haha done with first exam! stupid mgt 120h… was super peeved last night at the online practice tests’ horrendous, haphazard answer scheme which was probably done by a disgruntled, underpaid TA perpetuating his troubles on us students.

bah.

anyway MGT120H is history now whoop dee doo.

i woke up this morning with another silly dream which i seemingly had just before i awoke, where i was in this really lovely pristine white cafe with huge glass windows, cheerily lit by the sun’s rays from outside, yet managing to have this inexplicably peaceful shady feeling.

anyway, along with me in the cafe were all these other army guys dressed in their no.4 uniforms (thats the green camou uni’s)… and they were sitting at these nice round tables eating uh, cream cakes.

i remember walking around the room socializing with the army dudes (i was wearing a no. 4 myself) and like, shaking hands with a lot of people, and i very distinctly remember referring to myself as “lim pei” (ie. “your father”). haha.

and at the counter of the cafe was this big pastry / cake clear display shelf, with a lot of seedy-looking cream cakes… i REMEMBER looking into the crappy display and seeing this plate of big agar-agar (jelly) triangular blocks with a “$0.50″ sign in front of it.

haha and there was this mustachio-ed indian dude (who looked like he should be behind a mama stall or a prata joint) who was trying to sell me the cream cakes, but he was telling me, “eat these at your own risk, boy!” what kind of cake shop guy tells his patrons that!?

ha ha. am amused.

an army boy’s canteen break in heaven maybe? haha!

i turned 21 two hours ago…

this has been a good year. quite possibly the best in my entire life in terms of hmm coming into my own person and embracing my “will to power” instead of making excuses or whatever else. a year and a few months ago i still was such a total wuss bag. i think ive grown up since then.

21 is old, man.

… and the oddly negative gloomy thoughts still loom, thoughts about the past, about half-buried graves, about the future and rethinking, reconsidering a lot. im confused and dont know what to think about something. i know i need to be away from a lot of things, i havent had “alone time” in forever.

somehow in those two years spent alone in serangoon gardens (singapore), in all those hours lying alone on the sofa vegetating in front of the ps2 or at the computer… i developed a need for “alone time”. i need to be alone where i can do whatever i want and have no one to bother me.

haha. happy birthday indeed.

So I missed DAY ONE of the NBA Playoffs, I missed a Lebron triple double. Sheesh. Oh well…

Still, found this on youtube just now which is haha pretty lame… the “worst dunks ever in a dunk contest” vid… heh. Makes me feel good about myself knowing NBA players can be haha lame like this.

Nate Robinson’s 322398429 million missed attempts this year should be in it too haha.

Have been studying in manic fashion since Thursday morning, every waking hour. Realized underestimated amount of math have to cover, though am in not too shabby shape for rest of papers. Have already covered a third of ECO100. MGT shouldn’t be too bad too since the last test was just 3 weeks ago or so, and it covered the entire term’s work. PSY is going to be a bitch but if I read PSY whenever I’m not doing any other studying instead of say, a magazine, and treat PSY like recreational reading I’ll have time to finish this thing. Can’t wait for next Friday when have 2 papers down and can focus on math/eco and finish up these exams, ugh, though shouldn’t talk about finishing something I haven’t even started. This stuff is really getting to me, and for some reason all these truly stray thoughts keep creeping into the back of my head, all of a sudden all these nagging annoying doubts and whatever else. But will have to ignore all of these since I barely have the time to eat. Have been studying in manic fashion since Thursday morning.

I’ve been working like a manic, crazy man today. I don’t know if this is “hitting my stride” finally, or whether it’s that I had a little stress attack this afternoon.

It’s just as well, anyway, since my plans to go jogging didn’t work out at all since my calves are still on fire and I can’t even walk down the steps without heavily leaning on the banister. It was a nice day though, with the temps going up to 22 degrees, even though it got kinda cloudy later on. I ‘ve been sitting by my window all day, trying to get a slight tan.

I did so much work today, but I coulda done a lot more if not for the stupid negative panic attack I had mid-afternoon when realized that had underestimated amount of math would have to cover before exam next next week.

I had the weirdest dream last night, one which I remember very very vividly. I dreamt I was back in Raffles Institution at the Junior Block, only that it was a lot more metallic and industrial and had all these crazy twisted elevated walkways crisscrossing across the atrium. Instead of being just four storeys high it reached up a lot, lot higher now.

From where I stood among the metallic walkways I saw this big group of classmates playing around, throwing stuff at each other, running here and there, but they weren’t necessarily my RI classmates, but like, kids from all the classes I had ever been in. I can’t remember who I saw in that uh big classmate group but I just know it had people from all over the place in it.

I remember turning around and seeing my old form teacher, Mrs. Albar gliding across one of the walkways above me in her usual regal silk traditional Malay get-up, yelling menacingly at some students to be quiet.

The next thing I knew I was on the top level of the Junior Block, trying to make my way around the perimeter walkway surrounding the big gaping atrium. Now, I used to be pretty freaked out back in secondary one when my classroom was on the top floor there, because it To make things worse, in my dream the walkway was a hell of a lot narrower, didn’t have railings, and had uh… water flowing over it, coming from these little fountains in the wall, so that the walkway was more like the edge of this big wide gentle waterfall. I know it sounds weird as heck, especially if you’ve been to the Junior Block. Haha. It was kinda scary in my dream however, because I kept slipping and losing my footing near the edge.

Anyway, I make my way to the end of the walkway somehow, where the toilets should be, and I enter the toilet door and step into a huge cavernous jungle-room with hanging vines and a big clear pool of water in the middle, with a couple of lifeguards (who looked like those Sentosa slacker-lifeguards) standing at the sides of the pool. I remember wading into the pool for a bit.

