Ahhh...spring break’s finally over. the one week of well-deserved break after 9 weeks of constant studying, projects and exams has ended. shit, now looking back I can’t believe that I wasted the whole 7 days doing nothing truly interesting and classes have already started. and so the academic torture continues....
since my primary school days, I’ve always hated the day before school reopens. you spent days, maybe weeks or even months forgetting abt studying, doing assignments and reading textbooks and suddenly, on the very day before classes begin you finally realized you haven’t done squat. and that’s when the feeling of regret starts kicking in and you suddenly become ambitious of completing all of your work, to make up for all of those days of lazing around in a single night. and usually, by the time you’re abt halfway done with everything, struggling hard to maintain your consciousness with the help of a cup of coffee in the wee hours while everyone is still dreaming in ‘La-La Land’, then the morning comes. yup. time’s up and you’re screwed.
as you start getting yourself ready for class/work, reality slams your face like a brick wall appearing out of nowhere. you realize and start to wonder what the hell have you done to prepare yourself for your return to work/classes. what did you actually do with all of those free times you had? I’m lucky enough to have an extra day off since I don’t have classes on Mondays, but just this morning when I woke up, I realized I still haven’t done most of my work. so what the fuck have I been doing? here’s a not-so-brief recap of all of the things I did and a list of events that transpired during my incredibly boring break:
1) I spent the first few days planning for that spiffy looking ‘Friends’ section I put up. I actually had to look for “suitable” images of my compadres to produce those cool-looking pics (some even required my own creativity, fused w/ a bit of imagination). then it took me quite awhile to get the commentaries and the appropriate links done. oh well, at least the results paid off.
2) I woke up on Tuesday, absolutely shocked when I saw it was snowing outside. wtf?? snow?? in the middle of March!!?? yeah, it was a bizarre weather condition. makes the whole term ‘spring break’ kinda ironic since everything was frozen. fortunately, the shower of icy white crystal pellets have now stopped, but the temperature is still freaking cold. I was actually dumb enough to go out cycling yesterday wearing only a t-shirt. needless to say, by the time I got back to my apt I felt like my whole body was stricken with rigor mortis. also, it seems that cold condition is making me more sluggish and somewhat inactive, which might explain why I always end up creating a saliva-based River Nile on my pillow every time I lie down on the bed to read.
3) I was surfing the net the other day when I found out abt the term dakimakura, which supposedly means ‘hugging pillow’ in Japanese. apparently, the trend in Japan is that these long (abt 150 cm) fluffy ‘pillows’ have images of various models/female anime characters in skimpy clothing in the front and the back. some even have “holes” at the “appropriate” places too. surely most of you would know what this means... (heh, heh, heh, heh). the latest buzz is that Microsoft is releasing a special edition of the Xbox, complete with a copy of Tecmo’s new Dead or Alive Online (for those ignorant, DOA is a fighting game famous for its bouncing boobies of the female fighters) and guess what?.....a life-sized dakimakura of the character Kasumi in a skimpy bikini. talk abt good marketing strategy huh? unfortunately, the thing is only available in Japan and they only produced limited quantities of it (boo! hiss!!). check out an article abt it here.
4) for 3 days and 4 consecutive nights, we had a LAN party at Nublie/Jimmy’s apt. we spent hours playing Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne back to back from midnight till almost noon. as the unofficial master tactician of the group, I discussed with the guys on strategy and did most of the planning, providing tips on how to micro-manage and coordinating our attacks when we went head to head against the bastardized, forever-cheating AI. anyways, by the time the sun was shining high above, most of us were too groggy and we pretty much looked like fucked up druggies craving for some hibernation. on a side note, Blizzard Entertainment (the guys who made Warcraft) recently announced that the new World of Warcraft, which is slated for a release sometime in summer has gone Beta (basically it means that they’re inviting players around the world to test the game to find any bugs to be fixed before it hits the stores). this MMORPG (that’s “Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game”) will feature a huge world where everybody will participate in quests, duking out with each other in the fantastic world of Azeroth. just imagine playing CS, except you use swords and spells and travel around in the Warcraft universe. man...I can’t wait...
5) during the last few days of spring break, I actually spent most of my time playing ‘Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship Tournament 2004’ on my Game Boy Advance SP. it’s basically a tcg (trading card game) like ‘Magic the Gathering’, based on the hit anime/manga by Kazuki Takahashi. for hours I played the game to collect enough cards to construct a ‘perfect deck’ for me to use and at last, my efforts were not in vain. I was finally able to complete my ‘Dark Exodia’ deck (for those who DO know what in the blue hell I’m talking abt, I’m using a combo consisting of Exodia the Forbidden One, Thousand-Eyes Restrict, Dark Necrofear and Dark Ruler Ha Des. pretty nifty huh?). there’s actually a tournament sometime this July in California and given the opportunity (and if I have the money and the time), I might go and participate.
6) the Malaysian general election is finally over, and unsurprisingly, BN won (again). frankly speaking, I really couldn’t care less abt the current political situation in Malaysia. I’m more concerned abt the battle between John Kerry and George W. Bush. hopefully, maybe ol’ George might end up choking on another pretzel or someone might try to assassinate him like what happened to Taiwan’s president recently. anyway, if he resumes for another four years, the whole world is pretty much screwed.
7) I just enrolled in an 8 week course, “Literature & Ideas” and I had to finish a book, On the Heights of Despair, by E.M.Cioran. shit, my head actually hurt reading the goddamn thing because it was way too philosophical. if you thought that the gibberish, philosophical mumbo-jumbo in the Matrix didn’t make any sense (I actually understood a bit, esp the whole ‘Architect’ concept) then this is gazillion times worse. one thing I can say is that the author surely makes you feel depressed when you read the book because he’s always implying that we do not have a purpose in life, asking questions like ‘why bother living if you know you’re gonna die?’. basically, he argues that time is linear and life is absurd, for we are truly the prisoners of an inevitable fate: death. he even contends that ppl with faith and belief of an after-life are just trying to placate themselves because they actually fear that there is nothingness after their passing. anyway, what made me intrigued abt his writing is because he theorizes that we can only appreciate our existence at the brink of death or when we are suffering. he also mentions that we can only know whether we are truly alive when we realize that we always have the to option to commit suicide. although most of his ideas and his perspective of things may seem atheistic (or at least agnostic) in nature, some of them actually make you think abt the question of life and why we exist. not that I’m persuaded by the book or anything, but he does have points and arguments that I sure like to discuss with (from an Islamic point of view of course).
yup, that’s basically a rundown of my shitty spring break. I could go on with my ramblings but I’m afraid I need to study for my Human Sexuality exam tomorrow. and then there’s a team project due on Friday, helping out for the annual Malaysian Coffee Hour event later in the evening and then an accounting exam on Sunday. and just when I think I could get most of these things done the night before the day itself, then the morning comes. I seriously need to find a cure for this destructive habit of procrastinating my work...the mental anguish of having tons of work piling up is causing me so much unnecessary stress. then again, I could always just buy and “relieve” myself with a dakimakura when the semester’s over...
