Will be on a plane and flying to Kuching in less than 12 hours, and I don't really know why I am going on this trip. Haha the bandsmen are going up to support them with a funfair that they're going to have, and Daniel sort of just asked if I wanted to go and I was free either way so I just said yes. But it was an opportunity that I can't have said no to also, been there two years ago and was richly blessed by the people there, and have quite a few friends there whom I simply cannot not visit. Is it wrong to go for personal reasons then!? Hahaha but I will be admin guy and photographer.

It's only the end of week 3 in school and I feel like I am severely behind work! Gosh how did it end up like this. 

I love my literature classes. I really do. I don't write as well as I should, and I don't read as much as I should, but I love the way how I can sit in class and listen about the vastly different comments on a text or film or image or whatever we're given to analyse. It's the lit classes that throw me completely off my comfort zone. When I walk into a geography module at the start of the term, I already know what to expect. Probably because I've been through more geog classes than most people so after a while you know the scopes of research and academia that goes into urban cities, development, tourism, economy, etc. But my lit classes are a colossal mystery prior to the first lecture. The module names go "Psychoanalysis" and "Tragedy" and "16/17/18/19/20th Century" and I will be okayyy so what happened centuries before my time, and all the concepts are way too philosophical for me to comprehend in a single day.

And somehow everyone seems to know it better than I do, they exchange insightful critiques and complicated verbose that happen all above my head and I'm grasping at thin air. I sit there like a blubbering idiot wondering what are the books I need to read to be able to present dialectics like they could. Whatever that I want to say I'm always hesitant to eject, because I constantly think that it smacks of high school touch-and-go tripe which barely scratches the surface. But I've also learnt that there really is no condemnation and shame in my lit classes. They kinda like building up and adding onto what the previous comment was, so I try to make sure that I speak up among the first few hahaha so that whatever I banal stuff I say establishes the ground and then people build on for me and they'll quote me "like what Guan You said earlier"! Or else I will propose outrageous ideas, mainly because I don't really have much else to add, and so I go on and question whether that character is bisexual. Then there will be this huge debate for or against that.

Which brings to mind how I walked today into the smallest and most intimate lit tutorial I've ever had thus far. The immediate trouble was that all of them seemed to be lit majors and they apparently know each other, so I kinda just hid in my corner acting all smug and mighty because I really didn't know anyone in that class. Okay to be truthful it really felt like one of those book clubs! There were only like ten people, and the venue was the prof's office, which was cramped with wooden bookshelves towering all over the place and there were stacks of Penguin Classics in each shelf. Tell me if this doesn't seem like one of those quaint book attics and all of us were packed into this tiny abscess discussing Victorian authors. But for the nice people and new friends that I've met, it was worth the shoulder-to-shoulder squeeze. I highly suspect that this is one of the tutorials which I really cannot bluff my way through, and already they are imposing their imprints everywhere. I mean, it's one thing to enjoy Great Expectations, but I get a little bit scared when they gush in girly-speak "I lurrrrve Dickens". Heh but that's another post for another time. Right now I can't wait for next week's book club.

I don't really know what is it that I want to bring across in this post. 

Today I found out that I actually can teach guitar entirely in Mandarin-speak! Never ever thought that I would be walking down this path, and this is definitely one of my better achievements for this year! Just taken up a new guitar tuition job for this three ladies that I have never met before, and the only caveat in the job description was that they requested for the lessons to be conducted in Mandarin and that they want to learn worship songs in Mandarin too. My knowledge in that area is severely limited to as many of the handful of times I have assisted Chinese Corps with their praise and worship segment, and even then I cannot remember the songs that they introduced me to! The worship songs I know in Mandarin are all the ones that have been translated from their English counterparts. 

So it was with some trepidation that I'm taking on this job, and possibly continuing it for the next few months or so. I had to Google Translate last night for specific nouns like music note, chord, guitar string, metronome, tuner, octave haha oh my it took me quite a bit of time just to memorize all that! But I thank God that I lasted through the entire hour plus plus with barely an English word muttered, apart from all the music notes like C sharp heh there's no Mandarin alternative to that right?? Happy for the new friends made, and I'm determined to learn more Mandarin worship songs. This reminds me strongly of leading that Indonesian/Malay praise song at Malaysian Camp. Cool, my worship ministry is going multi-lingual. 

