Panthera Sapiens Ellipsis: The Blog

Both Marsh and Easy Kill have made statements to the effect that I appear to be completely relaxed and stress-free. I didn't know that--and in any case anybody who reads this should know by now that I worry too much about too many things... apparently neither of them reads, though. Easy Kill spends a lot of time online and Marsh... well, Marsh is going the way of Gene. Apparently my habit of sleeping through uninteresting classes (Economics and Chemistry, so far) has given them the erroneous impression that I'm perfectly able to cope with anything the professors happen to throw at us in the way of information, and now they seem to regard me as some sort of incredibly lazy demi-genius. I had to shatter that impression, but it made me wonder how I gave it off in the first place... It's easy to see that Marsh is stressed out; he insists on telling everybody he meets that "it's all about the effort you put in", that "school is difficult", that "he...

Is it not obvious yet that I have a math quiz tomorrow? I should be consolidating my scant knowledge of exact linear first-order ordinary differential equations by doing practice questions, but I'll be satisfied with knowing the principles and methods behind it... for now anyway. If I ever have the time to--or if I ever make the time to--I shall fill up my logbook with those questions. But now isn't the time to do that... In fact now isn't even the best time to blog, but I see my blog very often and not having something new up there rankles somehow. And besides, going on an unannounced hiatus would defeat my purpose of having this blog in the first place. Even if said hiatus was caused by exams or whatever. It's been slightly more than a month now since I and a whole slew of freshies arrived in NTU, and... the changes are startling. People are falling back into the old routines of study life, while somehow balancing it with suppers and extra-curricular activities, and m...

[Monday, May 14] ...you know it's not going to be a good day when your first thoughts on waking up are, "Shit, it's Monday". I suppose being late--again--does things to my mood. I don't particularly like being late. Then again, it's been a pretty OK time so far apart from when the Brats are around--I guess they have some sort of allergy to human decency or something. I've been receiving loads of letters the past few weeks, mostly from universities in the UK--even though I'm definitely not going to any of them anymore since I've decided on NTU, I haven't told them yet because I haven't found a suitably tactful way of saying No. Even if it's to a computer... anyway, so I've got loads of letters waiting for me at the Gorillas' every week when I go back. I don't usually look forward to those all that much, since they're like an instant guilt trip, but this week I got something nicer--a letter from myself. I should probably e...

[Monday, April 30] I wonder if I should sign up for this year's Copa di IBA. It's not like I'm going to do much good if I join anyhow, though--Claus has already told me that the way I play, I'm a liability to the team. Apparently because of the way I jump, people behind me are liable to have their eyes damaged... so unless I have a sudden improvement in style or technique or whatever it's called, I guess I'm not going to be on our delegation to the competition. Not that I mind. Sweat and sore limbs are not my cup of tea anyway--if possible, I'll probably just find a nice steeple hat somewhere and wear it there to keep the sun outta my face. I might even want to try and buy a (hooded!) trenchcoat or something in case it rains. It's a pity there aren't many shops selling ankle-length cloaks--I've always thought those looked kinda nice. Still, one has to make do with what one has... Things are definitely getting stressful around the office. With all...

[Monday, April 23] I received news on Saturday morning that I've been accepted to NTU for a bioengineering course. It does sound very attractive, of course; and my parents are all up in the air about it--it's been a long, long time since I got such happy emails from them, and (woot!) my father has finally approved me getting a laptop as long as I install some course-appropriate software (Herr Robson says all courses that end in "-engineering" require at least passing knowledge of Frontpage and/or SolidWorks) and Skype with the parents frequently. Both conditions are, I think, easily met, unless I wind up with rotten connection speeds or something. At any rate I suppose I'm quite contented with the way it's turned out--thank God! From my point of view, it's a miracle that I managed to get in there at all, since they are apparently a rather difficult school to get into. And it's nice to have the family seal of approval in it (though the laptop helps too)...

[Monday, April 16] CS Lewis wrote somewhere that God, if we may say so, is very unscrupulous. And I don't know whether I want to nod in agreement or start drafting legal agreements for God to sign... Well, I can't take God to court--He is perfectly just, after all, which makes my chances of winning that argument pretty slim--so I'm stuck with nodding madly and sighing. Actually I think God has been dropping those hints for awhile now, but He only chose this past week or so to start in on the nagging. Well, if you've been reading and you didn't doze off halfway through or click that handy little red X in the top right corner, you probably know I've been ranting a bit about the Brat. (Even the name I chose for him shows that.) And I've been ranting a bit about my uncle and his tendency to fly off the handle at what seems to be the merest of jolts... Yesterday in church, a song about thanking God for trials came up, and I found myself wondering what exactly I w...

[Monday, April 9] I'm wet. I'm in an air-conditioned room. The air conditioner is on Oscillate, so it sometimes blows me and sometimes blows other places. I'm cold. I don't like being cold. It's my own fault anyway for running in the rain... OK, maybe I should explain. Remember a few posts ago when I mentioned one of my tasks being fetching cousins from tuition or school? Well, I just ran one of those errands. Now cast your mind back to the last post, where I mention the weather being unpredictable. Now you probably get the picture: I went out of the building and it was cloudy. (Fortunately my colleagues insisted on me bringing a little pink umbrella along.) By the time I got to my cousin's school (where she was waiting because she'd finished school), it was drizzling lightly. We went twenty paces away from school, and the wind and rain increased exponentially. I do declare the rain was almost horizontal by the time we had gone one hundred meters--and do rem...

[Monday, April 2] The weather these past few weeks has been most unpredictable, shifting back and forth between rain and wind and cloud and shine. It's not that I mind terribly--you ought to be very much aware by now that of the four, my least favourite is shine--but it does make things inconvenient when planning anything. Even hanging clothes becomes something of a challenge. (Especially because I have very few of those.) I have decided that I very much like midi files. They're small, they sound almost like the original song (but without singing), and they don't make my uncle scream "Noisy!!" every time he walks by. Well, he doesn't actually scream, because what he does is reach over and turn my volume down until probably only an owl could hear it... if the owl happened to have earphones on. It's rather annoying... so I spent a few hours over the weekend on the Gorilla's computer (my main link to the Net) downloading midi files. The nice thing about t...