20p/freeplay/permanent press

what a nice garden. with nice seats for the 3 of us. (4). but no one's going to sit down because they don't want to have their butt stuck to the chair.

visited oxford where there was frost in the air and everywhere. the lakes caked over with ice which was really fun to break. crystal showed us around where i finally got my guest pass back c/o faiz c/o michelle but in the end c/o her and acquiescing to her evil plan, we watched harry potter and anything was welcome to get away from the cold. plus, the dining hall is that of christ church college which we had just visited earlier in the day.

oxford is pregnant with knowledge and the occasional evangelist. i gritted my teeth and i nodded as i acknowledged how i was doomed for eternal damnation. tinglin had the energy to argue (oh, the joys of being young) but there is no way to argue when people do not see eye to eye. this i have learnt and well. this after a moving debate with tinglin and benita in the bowels of the oxford university press on theology and philosophy.

i am glad to have enjoyed myself over saturday because i was honestly rather burnt out last week. i spent so much time on marginal points to my presentation and my essay, being wracked by anxiety, and refusing to leave tutorials until they were finished and looked approximately right (which, not having the solution sheets, meant having to spend more time determining if the answer made sense, and of course those questions involving proofs were self explanatory). it was this that made the end of the week slightly bearable, that i felt i did contribute to knowledge by spending so much damn time on the contribution (and the acknowledgement of peers, a potent drug), and finding that what you had done matched the solution sheet. and once again, jesse has triumphed against his utter uselessness.

modesty aside, i don't think i can keep up all this under the pretence of "learning". i haven't learnt if i haven't done it well, i say, but i think all this effort will kill me. i needed something completely unrelated to my studies.

For JR, translate this: "Da k�nnen S' mi' frag'n was Sie woll'n: ich weiss alles."
There is no way I could understand a formal philosophical text in my relative ignorance so I stuck with what (many) people do, read autobiographies. this was not so much a biography than a history of a person's thought and random digressions. I found "unended quest" by karl popper in the library, and it was nice because he actually taught philosophy here.

and i revelled in reading about how experiences shaped him, how, as a child he grew up reading, and from his uncle who knew everything he knew learning more would only succeed in making him more aware of his ignorance, because knowledge only leads to questions. and that explains why common sense tells everyone, don't think too much, don't learn so much, learn what you need to know otherwise you get embroiled in thinking and forget how to act.

and it is important to live with action as well as taking things positively, and having to write happy story-like accounts of your day, so that you don't have to constantly remind yourself of the self-criticism that goes on in your head. and it also gets you actually doing thigns instead of sitting around and moping the whole day.

but this dr. popper, who spent the early years of his life as a carpenter, grade school teacher etc, before becoming an academic at 35 (hey... early life is a carpenter, finding vocation in mid 30's... sounds familiar.) life isn't demarcation. it isn't telling yourself to think one moment and not to the next. in any case, how can one control it? (why with a little bit of discipline of course).

it's so easy to get lost in a world like this. so many people, with different dreams, different forms of receptiveness to humour. watching harry potter with all those teenage sexual tension innuendos scripted in made me miss being in secondary school, made me miss being na�vely stupid (versus being passionately misguided, made me miss and relish the occasional moments where i could be a little more honest, bore people with my earnestness etc. and i think i'd just sound stupid preferring to read karl popper in the library than attending an internship fair with all sorts of lovely job opportunities and i know i go through something like this from time to time. why? whywhywhywhywhy? and i fail to function for a while until i get it out of my system. maybe taking philosophy would be the beginning of a cure. but i think it will only succeed in making me worse than i am. but if it's possible to be worse in a more satisfying way, i don't know it yet.

i miss having someone to bitch to. i realise this after sitting down in caf�s so much escaping the cold and talking to keep warm.

in the grand english tradition of unintelligible song titles.

my laundry is currently bouncing around in the machine.

i'm sorry i've been such a bore. i could sense you were getting tired of the vanilla descriptions of my life, and yearning for some chocolate descriptions of my inner soul *munch*. in any case what did you want me to talk about. YOU?

===random aside===

funny things have been happening in bankside. skulking around at 5 in the morning i overhear juicy scandal between a girl and our security guard that she got locked out of her room by a drunk guy who really liked her and wanted to f*** her. (can you dream this up?) and she was bitching about how bad guys was (not forgetting to slip in the occasional self compliment).

and on the bus ride back, guys talking about milfs and fit girls and how they ought not to use teeth (don't they have the slightest inclination it may hurt?)

you see, when you say something like "if i knew what a guy thought, i could probably never be friends with him", you're just being intolerant (and you're being funny because you know you still are friends with them, ha ha.) the key thing is, girls are cockteases too anyway, it just takes many guises.

the next time you walk through a lingerie department with a guy, don't expect him to think normal thoughts. don't care what he thinks. we all think rather too much anyway.

===

the drunk guy bumps into me. "sorry, he's just had a couple too much to drink."
i smile back "just a couple? i had 2"

one never knows the straw which breaks the camels' back. nor the drink which kills you. the satin dresses in harry potter are killer (yes, better than the scgs ones)

i miss singapore. i miss claret blue uniforms and all i know. and temperatures in the high twenties. but i know as soon as i teleport back there that i'd miss here too.