ive been meaning to blog for awhile, but there always seems to be a lack of time. well i am one who believes that time can never been a good excuse, so slap me on that one.
packing my room for the past 2 hours has been rather, stupid. i now feel tired and dumb cos i'm waking up 6 hours later for tennis. yes friday morning tennis, the perks of having no friday class. well i suppose it didn't seem like such a bad idea to start packing my room since i felt in the mood to do so. but it was probably a bad idea to be starting at about midnight.
i've too much stuff and memento that i want to keep. yes i'm a hoarder. probably need a big big storeroom when i get my own pad.
in any case. this is a better post than the previous. and i've no idea how to label this. how do you fit such posts into anywhere?
clinging onto my audit textbook today on the train was quite an embarrassing experience - i wanted to hide the fact that i was an accountancy student, but the alternative was walter woon's company law, plus the audit text was way heavier - i didn't want my bag to snap. i also believe that the expats speaking in a foreign tongue were sneering at my audit textbook, the same way i'd do if i ever spotted one in the future.
weird feeling. but i suppose it points me away from one career path.
pot calling the cattle black.
:: kiathy. 1:50 pm [+] ::
::::
...
:: Tuesday, September 11, 2007 ::
there's been much talk that the 911 tragedy has been overhyped, and that it's been going on for far too long. memorials have been shifted to other places, families have been told to move on. but i suppose only personal tales can tell part of the story and how, even 6 years on, it still hurts.
September 9, 2007
Modern Love
Passage to India, by Way of an Elevator
By KATHERINE RUSSELL RICH
THEY say that in a different language you become a different person, but in Hindi I’d barely gotten a handle on the subjunctive and already I wasn’t myself. This first became apparent in an East Village restaurant where some friends had taken me for a bon voyage party. The spring before, I’d signed a contract to write a book about learning Hindi, a language I’d been studying on a lark. Now I was about to go off to India, to live there for a year and document the process.
The idea for the book had seemed exotic when I was writing the proposal, ingenious when the pages were going around, but then the deal went through, and now it struck me as deranged. A brochure had arrived from the school where I had enrolled, complete with tips on what to substitute for toilet paper. I read it and realized an obvious fact: I had not been in my right mind.
That night at the bar, with my departure fast approaching, I was a slumped-down portrait of misery, but then a troop of firemen came clomping into the place, all of them attractive in the extreme. They’d been called in to revive a guy at the bar, a heroin addict, best I could tell, who’d begun a slow-motion dive toward the floor; presently, he was stuck midway. Once they ascertained that the guy had some time to go before he hit, they put off first-aid procedures and took to flirting with our table.
“Hey, ladies,” one called over. “You taking bets on when he’ll land?”
“Hey, ladies,” another said, “this is like dinner theater for you, huh?”
They broke to shout “Hey, hey!” at the addict, and then the oldest one strolled over.
HEY, ladies, how’s the food?” he asked with the air of a maître d’, as if this inquiry was part of his job. He had a raspy voice, dirty blond hair and a fine straight nose; in my dazed state, he resembled one of the men in tights in a 15th-century Tuscan painting.
My usual response in a situation like this would be to examine my fork. But I was no longer who I’d usually been. I was now someone who behaved rashly. “Why don’t you join us?” I heard myself say.
“Why don’t you go on a date with me?” he replied.
“O.K.,” I answered calmly, suavely, with the ease borne of oxygen deprivation. I’d never done anything remotely like this. But change your language, you change your life.
He produced a pen. I wrote down my number.
We met in the upstairs of a low-lit Italian restaurant. He had on a suit and tie. He looked as if the tag on his shirt was itchy, or maybe that was projection on my part, for that was about how I felt. Up until now I’d been out only with men who could be described as creative types: a performance artist who hung naked over jacaranda flowers and stabbed himself in the chest, people like that. On a date like this, I wasn’t sure what you were supposed to talk about.
