Finally, it’s recess week. And now, I don’t even know why I looked forward to recess week in the first place. I think there’s a reason why they dubbed it “recess week” and not “mid-term break”. Recess week is for everyone to catch up with their tutorials. And for those who are already up to speed with their tutorials, the good people in the offices of NUS threw in a batch of Mid-Term Tests for everyone to revise for. So using the word “break” would have been a bit of an mockery.
Which is why I continued working non-stop throughout the week, and all that work is about to culminate later today, where I will finally be able to execute my big plan – my “Plan to Do Nothing”!
~Evil laughter~
Yes! For the first time in 7 weeks, I shall defy the values of the model NUS undergraduate, and do absolutely nothing but sit in front of a big plasma screen and couch potato-rise myself, after which, I shall die a painful, gruesome death on Tuesday, when my first MTT starts!
~More evil laughter~
Well, that last bit wasn’t really part of the plan, but I have this inkling that I might not do so well. I’ve been making so many mistakes in my practice papers. You know the kind of careless mistakes that make you want to hurl yourself out of a moving train repeatedly? Yeah, those kinds of mistakes. I can’t even do integration problems properly now – I just can’t see the patterns anymore. And the thing is, despite all the careless mistakes, I’m really not that tired I think. I wake up so late into the day, I’m starting to have trouble falling asleep at night.
And speaking of sleep, I had this really weird dream last night. Well, it wasn’t exactly a dream. I woke up in the middle of the night, and my brain just started to obsess about everything and anything that didn’t matter. You know, like “What would happen if I downloaded this podcast? What if it isn’t very interesting at all and it just wastes space that would otherwise be used to store some other more exciting podcast? Oh no! What am I gonna do?!” You know, just things that just don’t matter. And no matter how much I tried to drive all those thoughts out of my head and get some sleep, I couldn’t! I was just lying there in bed, looking out the window, watching the sky turn blue and driving myself crazy.
I did get some more sleep in the end though. Woke up the next morning and said to myself, “what was THAT all about?”
Strange.
Wonder if it’ll happen again…
So I celebrated my birthday with my family at Jack’s Place with a very nice piece of steak. I love steak. Mmm… Anyway, it was a pretty good day, since I didn’t do any work at all, which also meant I had to make up for it throughout the following week. To come to think of it, I think I’m starting to get the hang of this. I’m feeling more relaxed, but that could be a side effect of constantly feeling so exhausted, and I’ve just completed all my assignments yesterday! I feel so proud of myself…
So anyway, my dad gave me this:
It’s the new iPod classic! And it is so cool. I mean, this thing has 4 times the storage space of my old Pentium 2 (I actually miss that old museum piece), and it’s so thin! The sound quality wasn’t as good as I had expected, but still very good nonetheless, and so is the user interface, especially if a lot of your songs have album art, because it’ll be displayed as you browse through your music library. And now, the iPod has an aluminium surface instead of the old glossy plastic surface found on the previous iPod, but the lack of a protective case is still a pretty big omission when you consider how easily the chrome backing of the iPod can get scratched. Unlike the PSP, which made shops so enthusiastic that they sold protective cases even before the handheld itself was released, there’s nothing in stores right now that actually fits the iPod Classic, so I’ll have to wait a couple of weeks before I head back to the shops in search of that elusive leather protective case.
As you can see from the above picture, my camera-phone produces very noisy pictures. But that’s not my point here. I have become addicted to Red Bull. It’s nice actually, and it has taurine! Did you know that cats need taurine? Because if they don’t take enough of it, they’ll turn blind. But don’t worry – if you can read this, there is a good chance that you are not a cat, so you won’t be turning blind anytime soon. And even if you were a cat, you don’t have to drink Red Bull to avoid turning blind, unless you’re vegetarian.
What a load of bull I just typed in that last paragraph…
But I’m drinking a lot of it because of a lot of late nights spent doing work and chatting online (mostly work… Really!), and I don’t wanna fall asleep during lectures. Coffee makes me feel a bit bloated, and I ended up not eating too much during my next meal, so Red Bull is the next best thing. Plus it tastes kinda nice. Well, it doesn’t really give you a sudden burst of energy or anything, but it does keep you awake. Or maybe it’s just a placebo effect…
So there goes week 6. Up next is recess week. Notice they don’t call it “mid-term break” because everyone’s gonna be studying for the mid-term tests, which comes right after the week is done. I’m starting to wonder how I’m gonna study for the tests right now, because I don’t quite know the coverage for some of the tests. But I guess we’ll soon see how that works out.
Today was the first mid-term test, and I messed up. And I am almost as pissed as I was after my Physics paper during the “A” Levels, because the exact same thing happened! This one question. I knew what to do, but I took the wrong approach to the question. And when I realised what the correct approach was, it was already too late. On top of that, I was too damn blind to read some of the information that was printed in the question and I omitted it.
The test was there for the taking, I could’ve nailed it without a problem, but I left it there. And unlike the “A”s, I’m not gonna pull off another “Lazarus” this time for sure – the paper had just 2 questions, and with one question gone to the dumps, the whole paper’s pretty much fucked. I messed up. I didn’t do my best. And I’m gonna have to pay for it.
Bad day.
Bad week.
In fact, it was a bad month.
And we’re just getting started…
Filed under: Tech
I came across this article on CNet yesterday by chance, and I just found out that Apple released, among other things, it’s new iPod lineup this weekend, with more colours for the iPod Shuffle, a shorter and fatter iPod Nano and the iPod Touch, which is basically the iPhone without the phone function – a faux-iPhone if you will. But what really caught my attention was the new 6th generation iPod, dubbed the “iPod Classic“. With a full metal exterior, it’s thinner, prettier, and the battery lasts longer too. And it comes with either 80GB or 160GB of storage space.
(Photo: Apple)
I haven’t stopped drooling since…
Tutorial sessions started on week 3, and since then, assignments have been flooding in. I haven’t had a real weekend since term started, and I don’t think I’m about to have any too soon. I’ve reduced my involvement with CSS, but it isn’t helping too much – I barely managed to complete all my assignments, bar 5 sociology readings, on the Sunday of week 3. I think I’ve just about given up on the sociology coursepack. It’s too time-consuming, and also very difficult to understand.
As you can tell from the bland language of this post, 4 continuous weeks of working flat-out is seriously getting to me. It’s not stress – it’s fatigue. Sure, I’ve had a few breaks here and there, like that one hour of Grey’s Anatomy I watched on Wednesday, and Engin bash at Attica (which was somewhat humiliating, but a lot of fun nonetheless) with some of my O-Week groupmates…
Speaking of those groupmates, I’d truly be at sea without them. Fiji rocks too! But I just don’t see you guys around as much as I see these people. Just being around them makes me feel happier (which probably goes to show how miserable I’m getting), and it reminds me that I’m not alone, which really means a lot to me. So to Jude, Vincent, Kevin, Nikki, Yujun, Charlene, Yiyang, and the rest of the “Astroboy” crew, and also to Zhaolin and Eugene, thank you all so much for being there to distract me from my studies with your inane chatter. Hahaha! Really! I mean it! You guys are a big part of what keeps me going.
Anyway,
…Grey’s and Attica. That was pretty much all the breaks I’ve had. No PSP, no drums, no net surfing (except for the next post, haha…). The first mid-term assessment starts in 6 days, and I have no idea how I’m gonna fit in some revision time into my already busted-up schedule.
I’m starting to hate my life, but if I stop now, I’ll start hating myself. So what should I do?
Floor the throttle, and hope it doesn’t give.
