No-Hitter Day/Respect Canada Day/I Love Horses Day/Harvest Festival (Kansas)/SummerFest (North Dakota)
2004-07-15 @ 10:55 p.m.

I've just spent some time deleting all my poems from this blog, and altering the dates at Mingled Soil to those which used to be reflected here. It wasn't an easy process, because I wanted to keep the more significant comments I made in those entries with the poems. There's also a new shoutbox there, so please post your comments about my poetry there in future. Should I change from a tag-board to a shoutbox for this blog? My latest poem is about love. So far, I've shown it to a few classmates, and they liked it. That made me quite happy, because usually people have very mixed reactions to my poetry. It's not often that I write something which has mass appeal. It's a pretty long effort, most of it written during Mathematics lecture today. Before some idiot says it, I state for the record that I wasn't inspired in the least by the person sitting beside me. I've also deleted a good number of MP3s from my collection, including all of Jeff Harrington's stuff, since I never listened to any of them after I downloaded them. Not my kind of music anyway! Maroon 5 rocks!

Today, we got back our English results. I'm happy! Scraped through with an A thanks to my practical criticism. As for Silas Marner, I actually did better for it than Antony & Cleopatra. Mr Purvis, you're much too kind. "Some good work as always", and I thought my conclusion was rubbish, but he thinks it's very good. I was practically panicking by the end of the essay, just grabbing anything I could come up with and dumping it there. Oh well, I make more sense than I give myself credit for sometimes. We've started on the banner for the Afternoon Of Poetry & Music. Amazing, isn't it? Half-expected Ms Ho to bog us down in endless arguments over what the damn banner should look like. She'll probably still find something to complain about later. Painting emulsion is really boring, but swirling paintbrushes in turpentine is rather fun. Kai Min's comment on the paintbrush that could kill a chicken sticks in my head for some reason. There was other hilarious stuff that I'd love to post here, but my head'll roll if I do that. Think I'll go down to Mel's place later on Saturday, need to help paint the banner.

Mr Purvis is terribly blunt. It was probably his hangover, because he was just weirder than normal during GP today. One of his first remarks is about how he's read our essays, and he likes mine and Yi-Xun's. That isn't really surprising. What's surprising is how out of the blue, he tells Daniel he wouldn't have given him 44/50. That came after a side remark on how Yi-Xun should have got a higher mark. I felt kind of bad for Daniel, but at least Mr Purvis qualified his comment about Daniel's essay. Still, if you had to plaster that grin on your face, it proves his point that you don't really have a sense of humour, or at least not one that shows. Saying this or that thing is tasty doesn't count after the first 10 times you do it. (It's bloody difficult to carry out a normal conversation that way. You never know what's going to be on the menu.) I don't think it's very hard to earn Mr Purvis's respect, so long as you show that you're trying; it's hard to earn his praise. As for whether he deserves our respect, I suppose on a certain level he does because after all he is our tutor. Ah well, not really my business...