He led with his best shot, stories about his uncle who was in the mob. Then I did, too. I wrote his name in Devanagari script on a napkin. I’d been immersed in Hindi too long, or else I’d dated too many men of the creative kind, but I honestly believed this was a come on.
“Yo, really? That’s how you make a ‘p’?” he said with extreme politeness.
We had so little in common, it made the evening heady. “India!” he said when I mentioned my plan. “India? You mean like with elephants?”
I didn’t take offense when he said he disliked journalists, adding, “with all due respect,” since after all, I was one. He told me about the time he’d grabbed a baby from a burning room and raced him down five flights. When he got to the ground, he tried to hand the child off to the first man he saw, but the man, a reporter, refused to take him.
He shook his head. “Yeah, I’ll give you an interview,” he told the memory of the man now. “Yeah, I’ll give you one.”
He told me how he planned to open a small business when he retired in three years, one with a fail-safe gimmick. I can’t say what the gimmick was, because he held out his pinkie, linked it with mine, and made me do swears. He said he had never been out of the country before, but was thinking of traveling to Italy.
I tried to imagine us in Italy or even together, period, in three years. I decided, maybe I could. True, all I got when I tried to imagine it was a split screen—me on one side returned and speaking Hindi, him doing swears. But stranger things have happened. In fact, stranger things had been happening to me all year.
When I thought about what we should do next, though, I was overcome with exhaustion. We’d been dive-bombing in and out of each other’s worlds, and while I wanted to meet again, right then I had to go to bed.
“I’ve got my car. I’ll give you a ride,” he said gallantly. It was a ride with a detour: he first had to stop at the station for no reason other than, I’m pretty sure, that he wanted to show the guys he was on a date. But when we arrived, no one was there. He brought me out an F.D.N.Y. T-shirt, then we sat in the car and waited. Eventually a firetruck roared up, and I met a sweet and courtly old guy, the captain, and shook hands with the rest of the troops.
After that, he took me home, and on my doorstep he said, “I want to come up.” We argued the pros and cons. The con, to me, was that I’d just met him. The pro, to him, was that he really wanted to. Finally I broke the stalemate. I turned and said I had to go.
“Wait,” he said. “Wait.” And he nodded at a massive brick apartment complex across the street, a soaring behemoth with four towers. “If I can get us up to the roof over there, will you go up and make out with me?”
I asked how he thought he’d do that.
He smiled. “I have the fire key.”
Everyone has his threshold, they say, and it turns out in this new incarnation, mine wasn’t very high. “The fire key!” I said. “Well, O.K.”
We sneaked in the front door, crept by the doorman, pushed a button. The elevator whisked us to the top. But when we got there, the fire key wouldn’t work. “All right, that’s it,” I said. “I’m going.”
“Wait,” he said. “If I can stop the elevator, what about that? Will you make out with me in there?”
“How are you going to do that?” I said, laughing conspiratorially.
We got back in, and for at least 20 minutes, we kissed up there in the air.
And this would have been one of the great moments of my romantic life, except for one fact he’d overlooked: when you stop one elevator with a fire key, you stop them all. Every lift in the system, on a Saturday night, when residents are trying to get home.
We caught up with this information as soon as the elevator landed and the doors opened on a sea of angry people. Worse, they’d all been watching us on the elevator cam.
“Hey, you can’t stop the elevator like that!” a sniffy-sounding man in his pajamas cried. He was holding an aggrieved-looking dog. “Just because you’re a fireman, you can’t use the key that way. No you can’t. O.K., I’m calling the police.”
He meant business, you could tell. I looked over to see what my date would do. But my date was a New York City boy. What he did was bluff. No matter what anyone said, he’d answer, “Waddya mean?” Waddya mean, waddya mean, until he got them all arguing. Then he leaned down, grabbed my hand and whispered, “Run.”
