pecks and whines.

I dont usually post conversation bits because i have the memory of a seventy-year-old. with dementia. with history of short-term memory loss. But once in a while, some bits stick. On the way to seminar this afternoon, i bumped into Laura:

L: The ducks at Langwith are much quicker than those in James.

Me: The ducks in James poop alot more than the ducks at Langwith.

L: Yea, and they peck at their own poop!

Me: Ducks dont peck.

L: Of course they do…Pecking Duck?

And it took me a while. Then i’d to reveal to my hitherto uninformed friend that aforementioned Duck is named after Peking. Not because ducks peck. I wonder if she just thought the computers used to type out menus just all did not have spell check. Hrm.

In other news, ive unwittingly volunteered to give a presentation of Tolstoy’s views on art next week. Why? Why! Woman, you could have just endured that thirty seconds of painful, awkward silence when everyone looks around, wondering who will ascend the sacrificial altar. Just endure the silence next time damnit. So now, in addition to a Philo of Science essay and a Philo of Art essay plan due next week, an LFA test this thursday, i have one Leo Tolstoy presentation coming up. And in parentheses, if i may add, the weather is finally looking cheerier!

it’s been awhile

You may have heard of Second Life - eh, i’d heard of it but fancied it like an adult-version of Neopets so scorned it like a genuinely -ahem- matured soon-to-turn-21 would. But some trait in my personality loves getting addicted to things – and i thought this would be a rather harmless distraction/addiction. So i morphed into Agnes Kuhn – my fancy cybergoth hottie. And realised how painfully boring it was. How could it possibly be massively popular!

Feeling a little like the one left out of a party, i searched for like-minded souls, and found this particularly amusing blog post -laughs- do read it:

Yesterday I downloaded something called Second Life. It is like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, except you can’t shoot anyone, and you can’t hit people. You just walk around. There are no prostitutes, and everything costs real money, and you can’t rob anyone to get money. You have to use your credit card, with real money, to buy fake money to use in the game. It’s not actually like Grand Theft Auto at all…

…

You could transform yourself into a giant penis for 200 fakebucks, but one could argue that you do that anyway by spending time in Second Life. I quit the game at this point, because my wife was sitting on the couch, and we were about ten minutes deep into a conversation about how we did not enjoy our Second Life. She installed it at about the same time I did, except she got bored and quit before leaving Initiation Island.

and with that, my brief flirtation with an online addiction ended.

***

and now – how many years has it been? – with some prodding from a friend, i find myself sitting here, mentally crafting an email to my person, a source of support from so, so many years ago. i cant believe it has been such a long while, and im halfway across the globe, yet still jogging on square one at the same time.

it is perhaps the idea that ive tried it all, and yes, things were exactly like you had foretold. teenage-hood pulls a hood over your eyes, and you dont realise how very wise the words of those older than you are. how much predictive value these words scarily carry. how my life had panned out exactly the way you’d clinically predicted. no, i didnt rise above it, i wasnt one of the special few that we all secretly believe we are.

chinese new year this year saw potluck at lin’s (ntuc yusheng!), one angbao from the elder (ailin). this week, in brief, and un-chronologically, was international cultural performance at derwent, drinks with ex-sem mates at the charles, an easy japanese lesson (finally!), the 21st birthdays of three of my closest friends, one unexpected (and uneasy) phonecall from a not-so-close non-friend, lunch with holly at benjy’s (another finally!), piano with Laura (my musicsoc membership is so underused) and hair-tearing philosophy readings.

home in less than 20 days. ive got to drum it into my head to watch the spending for the five weeks in singapore. its odd – curiously, i find my wallet unacceptable in singapore but perfectly alright in york. my horribly boring collection of clothes here suffices, but nothing ever really satisfies the palate when im home :x have got to learn. contentment.

oy! wot makes you ‘appy?

im a morning grouch – blarring birds and the uninvited sunlight interrupting sleep just dont make me much of a lil miss sunshine :x but today! this morning, scuttling off for my lecture, the world greeted us all with a fluttering fleece blanket of pure, white snow. just listen, even the word ‘snow‘ itself (‘xue’ or ‘shuang‘ in mandarin) sounds so unblemishedly elegant!

it is all too easy to forget how we can get by with just absolutely nothing; this human instinct to hoard, its so debilitating, so gnawing, and yet so gratifying. over drinks at the Charles (a pub just off-campus), we got to talking about hoarding. um, it seems most socially-acceptable to confess that you hoard books, because phwoah, geeks are In this season, dude. so yes, i do hoard books, with the intention of curling up with them in bed one fine night. but these potential lovers have all been relegated either to boxes under the table or to the shelves. but book hoarding isnt too embarrassing a idiosyncrasy; i hoard downloaded tv shows, i would like to hoard clothes, i stupidly hoard cereal (and subsequently sell them to louis at a reduced price because the palate got bored), towels, i would like to hoard cash. but yea, the last on the list is not happening anytime soon -sad- and why? because i hoard other stuff that can only be bought with cash. what a conundrum.

in other news, just had my third Japanese CA, and am determined not to let this slip like Spanish sadly did! although i keep confusing some of the vocabulary: today i said ” i am reading coffee in a bicycle” as opposed to “i am drinking coffee in a coffee-shop” heh.

my happy place

theres something about starbucks. i dont know if its the genius pairing up with borders, the constant availability of trashy magazines, their caramel frapps, vanilla lattes, the pretty mugs or just the comfort in knowing you can lounge for hours (and potentially snag those red sofas!). i love it all! this term, i found another starbucks chum in nish (: when you dont think twice about spending more than 3 pounds for a coffee, you know you’ve crossed the line of no return. and ive even bought the passport for crossing this line – the starbucks topup card!

and whee! also had abit of fun today along with coffee. heh visited charlotte today and badgered her to lend me her apron! after my part-time work experiences, ive concluded im not one for the service industry. mainly because you dont get to be a grouch, and i’d like the option of grouching out sometimes. also because the customer always wins, and sometimes (grouch out days for isntance), i’d like to not be on the losing end. anyway!

why are aprons so unflattering :x on the therapist couch, the happy place always seems to be some faraway imaginary meadow where the daffodils are aplenty; my happy place is somewhere, thankfully, alot more tangible (:

who likes Percival.

ive always known the language of philosophy papers to be inaccessible; but this takes it way up a notch:

Hence it is the universal capacity for being communicated incident to the mental state in the given representation which, as the subjective condition of the judgement of taste, must be fundamental, with the pleasure in the object as its consequent…As the subjective universal communicability of the mode of representation in a judgement of taste is to subsist apart from the presupposition of any definite concept, it can be nothing else than the mental state present in the free play of imagination and understanding (so far s these are in mutual accord, as is requisite for cognition)…

after reading this through for the fifth time, im still nowhere closer to throttling the essence out of this ridiculously-inaccessible piece of work by Kant. Kant is annoying. Argh. And reading his works make my mind wander. Not wonder. Its crazy, the chains of associations that my distracted state takes me: Immanuel Kant. Why would someone name their child Immanuel? Thats one step worse than naming your child Percival. See, Percival would probably write inaccessible gibberish like this too.

I wonder if anyone actually likes the name Percival. Hrm. I actually do this subconscious thing sometimes where i nickname annoying people Percival – guys of course. Yea they generally dont know about these private nicknames but ive accumulated three Percys here in York. ‘Percys’ always come with their high horses, and usually are too smutty for their own good. Conversations with ‘Percys’ are a bore, and though they may be the perfect gentlemen, they make your skin crawl.

…And so the mind wanders.