Posts tagged with "writing"

Sleeping Early, And The New Breakfast

I find myself unable to stay up late nowa­days, the time that writ­ing comes eas­i­est to me. I wake up in the mid­dle of these sum­mer nights and can’t fall back asleep. In the end, I regain lost sleep by tak­ing mid-day naps, a habit I’ll have to break once I find a job. My par­ents would ask me whether I slept well, when I was younger, and being a child at the time, knew noth­ing but excep­tion­al slum­ber. “Of course”, I would tell them, with a con­fused look on my face. To me, naps were always a sign of old age, and per­haps I’m get­ting old­er.

I’ve recent­ly switched from hav­ing bacon with egg on toast in the morn­ings to hav­ing a bacon and egg sand­wich. The dif­fer­ence in prepa­ra­tion lies in the style of eggs. Whereas sun­ny-side up com­pli­ments toast with it’s oh-so-dip­pable run­ni­ness, a pair of over-hard eggs go much bet­ter in any hand held meal.

Inferno: Canto III, Line 9

I always won­der who reads this. I try to nev­er write for any­one else; after all, the things I write about are things that both­er me, that I need to get down. It puz­zles me some­times when I read peo­ple’s jour­nals, and they start to talk to their friends about some­thing, or to some phan­tom audi­ence. I can under­stand why one would do that though, since the point of some are to inform friends of how one is doing. More often than not, how­ev­er, it seems to be an exer­cise in nar­cis­sism.

I won­der what some­one would think of me, if they were read­ing this with­out ever meet­ing me. Would they be able to see all sides of me? Would they be able to under­stand who I real­ly am? Most of the time, what I write is out of neces­si­ty, and ends up being some sort of com­plaint, rant, or con­fu­sion.

I think most peo­ple would believe that I’ve lost hope. It’s quite the con­trary real­ly. Ever since the sum­mer, I’ve gained hope to a degree. Of course, I’ve often stat­ed that hope is a bad thing, and I still feel that way to a degree.

What I’ve come to real­ize is that I should pos­si­bly try to hope for the future, but not get my hopes up. The dif­fer­ence between the two is in length of time. Getting one’s hopes up has a more short-term con­no­ta­tion for more tange­able ideas, where­as hop­ing for the future is thought of as hop­ing for some­thing that is cur­rent­ly unknown. If the future is ever to become the present, I’ll try to keep myself more ground­ed.

And if the present were to come to fruition?

Maybe it would be a good thing.

Thoughts After A Bad Phonecall

Leave it to a sin­gle phone call to fill me with wor­ry. Now I’m anx­ious about my marks, my mid-terms, my projects, my grad­u­a­tion, my life. Pat gave me a pep-talk yes­ter­day, and it helped. Graduation seems uncom­fort­ably close. I’m dying to know how the sto­ry ends.

Patrick was nice enough to come up to me and start a con­ver­sa­tion the oth­er day. I asked him how his work was going, and he told that he’s real­ly enjoy­ing it. He let me know that the Montage project in becom­ing real­ly big, and they might be look­ing for more work­ers, and that if I send Chau my resumé and let him know that I can work full-time dur­ing the sum­mer, I might be able to get a job in devel­op­ment, instead of infor­mat­ics.

God, my sen­tences are becom­ing more and more struc­tured like some­thing Henry James would have writ­ten, although I’m sure I’m not able to be as descrip­tive, or as bril­liant, since he’s a well renowned author infa­mous for being gar­ru­lous, where­as I’m sim­ply a com­put­er sci­ence stu­dent, only able to write when nec­es­sary.

There seem to be a few Five Alive flavours on the mar­ket, such as “Tropical”, “Citrus”, or “Peach Passion”, but none taste as good as “Berry”. Aaron, Trolley, and I all agree that it tastes like Skittles. The juice from con­cen­trate has a slight­ly vary­ing taste from the one in the bot­tle; I find the lat­ter to be a lit­tle more tart and a lit­tle sweet­er.