We cut through the crowd. We bolted out the door. A siren that had been faint in the distance was wailing louder and louder. We flew across the street and scrambled onto my doorstep just as the police car pulled up, then we stood motionless in the dark. “You know what?” he said, between gulps of air. “Now you have to let me up.”
I shot a glance over my shoulder. “You know what?” I said. “Now I do.”
Upstairs, he had me keep the lights off. We crouched by the window and peered down. We said, “Can you believe that?” We laughed and breathed in the August night air until motion in the gray light below caught our eye, men in uniforms returning to the car. Then he flung the window screen up and told me to yell down, “You won’t take me alive, copper!”
And I did, without a moment’s thought, because by then it was clear that I was so far out of my formerly right mind, no way anyone would.
When the coast was clear, I said I had to turn in. At my door, we kissed some more, then exchanged addresses. We said we’d write.
I LEFT for India. It was apparent to me only sometime after what that night had been: a moment of pure, shining glee, the kind that can happen only right before everything changes, that can take full shape only then, because such distilled purity can be obtained only in retrospect, in an aftermath.
On Sept. 6, 2001, I arrived in Delhi. Five days later, everything changed.
Friends back home diligently phoned everywhere they could think of to find out if he was alive, to no avail. Finally a friend’s 82-year-old husband tottered down to the fire station and learned: he’d survived. He had been out of the country, in fact, on a first-ever trip abroad — spontaneously booked that week.
I wrote, said how very relieved I had been to hear he was all right. A letter arrived. He’d lost 92 friends, he said. Everyone we had met that night, including the captain, had been killed. He said to call him when I was home again. When I was home again, I did. Several times, but while each time he would say, “Yeah, yeah, we should,” a meeting never took place. Finally I saw that a meeting never would. Because by that time, he was no longer there.
He had already, and some time back, entered another world.
Katherine Russell Rich lives in Manhattan. Her second book, “Unspeakable: A Story About India and Life in Other Words,” is to be published next year by Houghton Mifflin.
i'd like to travel eastern europe next year, considering i've covered a few of the west and central. any followers?
So near and yet so far
Michael Palin has already travelled around the world, from pole to pole and across the Himalayas. Here he explains what drove him to make his latest odyssey, from Estonia to Albania - across the 'new Europe'
In Slovenia it was the Month of Asparagus, in Turkey men wrestled in olive oil. In Poland I went on stage dressed as a three-year-old and in Germany I engaged with the great debate about whether men should stand or sit to pee. One starts with such high hopes, but reality is a fickle thing and makes fools of us all.
It was not my intention to do another journey. It never is. At the end of my TV series Around the World in 80 Days I said I wouldn't do anything like that again, and I said the same thing for the five series that followed it. I shall doubtless say the same after Michael Palin's New Europe. So why do I bother to lie? Why don't I just get the bag out, get down to the airport and get on with it? Part of the problem is that it's hard work and takes me away from home. Yet even as I write this I realise these are two of the main reasons I enjoy it. I love my home and my family dearly, but I'm aware that love grows in direct proportion to the amount of time I spend away. And as for the hard work, I need it to combat a dangerous tendency to sit in cafes, read books, have long lunches and watch all five days of a Test match.
And of course I learn a lot from my travels. Things I wouldn't learn at home, like how to survive on five hours' sleep a night, how to distinguish yoghurt from mayonnaise in hotel buffets, and how to say sorry in Pashtun.
But sharing my travels with large numbers of people across the world, on film and on the page, is something else altogether, and carries with it a whole lot of anxieties that have to be wrestled with before each new departure. Like what I should be telling people and why. What is my agenda? What is my purpose? What can I possibly tell the world that the Charles Wheelers, Colin Thubrons, Dervla Murphys and the like haven't already told them?
But this way madness lies. I have, for the past six series, found that it is better not to be too self-conscious. My approach, and it's one I'd urge on any would-be travel writer or journalist stepping on to a foreign dockside, is be yourself, and see where it gets you.
