Panthera Sapiens Ellipsis: The Blog

It's been a long weekend; Vesak Day was on Friday, and it's a public holiday. I thought it was a Hindu thing until a few years ago when I found out it was a Buddhist thing despite the very Indian-sounding name--perhaps the Southeast-Asian kind of environment causes one to associate Buddhism with Chinese-ness, and thus any Chinese-sounding festival or event is automatically Buddhist until proven otherwise. It's only relatively recently that I've found that Buddhism comes in more than one flavour, and the Southeast-Asian variety--in fact, specifically the Singaporean/Malaysian variety--is one of the more watered-down flavours, mixed with all sorts of strangeness and stuff as only Malaysians and Singaporeans can do. I suppose that what one can do to food, one can do to traditional beliefs. But I realised today that I have only two weeks of internship left. The report was submitted last Friday in softcopy form--if the professor wants a hardcopy I won't know 'til tom...

I'm rather maudlin today. But Amazing Grace (the movie) is awesome, more so than most video biographies of people are; it's one of the few nonfiction movies I've watched that I like (Mythbusters episodes and documentaries do not count as movies), and not just for the great music at the end--seriously, bagpipes and flutes and drums and tambourines and cymbals and lots of brass thingies that I didn't really identify because by then the ending theme was swelling and I was getting shivers down my back. Like I said, I've been maudlin today. Not just today. Possibly since Friday. With all the people from the Bible Study leaving for the holidays, one simply can't shake the feeling of being left behind while everybody goes off somewhere else, even though one knows they'll be back eventually. It's probably a huge factor behind me spending so much time with them of late; I have massive separation anxiety issues. I also need to get boxes and start preparing to pack...

The weather these days is simply atrocious; it's incredibly warm in the day, nearly to the point of boiling, and then it rains and the temperature plunges. Sicknesses and sore throats and suchlike are making the rounds of everybody I know, including myself, and it's a pain in the neck--literally. At the moment I've got something of a phlegmy cough as well as an irritating propensity to sniffle, and of course one nostril is completely blocked and drippy. I can't wait for this season of illness to pass. Today I spent the whole day with the Bible Study folks; the morning in a Christian bookstore with one of the guys, and between the two of us we spent more than SGD150; the afternoon with some of the ladies in one of their houses for lunch and a video ( A Case for Christ ); and then the evening-to-night in the leader's house for dinner and tonight's session of the Alpha. But that's not the main thrust of today's post. No, today's post is a rant concernin...

...it's been a very long time indeed since I last posted, isn't it? Yes it has. It's been ages, in fact, but that's not terribly surprising because I've been awfully busy. At least that's what it usually means when one's Google Calendar page is a massive splash of colours and there's barely any white space left. Of course, there's more white space than there was in March or April, partly because school's out so the ALS doesn't have any events for me to attend or plan or whatnot. But now there's church stuff and the mission trip in July to deal with, and that one's got me hugely worried because we have far too few team meetings and I haven't started on the fundraising... I envy almost all the people in my Bible study, I realised a bit of time ago, because they're on holiday and I'm still on internship; and worse luck, the industrial attachment report submission date is coming up in a couple weeks and my projects (if they ma...