Setsaiselcce

"Sselgninaem! Sselgninaem!"
syas eht Rehcaet.
"Ylrettu sselgninaem!
Gnihtyreve si sselgninaem."

Meaningless procrastination

I'm sooooooo bad these days. I can't make myself do anything. I'm not learning anything at uni. It's so weird. I used to study all the time. Now I come home and do nothing. Unless I really really have to....and it seems like I can't make my brain feel I "really really have to" until around 1am on the day something is due.

I still have this habit of setting aside all this time for when I'm meant to be studying though. But all that time just goes past...and no study done. Sooooo baaaaaaaaaaaad. Can you believe it's Week 7 already? I lie in bed at night and think, if I don't do something about this soon, I'm going fail. I sit in lectures and think, I don't know what's going on, I'm going to fail. I sit in tutorials and think, I'm not even trying to pay attention, I'm going to fail. And funnily, the thought of failure isn't scary enough to force me into doing some work.

Maybe I would be more worried about failing if I wasn't so young for my year. The mature-age students, or the ones doing pharmacy as their second degree, they try really really hard. I fully admire the ones who are married with three kids and study pharmacy full-time, I don't know how they manage. I think pharmacy and looking after three goldfish might already be too much for me.

Maybe I would be more worried about failing if I had failed something before. You certainly wouldn't want to study the same subject three times (especially something like pharmacokinetics). Although you could hope that they radically change the course syllabus within that time and cut the subject out all together...?

Maybe I would be more worried about failing if I hadn't been so blessed with ridiculously good marks in the past. Maybe those days are gone forever now. The ending of an era, so to speak. Maybe this is how it's meant to be.

I feel like I've lost this part of me that has defined who I am for so long, and now I feel incomplete because I haven't found anything to replace it. This is starting to sound really cheesy, but hey, I'm just saying it how I think it is. It's probably also making me sound arrogant...oh well, I'll just hope people don't take caffeine-inspired posts too seriously. (Don't worry, it was only tea. I'm not stupid enough to drink coffee at this time of night. Although I have done it before :P)

Hmmm...I have so much to say when I'm not talking to anyone directly...why is that?

The bad thing about being introverted is that sometimes, when you finally do feel like talking, you find you don't know how to. Alexithymia. No words for feelings. Learnt that in a lecture last year. Funny the things you remember.



This is Little E, by the way. Kindly donated by a friend. I gave E a bit of a makeover. She's kind of hard to see being transparent and all, but at least she casts a shadow. I still think D is the prettiest, though :P

Better stop writing now so people can keep up with all these long, random posts I've been making recently.

*Sigh* I should try and blog about happier things...

A day in the life of a string

Hi everyone. There's someone I'd like you to meet. He doesn't really have a name, but we'll call him D. You may have seen him around before. Let me tell you more about him.

D used to be part of a larger workforce, located somewhere between Departments A and G, but he has recently been replaced by someone newer. His performance had been perfectly fine for a long time, but he suddenly found that his time was up.

He had been feeling the pressure for a while now, and this had made him fret quite a bit. It wasn't easy having to conform to the standard structure of the company. You could never predict when your continuing performance would be assessed and fine-tuned. Luckily the level of action always remained relatively constant, so they didn't have to do anything about that.

What really got to him was being constantly picked and hammered on. They said it was just part of the job. It was probably harder work for the boss than it was for him, but still, he had to suffer the effects of it. And having to bend to the will of a higher power...that really stretched him to his limits.

One day, the tension got too much for him, and he just snapped. He felt quite relieved afterwards, but felt he had somehow lost his purpose of existing.

That's when I came to his rescue. As you can see, D is now happily curled up in semi-retirement, his only job being to look good and accessorise a greater ensemble. He gets most days of the week off, and spends the time doing absolutely nothing. Being made redundant isn't so bad after all.

If you know of any others who have similar stories to that of D, please pass them on to me, rather than simply tossing them aside, to be good for nothing but to be thrown out. I'm going to try and start a collection around my wrist. Thank you.

The search for meaning

Epiphanies are strange. They come at the most unexpected times. For me, it was yesterday morning at uni, when I was on my way from the footbridge to Bosch; I was halfway down those wide steps facing The Square between the Education Building and the Old Teachers' College, and I suddenly realised....I feel empty. I'm not sure if initially it was a just realisation that I had finished digesting my breakfast...but gastrointestinally related or not, it led to me being able to make a vague attempt at putting what I've been feeling for the past few months into words...

When you don't really know where you're heading, and you get the impression you're somehow missing something everyone else has...what is it? Why do I feel there is something more? Why do I feel...nothing?

What's even weirder was that we looked at pretty much these sorts of issues at bible study last night. Ecclesiastes....when wisdom fails....the ability to discern new things in this life is so restricted that everything becomes meaningless, and the desire to find the answer is never satisfied. Pity I was kind of zoned out for most of it, thanks to staying up 'til 4am on Wednesday night, I mean, Thursday morning...I hate the effects of sleep debt accumulation....why am I always tired for the most interesting studies? (Just on a tangent: I recommend not combining lack of sleep with 4 hour Friday afternoon labs that require you to skip lunch, take drugs that slow your heart down and do semi-strenuous exercise. Even though they are kind of fun. Just get enough sleep first. Ahem, anyway...)

What really confuses me is being Christian and feeling like this....I mean, what more is there? Being certain of salvation, the coming of a new creation that will last for all eternity, a relationship with God, being able to serve Him and His people, having fellowship with them....is there something I've missed? What am I doing wrong? How can life still be meaningless? What hope is there for the rest of us?

So this is kind of what King Solomon expresses in Ecclesiastes: "...I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind..." (1:14) Everything just happens over and over again, and there's no way out. You can have everything, and have nothing. You can have nothing, and still have nothing.

Argh...I'm confused. I probably need to approach this from a different angle. Read the Bible more. Pray more. Get more sleep. I don't know.

I feel so stupid and insignificant...I wish the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything really was as simple as something like 42.

All the small things

It's the small victories that count. Those quiet, reflective moments of yayness, that make you feel good on the inside. They're not much on their own, but they all add up to stop you from going insane on a bad day. Things like finding that library book you needed on the shelf, playing a song without any mistakes, stopping to make conversation with someone you didn't expect to run into. Leaving your umbrella in a lecture theatre and going back to find it's still there, seeing heaps of people in EU T-shirts, getting 4 out of ten for a quiz you didn't study for (yes, I beat the statistics!)...especially rewarding if the class average turned out to be only 4.2 (suckers....all those people who actually crammed and still did crap....) Ahem....OK, that was a mean thing to say. At least they tried. I was only lucky - I didn't even try and still got reasonably close to the average (I'm stooping to new academic depths). I must try harder next time. Pity the subject is PHARMACOKINETICS and is the most BORING subject in the WHOLE WORLD. (Does anyone else here think I'm starting to lose it? I think I'm starting to lose it. It's getting late. And I have to finish this assignment tonight. And I'm blogging. Ooops. Naughty children don't get to go to sleep.)

Hmmmm...this post started out nice, and then just deteriorated. Must stop hating pharmacokinetics with a passion. I know I went on in an earlier post about the fact that I didn't particularly like my course any more, blah blah blah.....well, I worked out that's not entirely true. It's not my course I hate. I just hate myself in general.

LOL...that's even worse! Someone needs to go read their Bible more often...I'm turning into a horrible person. The world is such a nicer place when you get enough sleep.

I'm not getting enough sleep.