Valentine's Day/Heart To Heart Day/Hug Day/Clean Out Your Computer Day/Have A Heart Day
2005-02-14 @ 11:14 p.m.

Listening to Sleep City Metalworkers, and trying to get started on the analysis of Good-Bye And Keep Cold for Thursday's tutorial. This is Frost being even more obscure than usual. Only thing I've picked up is the fact that almost all the lines have 11 syllables, and the exceptions seem to mark important lines. What the heck is so significant about anapaestic tetrameter? Thong had better find out soon, or I'll have to do it myself. Clinton's really amusing. This is the second time he's started a conversation with me just to ask who I am. Bumped into him the other day at the bus stop outside my house. He was going to church, the one opposite my block, which somehow reminds me of a shopping centre. Maybe it's the escalators. Have just switched the playlist to Bleak Harvest, which has now survived being eliminated from my music collection, by virtue of my discovering I like the music and there being new tracks available for downloading. The Mourning is a really bizarre track, aside from the fact that there seems to be the occasional problem with the mastering. Time to axe someone. Probably Naked Skin or Orphic Endeavors, neither of which I listen to much. Okay, Bleak Harvest's music is just weird. Period. Downloading Élu for tomorrow, when I might or might not organise the music in my Zen Touch.

Today was just one of those days for which it wasn't worth coming to school. Mr Purvis was presumably not well, so there went GP. Then the projector in LT6 refused to cooperate, even with the technician. Bye bye Mr Sowden's lecture! PE doesn't count. Today's European History tutorial was conducted by this really nice lady, here for a lesson observation. It would have gone better if we'd actually read the reading, but it wasn't so bad once you got over the overly long awkward silences. Mr Sowden spent most of his tutorial saying something about merit goods, but what exactly he said eludes me. It all just runs together, and all I'm left with is vaccines are not a good example of merit goods. Very happy about my essay, so at least the hard work for that paid off. Mr Tay wasn't in school, so I got home earlier than usual, and promptly fell asleep after lunch. That's my Valentine's Day for you, and I hope everyone had a happy one too. (Even if I still think it's a disgusting, commercialised affair that ranks right up there with Christmas.)

Now for something that will be completely useless to a lot of people, but which I find quite amazing. Metrical feet! Not just plain iambs and trochees mind you, but choriambs and ditrochees! (Although ditrochees strike me as being unnecessary, being after all, one trochee followed by another.) This is how you tell when someone is well and truly bored. He digs up obscure information like this:

Pyrrhic - unstressed unstressed
Iamb - unstressed stressed
Trochee - stressed unstressed
Spondee - stressed stressed
Tribrach - unstressed unstressed unstressed
Anapaest - unstressed unstressed stressed
Amphibrach - unstressed stressed unstressed
Bacchius - unstressed stressed stressed
Dactyl - stressed unstressed unstressed
Amphimacer - stressed unstressed stressed
Antibacchius - stressed stressed unstressed
Molossus - stressed stressed stressed
1st Epitrite - unstressed stressed stressed stressed
Paeon - stressed unstressed unstressed unstressed
Choriamb - stressed unstressed unstressed stressed
Ditrochee - stressed unstressed stressed unstressed
2nd epitrite - stressed unstressed stressed stressed
3rd epitrite - stressed stressed unstressed stressed
4th epitrite - stressed stressed stressed unstressed

Oh, to be a tribrach and not a molossus!