I’m get­ting a new Intellimouse Explorer sent to me via snail mail, thanks to Trolley. I called up Microsoft, told them that my mouse but­ton was dou­ble-click­ing when it should have sin­gle-clicked (as instruct­ed by Trolley), and they told me that they would send a new one, free of charge. I don’t even need to send my cur­rent one back. I got my cur­rent one four years ago, and I remem­ber spend­ing $100 on it. The pads of it have been worn out uneven­ly, caus­ing a notice­able wob­ble. The lat­est design of the Intellimouse Explorer has a low­er, sleek­er pro­file, and more eas­i­ly acces­si­ble thumb but­tons. Yay.

After talk­ing with my geol­o­gy pro­fes­sor I feel dumb as fuck. I almost failed my mid-term; my mark was the sec­ond low­est in the class, even with a gen­er­ous grade curve. I think I did con­sid­er­ably well, con­sid­er­ing the fact that I had three mid-terms that day, and the fact that I find my mind to be dead when I have my Tuesday lec­tures after a 7:30am lab. Apparently, I have very lit­tle com­mon sense. Although I know that zinc is the main ingre­di­ent is sun­screen, or that soft-drinks con­tain car­bon, I don’t know that nitro­gen is an impor­tant ele­ment in fer­til­iz­er or that graphite is a pop­u­lar indus­tri­al lubri­cant. The list of what I don’t know goes on and on. I had no fuck­ing clue that bak­ing soda is sodi­um bicar­bon­ate. To my prof, all of this is gen­er­al knowl­edge, so it’s assumed when deal­ing with the course. I was nev­er good at chem­istry, and my pro­gramme of stud­ies isn’t even close to relat­ed. I also took the pre­req­ui­site at the begin­ning of uni­ver­si­ty, which is four years ago. Fuck.

The Fourth Day

Four con­sec­u­tive writ­ing days in a row. Balls.

Pat called me yes­ter­day to see how I was doing. How fuck­ing amaz­ing is that? When I found out, the back of my nose felt tight­ly con­gest­ed, and the rims of my eyes start­ed to tin­gle. I need to be more like Pat. I real­ized yes­ter­day that he’s like my preach­er; he’s the only one I can talk to with­out fear­ing judg­ment or embar­rass­ment. It’s not that my oth­er friends aren’t under­stand­ing, it’s that Pat is able to see the moti­va­tions that dri­ve the actions one does, with­out wor­ry­ing about whether the con­se­quences are for bet­ter or worse. He’s able to see the good in many peo­ple, and I guess that I need to be remind­ed that I have some good in me on occa­sion.

I think I need boobs. I bought a turtle­neck dur­ing a box­ing day sale. I found it on a table stacked with oth­er mot­ley piles of clothes, in the mid­dle of the store, for 50% off. I did­n’t try it on, since the lines for the change rooms were ridicu­lous­ly long. I got home and tried it on, and it felt a little…large. I tried to shrink it in the wash, but it only slight­ly worked, because it still fit in an odd way. I real­ized today that it might be a girls’ turtle­neck, and that the extra room in it might be for a healthy rack. I’m not com­plete­ly sure, because I’ve nev­er tried on what I know to be a girls’ turtle­neck, and the beige colour isn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly fem­i­nine. I sup­pose I could try to return it since it has­n’t been worn yet, and has­n’t been (notice­ably) washed, but I’d rather have the boobs.

I’ve tried to change the date and time cod­ing in PHP, so that it more accu­rate­ly rep­re­sents when the entries were writ­ten, but no such luck. The serv­er this is host­ed on is locat­ed in Hong Kong, which is about 13 hours ahead, so all the entries seem like they’re writ­ten 13 hours into the future. I found out how to edit the val­ues of the date and time, but only when it’s from a cur­rent time­stamp, and not when it’s being retrieved from a data­base. I might just try to fig­ure out a way around every­thing if I real­ly feel the need to have accu­rate num­bers.

I think that I stop read­ing dur­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly stress­ful school terms. My free time alone is gen­er­al­ly divid­ed between gam­ing and read­ing, and when I need some stress relief then gam­ing is just able to deliv­er much bet­ter. As Doug and I dis­cussed, we’re able to lose our­selves, to just let go of every­thing else and be com­plete­ly absorbed. Sometimes my stress will spill over though, and I’ll feel the need to write.