I like to travel as light as possible. I try not to go out with too many prejudices or come back with too many opinions. I'm frequently approached by people who want to know how travel has changed me and what great insights I might have had on dusty roads and in blazing sunsets. Now I no longer even try to make up an answer. Any journey away from the room you're sitting in will increase the potential for coming upon the unexpected and occasionally wonderful, but that's not to equate travel with ultimate enlightenment or universal solutions, any more than breathing will ensure you become president of the US. It helps, but that's about all. I've learned that what I like about travel is that it doesn't sort everything out. Actually, it doesn't sort anything out. Where there was certainty, it sows uncertainty, where there is conviction, it sows doubt, where there is comfort, it sows heat rash. It's just that being in unfamiliar surroundings watching unfamiliar activity is something I find, on the whole, deeply refreshing.
This sort of floppy, undemanding reasoning is why I usually end up packing my bag for some sort of journey, somewhere, even though I've said I'm not going to. And as I always take a notebook when I travel, why not a camera - especially one wielded as skilfully and discreetly as my old friend Nigel Meakin's? And how nice to have someone record the sounds that no notebook can ever capture. And wouldn't it be nice to have someone to share laughter, decisions and food with, someone who's not a stranger to adventure and recklessness, but will leave you alone when required? In short, why not take a film crew ?
In the case of New Europe, however, things were a little different. Since we'd last been on the road together in April 2004, the Saga factor had kicked in. I was about to turn 63 and aware of Nigel, my cameraman, being hard on my heels, and sound recordist John Pritchard not far behind. Meanwhile, Roger Mills, my hugely experienced director, was well on course to be our only septuagenarian. After two years away from each other, advancing age might well, I thought, result in polite "No thank-you"s all round, unless the new series could be set entirely in deckchairs. (John Pritchard had indeed come up with a title for such a series: Death by Luxury.)
I was quite wrong. There were not only "Yes please"s but "When do we start?"s. Indeed, some were keen to make this trip as tough as any of the others, and for a while South America was in the frame. But then there was the Archie factor. When we were planning the series, my wife and I were expecting our first grandchild, who was due to emerge less than two months before the start of filming. Working within a few hours' flying time from home no longer seemed optional, but essential.
So I started looking very seriously at Europe, the only continent our journeys had not yet covered and which we normally flew over in half-darkness while returning from Bangladesh or Bamako. Western Europe was overvisited, but the east, the half of Europe that used to be concealed behind the Iron Curtain, was much more promising. It also fulfilled one of the main criteria for choice of journey, being somewhere as new to me as it probably would be to most of my audience.
But I sensed that eastern Europe remained a turn-off for many people, for whom it would always be a state of mind rather than a location. Himalaya tripped nicely off the tongue and had an exotic, escapist image. Say eastern Europe, and Soviet tanks rather than snow-capped mountains come to mind. However, the more closely I looked at the countries we might visit, the more I realised what exciting things were happening there. Half a continent was being transformed. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the number of countries in eastern Europe doubled. And it's not just new names on the map, but new political systems, new currencies, new ideas, new problems.
In fact the N-word was repeated so often in what I read and heard that I realised it could be the hook for the series. If eastern Europe evoked a dour and shackled past, new Europe, or, as we say in television, New Europe, suggested present and future. Horizons of hope. Around the beginning of 2006, as our two directors and their respective location managers began to make their first visits to the eastern half of Europe, things began to fall into place. Countries suspicious of visitors for 50 years proved welcoming and cooperative. There were people who had great stories to tell and were eager to tell them. Word came back of landscapes like the Danube delta, the Carpathian mountains, Transylvania, Cappadocia and the Curonian Spit, as beautiful as any we'd seen in the wider world, and much less well known.
So a series of six episodes fell quite quickly into place. (It has since become seven.) The BBC accepted it. Archie Palin arrived, and evoked such a primal rush of adoration that I couldn't possibly have imagined working a continent away from him. And on the first day of filming none of us arrived at Heathrow with stick or Zimmer frame.