Somehow, I exit that room back into the main area of the Junior Block, walk up to one of the classroom doors and open it and uh… lo and behold, I found myself walking up a beach path. There were all these people playing volleyball and soccer around me, and their stray balls kept coming my direction. I picked them up and threw them back, one by one, but to my horror I couldn’t throw the balls back properly… I forgot how to throw a proper chest pass in my dream, so I threw all the balls back wayyy short or off-target, or really noobishly. How embarrassing.

Then I woke up.

Haha what a weird ass dream.

It’s a nice day today, so I went jogging at the lake… there’s a park right across the road that connects to the lake, and this neat, biiig marsh which is really nice in the summer.

Spring is here, and it’s great and everything to be out again. I hadn’t gone to the park/marsh since 2003, even though I’ve been back here for more than half a year now. My leg’s finally okay, and what little snow there was this year is gone too.

A perfect day indeed. I saw so many people walking their dogs… and I like, in the little stream by the path I was jogging on I saw these 2 more-than-a-foot-long salmon(?) swimming up against the current!!!

I know how wrong this sounds but I really felt like hopping in and uh, fishing one of them out of the water like a grizzly bear. Haha. The water was barely 15-20 cm deep and still kinda muddy so I don’t think the bugger woulda had much chance.

Sigh… Fun stuff. Whee.

I’ll say it now, and I’ve said it a million times before: people are inexplicably attracted to “bad”, dangerous types, like moths to a flame they know will burn them. And they still gravitate toward them. I could go on for more than a whole page on just why people tend to fall for people who “are bad for them”, but I won’t. But I will say this:

I know. I’ve warned so many of my friends from getting involved with “bad boys” or (hmm…) “bad girls”, but it never works, and months or even weeks later, I usually can’t bear to go “I told you so but nooo… someone had a better idea” into the face of someone who’s already in tears, a crumpled wreck of a girl almost convulsing with sobs, or even worse, a drunk emo-guy swearing “@£%@£%% bitch” loud enough so that everyone in a 3 or 4 table radius knows his whole sordid tragic tale.

I’ve told a number of my female friends this, but I’m going to go on the record to say that I am a pretty good- no, I am THE authoritahhh on bastardy guys; it takes one to know one, and being quite the asshole myself (if I may toot my own horn juuust a little bit), believe me: I would know.

So when you come to me and tell me what I truly, honestly think about the guy in class who’s giving you “mixed feelings”, or the assistant manager at the cafe you work at with the badly tinted hair who’s kind-of-hitting-on-you but is being a creep to you at work…

… and I, in my not-so-infinite wisdom say something along the lines of “He’s a total scumbag. Stay away. Listen to me.” do you know what you should do?

Listen. Or turn a deaf ear to me, and wince as my words nyaaah kick you right back in the nuts a month or two in the future.

Because I won’t go Paula Abdul on you and say something airheaded like “Oh he’s niiice. He dresses so nicely!”

And neither will I start gesticulating wildly and proclaiming, “He mah main man! He cool! I’m feelin’ this guy, yknowwhatmsayin’?” a la Randy whatshisname.

I will say what counts, because I am your friend and I mean well. And because, being a rather big dumbass myself, I can usually smell unclefucker a mile away.

I’m not saying that I have great foresight, or that I am really well-read or anything - hell, I’m a commerce student - but I know my assholes, allright. I’ll say it again: I will say what counts. Even if it might be “mean”.

In other words, I am the Simon Cowell of dumbschmuck / skankyhoe judging.

What I’m saying is this: I do make mistakes, I do misjudge people sometimes. However, unlike everyone else who might make the same judgements or misjudgements that I make, but mask them in saying nice, sweet things… unlike them, I’m not that nice a person. So I probably won’t go “oh that’s nice of him/her…”; I’ll tell you what I truly, truly feel.

Because I’ve been hurt before by my own stupidity and if I see you falling into that same trap, I will try to pull you out - but if you try to bite my hand instead, I will let go.

It is funny, when someone “refutes” your opinion with bludgeoning, short-sighted dogmatic prattle without truly comprehending what you wrote, thereby missing the point completely by virtue of being blinded by self-righteous desire to… to what, be proven the better man? With facts that claim to refute your opinions but instead stand harmoniously beside them, at that.

It is funnier, and more than a bit ironic, when that person who has attempted to browbeat you into intellectual submission not by wit, but by unprofessional insults, has himself bemoaned the “infringement of Liberty”.

Liberty, my friend, is infringed when an attack is made to crush someone else’s point of view, no matter how flawed that point of view may be, in the form of slander, censorship, etc.

Check your slate before you pick up stones next time.

. . .

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s flawed yet brilliant first work, The Birth of Tragedy, had its credibility dented shortly after it was published by a contemporary of his, Wilamowitz, who published a lengthy essay critiquing Nietzsche’s work, blasting it for its lack of proper footnotes and references, unscientific methods and unacademic style. Wilamowitz’s critique was his first book, his own fledgeling attempt to carve his own little niche in the academic world - and this he did, while succeeding in tainting Nietzsche’s academic professional credibility.

Today, however, more than a hundred years after his death, the immortal Nietzsche’s writings have spawned a cult-like religious following worldwide, among whose number I proudly count myself. As for Wilamowitz, he remains a mere footnote, a forgotten skid mark on Nietzsche’s road to greatness.

. . .

I may fall sometimes, I may stumble in the potholes of this path that I walk; but I walk nonetheless.

Those who stone me from the dark comforting confines of their cave, who throw blind stones at things they cannot begin to fathom… they don’t.

The cave never seemed cosier, has it?