Hahaha 1.15am now and it's so apt to sing "it's a quarter after one, I'm all alone and I need you now..."! It's on my repeated playlist for a while because I like the harmony for that song. And nope, I am not deliberately holding out till 1.15am just so that I can be cheesy and include that lyric in. But yeah, anything beyond this time and it will be what Joanna would term an "odd hour" because I've been sleeping at 5am so much in the past three months! And I don't think my body clock ever adjusted back from the crazy summer holidays sleep circadian. I have friends in university who still keep telling me that three four months after not meeting, I still have that same dazed sleepy look on my face like I'm constantly tired. Nahh I think they meant to say I have small eyes. Or my slight-curly messy hair is giving me that dream look. 

But I really feel like I can function and operate best at night. I plain cannot study much in the day, and at night my brain activates some spark plug somewhere and my thoughts go into some whirlpool. Haha I kinda like how my room and laptop and seat is my recess and my silo for all the crazy things that happen in my head at night. I think whole universes are being borned and stars are smashing and creating new planets and whatnot this instant now. It's crazy, and I really should go write a book or something. 

Right now I am reading John Donne and Christopher Marlowe. Not the best things to read at a quarter after one because of blank verses and out-of-my-era English and Elizabethan tragedy and outrageous conceits. 

This is the one thousandth post for this blog! Well, at least according to the counter on Blogger, and barring any drafts that are not posted or any unaccounted for entries. This is a milestone to reach, and keeping in mind that it took a relatively long time to reach this many posts! First began this blog waaay back in 2004 when I was still actively playing Neopets hahaha and when I still have dial-up connection at home just to get on the Internet. But yup, it's a miracle that I'm still posting here with the advent of Twitter and Facebook and all sorts of other social media! Feels like this blog is a dinosaur in comparison to instantaneous, on-the-go updates at Twitter.

And I am constantly reminded that this virtual space is always a simulacrum of a diary equivalent if I do keep one? I know I am literally borned into the postmodern society where everything is based on the immediate visual, and sometimes it's hard to perceive that I have this archive of thoughts and feelings collected over the years in some, err, ethereal space. Intangible, yet constantly accessible, haha it blows my mind. I would be really sad if somehow the main blog server crashed or I accidentally deleted this blog, and I lose everything that I have written here. Should I back up my blog entries hahaha???

Elsewhere, I know that I am in some form of technological trouble when I start to think that all the display screens of electronic devices are all touchscreen! For those who have yet know I recently jumped on the iPhone bandwagon, and I'm getting very used to the entire "what I want I poke at it" concept. It's really cool and quite intuitive, except that this morning I was on my old iPod and I wanted it to repeat the song it just played and I stupidly jabbed at the screen several times before realizing that it is not touchscreen! Of course the iPod worked with the clicker wheel, and I felt like a fool. But yup, I remember the days when mp3 players came in 128MB and 256MB and 512MB, and then the iPod came along and revolutionized everything, and now iPhone and everything is so radical and different and technology changed every quotidian habit. Although sometimes I think that I am the one regressing technology, and I totally understand why my mother has huge pains and troubles with her new touchscreen phone too. Think my sister and I are both taking turns reprimanding the mother what to do and what not to do just to get her to call/SMS. The tables are turned now. Wahaha. 

Posting this as I just managed to navigate my way to where i wanna go at NUH! I have a class here in another hour, and honestly this place is a labyrinth with all the different departments and whatnot. Yup, school have started for me, after months of binning around and being able to wake up as late as I want everyday heh. I have two literature modules covering the Renaissance and the 19th century, two geography modules, and the NUH one is reproductive health hahaha.

And have been busy with many church things! We were at a leaders' retreat last week, then had a funfair yesterday, and was at Gracehaven for their service. Funfair in particular was fun! My cell group probably didn't require as much preparations as the other cells, but it was still a lot of work!

I'm eavesdropping on the conversations of these two NUH staff ladies who're sitting beside me for lunch now. One is attending a course on benefits of carbohydrates, and the other just came down for lunch from a busy emailing day. Feel so medical scientific gaargh. Okay I shall not neglect this blog space. But my next post is my thousandth I think haha