At risk of breaking the Trades Descriptions Act, I have to admit that new Europe proved very much a story of old Europe. The past intruded on almost every conversation we had and in every town we filmed. Not the quaint past of cobbled streets and church spires (though there was plenty of that), but the raw and shocking past of the 20th century. We in the west have fought and suffered through two world wars, but in eastern Europe the misery was prolonged and relentless. The first of our journeys, which took us down through the former Yugoslavia, was a reminder of how recently Europeans were fighting each other. As late as 1999, our boys were bombing Belgrade. In Sarajevo we talked to people in streets that were death traps only 13 years ago. The eloquent and painstaking leader of a Bosnian mine-clearance team was the same man who had planted some of the mines in the first place. A young Serbian told me that her people had no hatred for others in the Balkans, but then, with a look of bitter frustration, added that the same mentality that had brought Milosevic to power was taking things in that direction again. In the former Yugoslavia, the hurt is so recent that optimists can only hold their breath.
Much of the rest of east and central Europe was brutalised 50 or more years earlier and some of the pain is receding, partly due to the candid, unsensational but comprehensive preservation of concentration camps, torture cells and grim historical records, which make both complacency and denial that much more difficult.
Cities of great history and culture such as Gdansk, Warsaw, Dresden, Budapest and Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad) were devastated not just by Nazi and Soviet armies on the ground but by Allied bombers from the air.
And it went on. Eleven years after the war ended, thousands were rounded up and killed in Hungary following the unsuccessful uprising of 1956. As recently as 1991, people died under guns and tanks in Lithuania. There was civil war in the young republic of Moldova in 1992 when Transnistria broke away. All across the east of Europe the 20th century was a pattern of retribution disguised as liberation.
But in this new century a fragile peace has broken out across these bloodied lands. Whether it's from exhaustion or new-found tolerance is hard to tell, but I found that the confidence gained from EU membership has made an enormous difference (something that makes quite a change from the continuous whingeing with which the same subject is greeted here). For the likes of Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Romania and Bulgaria, membership is more than just access to money or freedom of trade - it's a sign that they're once again being taken seriously as European players (Hungary, Poland, Lithuania and the Czechs having at times had great and enlightened empires in Europe).
It's not clear what the future holds. Alongside relief that there is peace and security comes expectation. If ranks start to close again, there could be trouble. Countries, like the individuals of whom they are made up, want to be appreciated and respected. There are many we spoke to in Turkey, for instance, who feel themselves to be European, and cannot understand why somewhere like Bulgaria should be welcomed into the EU while their bid for membership is viewed with suspicion and often downright hostility. Raffi Portakal, an art entrepreneur who recently brought the first ever Picasso exhibition to Turkey, told me that he accepted that a club should have rules, but if that club keeps changing its rules then it risks losing respect and authority.
Whatever happens, I feel I have learned a lot this past year. Eastern Europe is no longer faceless. I can remember all 20 countries we travelled through (twice as many as in the Sahara and Himalaya series put together) and I can recall what makes each one different. I no longer see rows of concrete housing blocks as the only urban landscape in the east, and those I do see I now know much more about, including the multifarious lives going on inside them. I see beyond the cliche of belching smokestacks and fog-bound factories, to some of the most unspoiled and beautiful agricultural landscape on the continent. And the only Soviet tank on the move was being driven by me, at a school on the Polish-German border.
I've laughed as much as, if not more than, on any of the journeys so far, and I've done some very silly things I can't imagine being allowed to do in eastern Europe 20 years ago, like strutting the catwalk in a Budapest fashion show and appearing on Polish daytime television.
