Panthera Sapiens Ellipsis: The Blog

[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...

[Monday, March 26] Over the last weekend, two deaths came to my knowledge, both due to cancer. One was of a 3-year-old kid, succumbing to some form of cancer that tends to strike infants; one was a 67-year-old man, succumbing to skin cancer. Both were Christians. I found out about both through SMS. Both were prayed for, but both, obviously, died. I was one degree apart from each, connected to the child through the Gorilla and to the man through one of the teachers from RBS. I attended neither's funeral or wake, though I hope both went well... What I'm trying to say here is that all deaths seem to be very much the same. The manner in which they occur vary slightly, but in all cases the result is identical: a hunk of meat... Well, people have been dying for thousands of years in all sorts of ways, and I expect fully to follow in the tradition. Except I don't think my own will be too conventional... well, if I must be remembered then I might as well be remembered for having a ...

[Tuesday, 20th March] I still can't quite bring myself to believe that I've already been at work for almost a month now. But then I've fallen into the routine so easily that I might have been doing this forever. Of course I hardly see anybody outside my uncle's family now, except on weekends when I get into a flurry of social activity (which, rather unsurprisingly, includes staying on MSN Messenger into the wee hours of the night) or go shopping for whatever I think I want this week. There seems to be a bit of a sale on at the moment, though, so I don't eat into my finances too much. ...Right now seems like a pretty good time to go into depression, actually, what with the STPM and SPM results just coming out and my green-eyed monster going into hyperactivity. *sigh* I have a feeling I'm going to be struggling with this one for a long, long time. I don't like it--it's depressing and it always activates my inner Mom's voice ("If only you'd stu...