Friday, August 13, 2004
Rewrite It
Ach everyone has bad things to say about school. That is not to say I have anything good to say, but it is pretty depressing to hear everyone being bored to death in the first week of school. I have also made the startling discovery that boredom might actually predispose one to some forms of madness, after sitting through several COFM lectures. Oh, I like Adeline Seow (I thought she was great during FRS, and she's still great ^_^) and Goh Lee Gan, they are great lecturers, but Lee Hin Peng drives me up the wall with his one word every two seconds diction. And I have no liking for NE stuff either, being the highly cynical person I am.
Another good thing I have managed to find in the first week of school is the comparatively large number of British lecturers we have this year. I absolutely adore British English and the way British people speak English. Describing my reaction as ecstatic is not an exaggeration. Which partly explains my excitement while watching Harry Potter films. And the other day I watched a segment of The Importance of Being Earnest just to hear them speak in that beautiful accent. Who cares about the story. It might be a silly thing to imagine, but I like to think that having British lecturers makes school seem more Hogwarts-y. I can almost visualise next week's Microbiology practical as Potions and Dr Taylor as Snape. Ooh I am getting more and more excited.
Well anything to make school more exciting and less dreary. It is, after all, only the first week.
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Fullmetal Alchemist is accelerating to breakneck speed in its multiple revelations per episode now. I thought Episodes 41 and 42 were jaw-droppingly amazing but Episode 44 left me with some serious exophthalmos and dropped jaw. This must be the singular best anime I have ever watched, after Last Exile. I cannot imagine how I will live when it ends in 7 episodes' time.
Already I cannot contemplate waiting till the release of the next episode, since Ep 45 is only going to be shown in Japan on 21 August. Already I have reached the state where I am unable to wait till Fork's releases and I download the raws instead, even though my Japanese is even more lousy than I realised. But watching raws has helped me improve my standard anyway. For the first time in 8 years since I started studying Jap, I think it has finally made itself useful in my life.
Argh FMA addiction is driving me nuts!
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I was rather bemused the other day after being hit by a wave of reminiscence about the time when I was still very young.
I remember the first time I took an aeroplane when I was just 7 (Hah I am pretty happy about the fact that I had not took a plane before that; if so I would not have remembered my first time on a plane, and I would not be very happy about it). Being just a child and so naive, I was totally fascinated by all the interesting stuff on the plane.
I kept tightening and loosening my seat belt because it was so fun pulling the strap to tighten it. I emptied the contents of the compartment on the back of the seat in front of me onto my lap and started reading through all the safety instructions on the piece of card they had. The one with the pictures of those inflatable slides extending from the plane into the sea and people sliding down them, and with people in round lifeboats floating in the ocean, wearing lifejackets. Basically, just frantically trying to divide my attention between all these fresh exciting things that I was seeing.
For me at that age it was a new experience, taking an airplane, and I was so excited by it. I realise that when you experience things at a young age, you will enjoy that experience a lot more than if you were going through that same experience for the first time as an adult, because as a child you are not bound by the restrictions of better sense and norms of respectable behaviour as adults would be. A child playing with his seat belt would be greeted with much more tolerance than an adult doing the same, as society expects an adult to know better that to act so immaturely. But then there are people like Mr. Bean.
Alas, when we were children we could not wait to grow up, but when we are adults we wish we could return to our childhoods, as with the hindsight of maturity and the added restrictions of social norms and responsibilities we all wish we could have done more with our childhoods, that we could have enjoyed that time more when we were able to do so freely and without thinking twice. It is so characteristic of human nature to want things we cannot get, and to wish we had made better use of the chances we had when we had them. Such is the sadness of a life not fully lived, for at every step along the long long road of life one will always look back and wish things could have been better.
Avaris / 8/13/2004 09:29:00 PM
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