What's most important is that instead of seeing east and central Europe as a mysterious world into which I, as a westerner, could never be fully initiated, I now see it as a cultural, political extension of my own world. The bond of history and proximity is stronger than any ideology. We have much more in common than sets us apart. It's a bit like discovering a long-lost branch of your family. We shall doubtless still quarrel as families do, but at least we can get together for a party every now and then.
Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace do not help you make more genuine close friends, according to a survey by researchers who studied how the websites are changing the nature of friendship networks. Although social networking on the internet helps people to collect hundreds or even thousands of acquaintances, the researchers believe that face to face contact is nearly always necessary to form truly close friendships.
"Although the numbers of friends people have on these sites can be massive, the actual number of close friends is approximately the same in the face to face real world," said psychologist Will Reader, from Sheffield Hallam University.
Social networking websites such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace have taken off rapidly in recent years. Facebook was launched initially in 2004 for Harvard University members but has since expanded to more than 34 million users worldwide. MySpace, which was set up in 2003, has more than 200 million users and was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in 2005 for $580m (£285m).
Previous research has suggested that a person's conventional friendship group consists of around 150 people, with five very close friends but larger numbers of people whom we keep in touch with less regularly.
This figure is so consistent that scientists have suggested it is determined by the cognitive constraints of keeping up with large numbers of people.
But Dr Reader and his team have found that social networking sites do allow people to stretch this figure.
The team asked more than 200 people to fill in questionnaires about their online networking, asking for example how many online friends they had, how many of these were close friends and how many they had met face to face. The team found that although the sites allowed contact with hundreds of acquaintances, as with conventional friendship networks, people tend to have around five close friends.
Ninety per cent of contacts whom the subjects regarded as close friends were people they had met face to face.
"People see face to face contact as being absolutely imperative in forming close friendships," added Dr Reader. He told the British Association Festival of Science in York that social networking sites allow people to broaden their list of nodding acquaintances because staying in touch online is easy. "What social network sites can do is decrease the cost of maintaining and forming these social networks because we can post information to multiple people," he said.
But to develop a real friendship we need to see that the other person is trustworthy, said Dr Reader. "What we need is to be absolutely sure that a person is really going to invest in us, is really going to be there for us when we need them ... It's very easy to be deceptive on the internet."
i wonder if the world trusts my reading. like do the things that i read, and recommend others to read, actually add value? well i'd like to think so. so here's an article to chew on.
Polish author jailed over killing he used as plot
· Pole orchestrated murder of suspected love rival · Police stumped until they read gruesome thriller
Ian Traynor in Warsaw Thursday September 6, 2007
Guardian
A Polish pulp fiction writer was sentenced to 25 years in jail yesterday for his role in a grisly case of abduction, torture and murder, a crime that he then used for the plot of a bestselling thriller.
In a remarkable case that has gripped Poland for months, Krystian Bala, a writer of blood-curdling fiction, was found guilty of orchestrating the murder seven years ago of a Wroclaw businessman, Dariusz Janiszewski, in a crime of passion brought on by the suspicion that the victim was sleeping with his ex-wife.
In the novel, the villain gets away with kidnapping, mutilating and murdering a young woman.
In real life, however, Bala got his comeuppance, even though it was seven years after the disappearance of the advertising executive whose murder confounded detectives until they read the book.
The killing of Janiszewski was one of the most gruesome cases to come before a Polish court in years, with the "Murder, He Wrote" sub-plot unfolding in the district court in Wroclaw and keeping the country spellbound.
Janiszewski, said to have been having an affair with Bala's ex-wife, was scooped out of the river Oder near Wroclaw in south-west Poland by fishermen in December 2000, four weeks after going missing.
The police tests revealed that he was stripped almost naked and tortured. His wrists had been bound behind his back and tied to a noose around his neck before he was dumped in the river.
The police had little to go on. Within six months, Commissar Jacek Wroblewski, leading the investigation, dropped the case. It remained closed for five years despite the publication in 2003 of the potboiler Amok, by Bala, a gory tale about a bunch of bored sadists, with the narrator, Chris, recounting the murder of a young woman. The details of the murder matched those of Janiszewski almost exactly.
