Triumph Of The Holy Cross/Cream-filled Donut Day/Eat A Hoagie Day/Hug A Crabby Stranger Day/Write Your Own Headlines Day
2004-09-14 @ 10:58 p.m.

Bean Soup Festival (Pennsylvania)I made stunning progress (for me) on my complex numbers tutorial. Now if only I could bring that momentum into my other subjects. That'd be great, studying properly for a change. I was so sleepy today that I kept dozing off during Mr Rollason's lecture. I hope it wasn't too obvious! He was telling us today during our tutorial about how he went on strike once, to demand that washing-up time be included as part of the working hours at the factory. Mr Rollason's just damn funny! Like how our lecture notes have a line that reads: "Shengwu, are you paying attention?" We all started laughing when we saw that, and he was mystified for a few moments. Or like how he got caught off-guard today during the lecture, because he'd just copied and pasted some table from some website, and someone asked him something about it. He was uncharacteristically slow at bluffing his way through that one!

Doing my overdue case study on the UK brewing industry right now, and I've got a feeling that I'm kind of screwed for the Economics paper, at least the case study part. Oh well, I guess I'll continue tomorrow. The good news is that the discman isn't damaged; it's the headphones which aren't working properly. Lucky for me I've got a spare set of headphones handy. Today Mr Batchelor mentioned a short story writer, Raymond Carver, which he enjoys. I found a collection of his short stories in the library, and they're good. The stories are pretty much like those of Robert Frost's Love And A Question and Home Burial - they don't end with the expected denouement. They just sort of leave you hanging with vague possibilities. Fascinating stuff. Not the kind of thing you want to get into with less than three weeks to the most significant examinations of your J1 year, but what the heck...