Department Store Day/Independence Day (Mauritius)/Daffodil Festival (Arkansas)/Ostrich Festival (Arizona)/Crane Festival (Colorado)
2004-03-12 @ 11:06 p.m.

I'm still feeling happy after a lively conversation with Chernise and Thong at Délifrance over their dinner. I was too broke to buy anything. How am I going to eat dinner with my cell group in Holland Village tomorrow? Anyway, I've come to the conclusion that I'm hardly, if ever, sad. By sad I don't mean the minor pain you feel when you stub your toe and start crying. We're talking something that comes close to borderline depression, I guess. I'm happy or just neutral most of the time. Chernise insists that it makes me less human, and you can't possibly be good at literature unless you've experienced the range of human emotions. I disagreed, naturally, but I suppose it is decidedly odd that I don't feel anything very often other than a general sort of happiness. I think the fact that I don't experience sadness reflects a certain naivety in my perception of the world. Yet I think in some ways I see things in a more mature light. Ah well, life is full of paradoxes, and literature is about elucidating them...

Henna tattoo's still quite dark, I must be really fat. Okay, I'm not fat, just a little plump. I wish I had a thinner face, softer hair, bigger eyes, sharper chin, and a lot of other things. I think I'm pretty ugly, for the sake of being oxymoronic here. Anyway, that's not the point of this entry! Today was actually quite boring for a last day of term. Didn't even go out with my OG or class. We had to sit through seven periods, while our senior class was like in the canteen. The people in the office had better rearrange our timetable to more decent hours, ones which actually allow us to go out for class outings! I'm feeling tired again, too many late nights and this is shaping up to be another one. Oh well, on to the fun part of today's entry!

French was a bore again. It's nothing to do with our teacher, just what we're being taught. It's so weird to just sit in front of the screen listening to him tell us what phrases introduce the subjunctive mood. Just print out a list and give it to us! I thought 'AO' French is supposed to be more challenging than this? It's starting to feel more like a grammarian's session, twice weekly. I don't need that, I can study grammar by myself thank you very much. Oh! I just checked the FJCA page, and it has all the stuff he goes through during lessons. I knew I was right not to copy stuff. I was super tempted to continue reading the introduction of Les Fleurs Du Mal (The Flowers Of Evil), a collection of Charles Baudelaire's poetry. It was damn funny! Mr Quenot happened to walk in front of my table, and he saw the book. "Mon Dieu. Il lit Les Fleurs Du Mal." "Pourquoi tout le monde dit ça?" He then went on to talk about how it was like banished to hell in French libraries, but it was still a chef d'oeuvre of French literature.

Essentially, the poems are very controversial thematically, a lot of stuff dealing with the seamier side of city life, like prostitution. Everyone's quite amused that I'm reading this collection, probably because of the blurb at the back of the book which mentions that there are lesbian personas in some poems. It's actually just three, as I've found out from the introduction, which is quite readable, compared to that of Silas Marner. I've been spending a lot of my time in the RJC library lately, even though its fiction section sucks. They have a lot of George Eliot's works, but they're terribly thick. I feel stupid reading Silas Marner sometimes, but as Yi-Xun rightly pointed out, doing close reading of her work makes Shakespeare seem simple. The Bard pales in comparison to her "genius" as Mr Purvis calls it. Guess how many books I'm reading now? Around 30, four are by Italo Calvino, and another four are from the RJC library. One has a wonderful title - Noctuary. Go figure. The rest are all stuff that I've been reading on and off since forever. I'm presumably going to squeeze in time to go through my readings and notes too. Who needs holidays? I wonder...