the floor indicating an unread message; I gambled that nobody else would be looking at the floor with explosions flashing across the screen. Still, we were only free to actually locate it after the movie, but at least the pulsing light told me the phone was still there.
The movie ended at 3.30; we got donuts and separated, and I arrived at my room circa 5.30 before making a somewhat lackadaisical attempt to study. That lackadaisical-ness has been with me until now, which is why you've got a long long post detailing my Friday morning and afternoon, instead of a long detailed summary of the various mechanisms and enzymes involved in, say, the ornithine cycle.
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