for. . . the words you've spoken, the letters you've written, the actions you've taken, the tears, the dejection, the anger, the euphoria, the happiness, the emotions you made me feel, the brandon you made me see, the hand i held each day, the smile i saw every morning, the 5 months and 23 days you gave to me that were the most intense and fulfilling of my life.

for loving me.

thank you qingru.

but must everything that have a beginning also have an end?

modules modules modules. . . another suicidal semester awaits me with open arms. . . my poison this time round:

HY2243 - Film and History
HY3204 - Southeast Asia: Decolonisation and after
EL3203 - Semantics and Pragmatics
USS2105 - University Scholars Seminar
UPC2201 - Chemicals and Us
UAS3006 - Evolutionary Psychology

Once again, anyone who deems me a freefrag and wishes to have his/her CAP pulled up by taking the above-mentioned modules (especially the USP and EL ones) with me, please tag me.

6 (assuming i make it to honours year) semesters left.

here's another interesting topic that i had the sudden urge to write about. its something that everyone despises morally, yet puzzlingly, love and enjoy doing (for those that think you know me, no i am not referring to alcoholism). . . so, why do people g o s s i p?

evolutionary psychology argues both our physical and psychological characteristics are moulded by our need to survive. physiologically an example of this evolution would be the desire to communicate aiding in the development of our vocal cords over time. this, together with the development of speech centres in our brain makes acquisition of languages a piece of cake although speaking from experience, Chinese seems to be more of an . . . acquired taste.

yet the ability to speak can not, and should not be equated to the intention to gossip inasmuch as holding a gun does not make one a murderer. gossip is more than just a sentence - it entails a careful and often deliberate selection of words, each selected to controversialise, sensationalise, and more significantly, to undermine and subvert the object of the gossip. gossip is not idle chatter of the week's weather, it is a tool enabling one to exercise power and experience pleasure concurrently.

if the relentless thirst for power and pleasure has driven us to thrive as a species within the past two millenia, then should it not follow that the very tool helping us to achieve such an end should be one that everyone is acquainted with? and if we accept that assertion, why do we find it surprising and hurtful to hear of ourselves being the subject of gossip if we know in our own hearts that we are capable of spreading the same gossip too?

while criticism that we inhabit a world of cutting age scientific technology with stone-age mindsets of the basest of survival instincts may have a tinge of truth, it negates how our survival instincts too have evolved in uniformity with the potential threats to ourselves, especially innocuous ones taking the form of gossip. the best way to counter gossip is to gossip, and until our mindsets undergo a renaissance in that respect, that is how it will continue to be.

can one ever return to the past he had left behind? if we are moulded by our past, why is it so hard to reconcile ourselves with it? would Ithaca still be the utopia it once was after twenty years of wandering? or would it be a strange land, unrecognisable even to he who once ruled over it?

immortality is premised upon overcoming the transcendence of time; mortality as the succumbing to it. the passing of time is the indefatigable enemy of our memory, eroding and gnawing at every sinew of our weak cognitive system. we never remember the past in its totality not because we do not wish to, but because we cannot. yet it is in our refusal to accept our own fallibility that we choose to return, thinking time has stood still for us.

the decision to embark on a homecoming is never an easy one to make. the biblical prodigal son may return to his father's warm embrace, but what of the displaced son? he returns to a foreign land so cold he cannot bear witness to it. his memory is incommensurable to what is before his eyes. his memory, however misguided, is also unrequited - the land, the object of his remembrance has abandoned him in the dust. but the real tragedy is that he does not know that.

if to come home entails pandering to emotions so visceral that one questions whether the journey was really worth the destination (and what is the destination anyway), then why return? because he wants to believe, he wants to continue living the hope that he has defied time, that image and reality are one and the same. he longs to tell himself that he has remembered. . .

another month, another photo. . . (yes, as you can see, t-shirts and berms are not the only items of clothing in my wardrobe)

its that time of the year again. . .

list of FASS modules offered for Semester 1, 06/07

watch this space for the list of modules i'm taking, and you should too, so that you can be silly enough to tag me saying "hey i wanna take that same module too!" and i can devise an elaborate series of traps with my skill and cunning to leech off your notes and plagiarise your term paper. i know its cruel, but what am i to do? i've got no more freefrag 1101E modules left where i can whoop freshmen ass. *sigh*

like they say in the advert for Carls' Jr, "its gonna get messy". . .