Bala, who used the first name Chris on his frequent jaunts abroad, was arrested in 2005 after Commissar Wroblewski received a tip-off about the "perfect crime" and was advised to read the thriller. But Bala was released after three days for insufficient evidence, despite the commissar's conviction that he had his villain. When further evidence came to light, Bala was re-arrested. The case against him, however, remained circumstantial.
Police uncovered evidence that Bala had known the dead man, had telephoned him around the time of his disappearance and had then sold the dead man's mobile phone on the internet within days of the murder.
When Poland's television equivalent of Crimewatch aired details of the case in an attempt to generate fresh police leads, the programme's website received messages from various places in the far east, places that Bala, a keen scuba diver, was discovered to have been visiting at the time of the messages.
All along, Bala protested his innocence, insisting that he derived the details for the Amok thriller from media reports of the Janiszewski murder.
Sentencing Bala to 25 years' jail yesterday, Judge Lidia Hojenska admitted that he could not be found directly guilty of carrying out the murder. But the evidence sufficed to find him guilty of planning and orchestrating the crime. "The evidence gathered gives sufficient basis to say that Krystian Bala committed the crime of leading the killing of Dariusz Janiszewski," she said.
The court heard expert and witness evidence that Bala was a control freak, eager to show off his intelligence, "pathologically jealous" and inclined to sadism. "He was pathologically jealous of his wife," said Judge Hojenska. "He could not allow his estranged wife to have ties with another man."
His lawyer said yesterday that Bala would appeal against the verdict and sentence.
Stranger than Fiction
·William Burroughs' accidental killing of his wife Joan while attempting to shoot a glass off her head was later documented in his novel Queer. He wrote: "I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan's death."
· Thirteen years after OJ Simpson's acquittal for the murder of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman, his controversial account of how he would have committed the crime was published. In a chapter entitled The Night in Question, Simpson describes his confrontation with Goldman, "Then something went horribly wrong, and I know what happened, but I can't tell you exactly how."
· In 2001 the son of author Errol Trzebinski was murdered in a similar manner to that described in her book The Life and Death of Lord Erroll. She believes the killing was a warning against an investigation she was conducting into the suspicious death of the 22nd Earl of Erroll, whom she believes was killed by the British intelligence services.
i can't grapple with my life. not just my facebook.
:: kiathy. 8:45 am [+] ::
::::
...
:: Tuesday, September 04, 2007 ::
i can't grapple with facebook.
i think i'm growing too old. 23 and. growing.
oh noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
the week's gonna be rather packed. having project meetings for one topic almost every day is totally brain-sapping. it's week 3 and i was in school till 11 yesterday for a project meeting. speak about absurdity. well that's mainly cos we're presenting next week. that means another meeting today, tomorrow, thursday. f u c.
my exchange results will be out this friday. i applied to barcelona so i'm gonna be needing to learn some espanol, if i do get my first choice. it's really quite fast eh i'll be there in say, 13+4 17 weeks. wow.
people are saying it's 12 weeks to the exams, i see it as 12 weeks to the end of the term and half way through my 3rd year. i don't really want the school years to end honestly. as much as i'd prefer to have money in my hands and stuff. like hey it's only about, 30+15+12 = 57 weeks to the end of my undergraduate studies. :(
i'm extremely bored and restless so here's something for today.
just some interesting reads, which i've pretty much been doing (reading, sleeping, eating) for today. i shan't lament my fate because i've been out having fun friday/saturday, so sunday has to be a stay-home-to-study day. problem #1 was when i only woke up at 1 pm. not much of the day left. problem #2 presented itself in the endless supply of unhealthy snacks (read non-fruit) available at home, and problem #3 - nasilemak my mum cooked today. problem #4 - a nap from 5 pm to 7 pm. problem #5 - this.
