MEETING

Meeting in 5 minutes. This will be sprinting blog. Swoosh. Like nike. (pronounced, nike, like mike). Does not help that professor possesses shades of cuteness. Professor is also OCD. Desk is spotless and everything is arranged orthogonal/perpendicular/90 degrees to one another, which makes for a very sterile freakish environment. Keep expecting him to morph into Jack Nicholson a-la As Good As It Gets. DURH 5 MINUTES! Time up!. Move move move!

CHOOSING.

My best friend left town today (I know you're thinking, "That's So completely immature, only people in primary schools and pigtails have best friends," but that's because you were adopted and nobody loves you.) She was here on a visit with her boyfriend, who also left, but in a different direction (south) as opposed to her (north) and then they were parted.

Gosh. That was painful. For me, I mean. I couldn't help but feel a sense of infinite sadness and injustice to see love parting just because silly little things like space and time got in the way. But there was no other way, she explained. And I understood, of course. But still pain, and loss is universal, and it can never be tempered down, even by logic or practicality. I hurt to see them hurting. There is a saying:

"Berat mata dijinjing, berat lagi bahu dipikul"

And it means, No matter how heavy it is to eyes, the burden on the shoulders of the bearer is heavier. Of course, the true meaning is loss in translation, that is the failing of languages.

This made me think. Can humanity be reduced to a single multiple choice question? i.e.

Circle the correct answer:
(a) Fame and Fortune.
(b) Happiness.
(c) I live in a country torn by war/poverty/starvation/religious persecution, so I'm too preoccupied dodging missiles/scavenging through recycling bins/trying very hard not to think of food/praying, to think about things like fame and fortune or happiness while you people in your air-conditioned rooms with cans of beer on the table, philosophize and rant on about choosing the right path and debating the crassness of materialism. Thank you.

mmm...

I choose life. I choose sneaking out to watch cheesy matinee movies on a working day. I choose staying home on weekends as opposed to trooping back to the office to "work". I choose homesickness. I choose public transportation. I choose no to MTV, Friends and McDonalds (but yes to Sex in the City). I choose Microsoft (because I cannot figure out the Mac). I choose not to be a slave to my handphone. I choose no to Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Gucci. I choose an emphatic no! to the relentless pursuit of publishing the next pointless research paper just so I can add a line to my resume. I choose papaya, but not honeydew. I choose neurotic families. I choose happiness.

But as a result of these choices, I am a geek of infinite proportions. A happy geek though, because I chose to be so.

AH. the rants.

Exam on Tuesday. Not yet study. I choose no exams. But nobody seems to be listening. God. If you're listening. This exam thing? Not very good for karmic health. Please smite the exam-setting infidels, who in doing so have started of a chain reaction of stress and bad karma. The multiplier effect you see. Exam stress. I get crabby. Crabbiness induces rashes. Rashes make me look like a lobster. Lobster walks into hall, lobster scares roommates. Roommates stressed. See what I mean by the karmic multiplier effect. Not good.

Please let me pass. And don't let them take away my scholarship.

Thanks.

AND MY POINT WAS...

Of course. This is the second post today. It works like this, the frequency of me writing here, is proportionally related to the amount of work that I should be doing. By the time I get to the final exams, I shall be posting every 2 seconds, and then I shall be doing it for the rest of my life, on account of me continuously failing exams, never graduating, and becoming the Oldest PhD student in the Universe. By that time, I will smell like mothballs and wander around campus with my wild unkempt white hair, talking to myself and glaring at anyone under the age of 67 for being too young and frisky.

But then I digress.

Ok, but I've gone off on so far a tangent, that I can't remember where I started out from. So I will stop here. I write in spurts. Much like, passing wind. It comes. It goes. But the smell lingers for a bit.

EXISTENTIALISM AND HAMSTERS

I bought a card the other day, fully meaning to send it to my brother, but I felt so strangely attached to it that I decided to keep it, and stuck it in my cubicle. An excerpt:

The "Madness" Hamsters by Edward Monkton

Every night they visit you
Every night they come
And bit by bit they steal your brain
And feed it to their MUM

To me. The hamsters represent existentialism. Or they could just represent hamsters. If I wanted to be completely honest, I would admit to not knowing the meaning of the word existentialism. Normal people would look up dictionaries. Me, I'm just going to make up my own meaning. I mean, after all, if you can't make up meanings for words on your own blog, Where Else can you do it? The trick is getting Other People to think you're right and Mr. Oxford, Mr. Webster and Mr. Dewan Bahasa are talking through their pants.

So existentialism means the "Madness" Hamsters, who come and steal your brain at night, and feed it to their Mum.

THIS is what happens to people who start doing their PhD. They start buying expensive cards, with rubbish pictures, and rubbish poems on them because suddenly they feel a certain 'connection' with the "Madness" Hamsters.

it is the disease. and it is spreading. i'm the monkey from outbreak. save yourselves.