Quickly, Quickly, Quail, Quiver, Query

Is it really only two days since my last post? It's the first of October and somehow it's unbelievable that I should have posted only three days ago--it's Friday night, after all, and so much seems to have happened; yet looking at the post, so little seems to have been recorded.

This blog serves the function of recording things, in the end, and it doesn't seem to be serving that function very well...

At any rate I shall therefore record; after all this week many things happened other than me having weird dreams. But then I suppose those would have slipped my mind; it's not difficult, what with my mind having the frictional constant of wet soap. At any rate the record is accurate as far as it goes, so far...

Personality types have been on my mind for awhile. At any rate I've always had an interest in people's inner workings. I'm what I've learned (in Fundamentals of Management, no less!) is called a low-context person, which means I'm a lot more literal than most and care almost nothing for facial expression or body language or stuff like that; which is odd, actually, because I stare at people a lot. Body language fascinates me too: not that it's terribly accurate or reliable, but the idea that people are subconsciously broadcasting stuff is an interesting one (as well as the implication that you can therefore read them and send out false and confusing signals).

But all that is simply so that I can use a sort of shorthand, as it were, to describe the people I come into contact with. Of course, my other way of classifying people--a rather intuitive method, of course--I'm most likely an I_TJ (I can never decide if I'm N or S)--is that I classify people according to whom they remind me of. It's something in the appearance, but when I point it out nobody seems to have noticed it before (and sometimes they don't see it even after it's been pointed out), which indicates that it's not necessarily something evident to the senses. And I used to think it was a failing in myself, but... it's oddly accurate. People who remind me of each other do tend to behave like each other. And of course there's also the D&D alignments...

On Monday I met the other person in my Fundamentals of Management project group (it's to be done in pairs); a Lawful person if ever there was one--wouldn't even reply SMSes in class, but would read them. And she's in the Crusade, too... and then the people I've been running around with are ID/Performer or CD or Teacher (which if nothing else shows the need for some sort of standardised system). And so on and so forth; I'd be hard put to name a person I haven't also attached a bunch of psychobabble-labels to.

On Tuesday night there was a steamboat in the room of Announce-chan; I helped choose the ingredients, which in the end were: frankfurters, fish balls, crab sticks, cabbage, broccoli, corn, chicken wingsticks, carrots, chicken stock, and eggs; the total spent on that was about SGD40. Six people were fed and, as it turned out, I still retain my ability to prepare raw food well enough to not cause diarrhoea--lots of washing and rinsing were involved in that--and the soup came out pretty darn good, if I do say so myself. After that we played poker, but instead of poker chips we bartered with sobriety--there was vodka and Coke in the room, so we mixed them and bet on hands; however random chance has never favoured me, and I went all-in twice and lost both those times. I did not however get drunk enough to suffer memory loss, so I do know I was gibbering deliriously at one point; spilling vodka on the floor at another while trying to refill somebody else's glass; at least I did not at any point break out into song.

The rest of the week has been consumed in group projects and meetings of such and rushing those; admittedly, though, I do tend to spend a lot of time laying plans and preparations and then when the time comes to do the thing, I'm over-prepared for contingencies that never happen, and at the same time woefully unprepared for some terribly obvious thing that I somehow managed to completely overlook. Today's an example, though it might have just been due to lack of sleep: I spent most of the last week or so reading review papers for the Biomaterials project and making little scribbled notes on sheets of note paper, then Wednesday to Thursday morning keying the notes into a Word document while they were still legible and remembered, then Thursday night turning it into about 14 slides' worth of PowerPoint slides, after which there was a Skype call with a couple friends that lasted 'til 4am (in my defense the PowerPoint was only completed around 3am or so). And then this morning I remembered that the group discussion meeting (with the professor in charge, too) would clash with a tutorial I had forgotten about because it's a fortnightly class. So I shot off an apologetic email, but forgot to attach the slides... and only remembered that when the class had already started and it was too late to go back and resend the email. Of course I did eventually resend it, but much too late.

Lots of other things are still awhirl, too; lots of stuff I should have got settled ages ago are still in the air, though they're settling; this weekend promises to be full of lack of sleep; tomorrow I am going to a place to which I've never gone before, which means I must make travelling plans, and on Monday I have another group meeting; on Tuesday I must present the PowerPoint which I have no feedback about; and on Wednesday I have two Crusade-related meetings (though those require a definitely different sort of planning) and one other, I think... and the Sunday after next is the 1st birthday celebration of the administrative assistant of the company where I interned, and I haven't decided whether to go yet...

Argh. Time passes, flying off and never coming back, and I am so full of things I ought to or have to do that I cannot do what I want. But maybe that's a good thing. I don't trust myself to want the correct things.