California Poppy Day/Animated Cartoon Day/Caramel Popcorn Day/Tartan Day
2005-04-06 @ 10:45 p.m.

The Internet connection is fine now; it was the router that was faulty. The RAM on my Pentium 4 has also been tripled, so everything works a lot faster now. Here's to many more happy hours of surfing! After hearing Mr Purvis talk about The Return Of The Native so many times, I've finally decided that there are areas of my life that qualify as cosmic jokes in the Hardyan scheme of things. Now the trouble is deciding whether I'm more like Clym or Eustacia in terms of temperament. I suspect that I'm ultimately fatalistic, largely because I'm religious, but I still believe in free will. (What about predestination?) "Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days." That's the line that speaks the most to me right now in this book. By a twist of fate, I now possess two complimentary tickets to the band concert next Monday. Is anyone from school willing to accompany a lonely sod to the Esplanade on Monday evening? I wanted to go for it, but I just never got around to buying a ticket. Now that I've got tickets without having to pay for them, it'll be quite a waste not to attend really.

Just when Guitar was becoming too much of a routine, we've started playing our concert songs. I've had quite enough of our SYF pieces to be frank. Why do we always sound better when Mr Gaspar conducts us? I don't agree with Dan, who thinks Mr Gaspar panders to us too much. If your own conductor won't encourage you, who will? I'll be very glad when SYF and the concert are both over. I want my free time back, if for no other reason than that it's free time. Freedom to watch plays, to attend concerts, to read books, to listen to music, to write poetry, to eat and drink, to talk with the friends that matter to me, to live a life outside of academia. I miss the days when weiqi was my ECA, and all I did was sit in a room, and place and remove black and white pieces on a board. My fondest memory of those times was beating my instructor, which wasn't easy even when he gave all of us an opening advantage. Where did that self go in the intervening years? I hope it was somewhere safe.

(I wonder if anyone will blog about this other than me. Probably not, only I dislike him enough.) Mr Kwok hit a new low today. It started of with a ridiculous comment about Allen's face and the table, and degenerated further when he started picking on Li Jun for not handing in her work when he very clearly told her not to bother last term. The climax was when he asked who hadn't prepared for today's tutorial, and everyone's hands went up. He admonished us for our irresponsibility, threatened never to hold another tutorial, and stalked out of the classroom. (Would that we had captured the scene on video!) If even the ever-dutiful Dan wasn't prepared, surely Mr Kwok understood that this particular source-based question had really slipped everyone's mind? I don't think he handled the situation very well. I started laughing the moment he stepped out of class. Of course, Dan will readily attribute such rude behaviour to my antagonistic attitude towards Mr Kwok, just like how pointing out that Mr Kwok has seldom adhered to his schedule with self-professed "clockwork precision" is to be considered "self-justification" and "pathetic". (How your voice dripped with disgust, but you were always more forgiving, to put it positively.) Is one not entitled to state the facts though? Ah well, not that I cared very much about the tutorial anyway. Seriously, you can't expect me to respect someone who has scarcely a kind word for the students who need it most, and that's disregarding all his bad jokes. Like I've said before, this man needs to lighten up. Damn it, is that too much to ask?