Walking Wounded.

I'd forgotten what a five-day work week felt like! It's only Wednesday, and I'm already a zombie, so if you see a member of the living dead on campus, hold off on the exorcisms (or whatever rituals dispel zombies) - it's only me.

I'm planning to overcome my inertia and finally use the U of T athletic centre tomorrow; hopefully, this'll become a permanent routine.

Am I the only person who smiles when they're reading a funny book? I mean, the looks I get on the subway are not to be believed; "Young lady, are you perhaps mentally unstable? " I defy ANYONE to read Pratchett and keep a straight face.

hrm... what else? My courses seem pretty okay; ZOO328 is a highlight. It's a relatively small class (only 60 people), which, in and of itself, is a bit surreal: every now and then during class, I look around and think, "where are the other 1000 people???" Damn you, U of T, for making me expect gargantuan class sizes! Where was I? Ah, yes, Z00328. The course (Developmental Biology) is interesting, the prof has a cool accent (German) and the labs are interesting, and more importantly, aren't graded. Frog Embryo dissection, anyone?

ANT349 (Globalization & Underdevelopment) is interesting, albeit a bit on the theoretical side. I think the focus with the upper year humanities is not so much on the facts, but rather on the interpretation. With a history course, forexample, the emphasis tends to be on histereography (spelling?) and discourse (if you can explain that concept to me, i'll owe you forever!). Still, the material, as I've said, is interesting, and I do need to hone my research/critical writing skills.

CLA233 (Intro to Roman Culture) is great so far (don't want to jinx it!); the prof is funny and engaging, and the subject matter is engrossing. The prof (M Dewar) has a brit accent, but I think he's Scottish, cause he tends to roll some of his r's in (what I assume is) a Scottish way. Am I an actual accent expert? Heck no. I just watched My Fair Lady far too many times during my formative years, and that opening scene where Prof (again with the professor!) Henry Higgins deduces the origins of members of the crowds from their accents has always impressed me. hmm. but the course? does require a bit of reading (Catullus, anyone?) and a lot of latin/roman terminology; something tells me i'll have confused my fair share of consuls/praetors/aediles/quaestors before the term is done.

MGY377 and HMB321 haven't impressed me that favourably yet, probably cause the material is a bit harder (bateriology and genetics respectively); hopefully, given a bit of time, I'll warm to the subject matter.

Think that's it for now; oooh, before I forget, does anyone want a Gmail invite? It appears I have six (count 'em, six!) available. Leave a comment and I'll get back to you.

Another thing - do I really sound like I'm five years old? Cause I do on my voicemail, and it's very disheartening. :( The dissonance between what I look like (giantess) and what I sound like (squeaky) is really kinda odd, dontcha think? That's what happens when you get the shallow end of the family gene pool. :D

More rants on the unfairness of my genetic allotment to come. Don't change the channel!

Sharon's Personal Planet

School's back! I really do feel cheated out of my hols, considering that I had class 4 days a week for the evil effin' mcat for most of the four months. However, there's nothing to do now, but buckle down and get back to the grind. As usual, it's my elective course (Intro to Roman Culture) that seems the most interesting - we opened with an anecdote wherein Seneca the younger extols the braveness of a German captive who, rather than face his death in the amphitheatre, killed himself by choking on a sponge used in public lavatories to wipe one's rear. Our professor noted that ancient sources often take a lot of stuff for granted, thereby leaving important questions unanswered, such as - "Was the sponge clean or not?"

Everyone's had blog entries commemorating the end of summer, and so I feel I ought to follow suite - but I did ABSOLUTELY nothing this summer, so sorry, y'all get NOTHING. I became more geeky, read voraciously, slept muchly, and ate even more. Thus ends the story of the summer of '04.

I should REALLY learn not to get into a manga before it's concluded. The latest one is Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys, which has a bit of an X-files/conspiracy theory vibe that I loved. However, don't rush off to MangaScreener to download it just yet, since the series isn't completed in Japan, and volume 17 won't even be released there till October 30th! *argh* So here I am, reading and REreading volumes 1-16 to the point of memorization. The premise of the series is intriguing - in the 70's a group of friends devised a plan whereby they would defeat bad guys; twenty years later, they notice that someone IS trying to take over the world using the plan they thought the bad guys would use in their childhood. No one is what they seem, no one stays dead for long, and nothing can be taken for granted; sound interesting yet?

Oh, and on Inuyasha - Kagura died. It was very sniffle-inducing, while that whole arc lasted. :(

I tried my hand in the kitchen tonight, and managed to make a presentable Dal!!! And I managed to fry fish (shush, Hem!) Unfortunately, my family is less appreciative of my culinary endeavours than they might be:

Me: Don't feel shy about congratulating me on my latest culinary success!!!

Family: The rice is crunchy.

Me: There's something wrong with that?

Family: O.O

Me: huh?

Family: Maybe we dropped her on the head once too often when she was a kid.

Me: sorry, I didn't catch that?

Family: so, who wants take-out?

I was re-reading Helene Hanff's 84 Charing Cross Road. Technically, she's not really the author, rather a coauthor and editor. It's a collection of the correspondence between her and a a London bookstore, Marks and Co., which was at 84 Charing Cross Road, London. It's a fascinating read, really - the letters start in 1949 and continue until 1969, when Frank Doel, her chief correspondent at the store passed away. Hanff was a screenwriter, an New Yorker, and an anglophile (a trait i seem to share) and she liked old english books, preferably used. It's interesting to see the tone of the letters change from businesslike to friendly, and the world they describe is oddly remote, for all that it was only half a century ago. The writing is wonderful too; I'd like nothing better than to be able to express myself with that sort of charm and wit. Letter-writing is a lost art though; we are incapable of expressing ourselves without scads of smileys and acronyms.

think i've said all i wanted to say this time; apologies for the delay - writer's block is not limited to authors who actually possess writing talent. :D ta!

Happy Onam!

It's been a while!

Since the MCAT (Malevolent Cruel Annoying Test), I've gone into total seclusion and become a hermit. It's gotten to the point where my parents are trying (to no avail) to get me out of the house.

Mum: It's such a nice day out, why don't you take a walk?
Me: *Chewbacca yell*
Mum: *stare*
Me: *more Chewbacca yelling*
Mum: You were DEFINITELY switched at the hospital.
Me: *grunt* *snort*
Mum: This is all your father's fault for letting you watch those movies.
Me: Star Wars is a CLASSIC!
Mum: pfft.

... and so on and so forth. :D

The epic battle between Haloscan and Blogger-Commenting was won, with very little actual blood shed, by Blogger. My Haloscan account has been consigned to the larger wastes of cyberspace, so people will have to make do with the Blogger comments.

And now for the meat and potatoes of today's post - Happy Onam!!! Onam is the main cultural festival of Kerala, the state in India where I'm from. The story goes that once upon a time, there was a noble King who was banished (I forget the story of how exactly, but banished he was) and was granted the boon that every year he could come back and visit his subjects and see how they were doing. So every year, Malayalees (that means people from Kerala, or people who speak Malayalam) dress up and cook their best food so that the King sees that they are doing well.

The main Onam meal is called the Onam Sadya, and it is a feast! There are around 10 curries, and you're supposed to finish as much food as you can, because to waste food on Onam is inauspicious. It's an entirely vegetarian affair, and though I'm not all that fond of Malayalee vegetarian food, my Mum's an awesome enough cook for it not to matter. So yeah, right now I'm absolutely full, moving from where I currently sit is not a viable option, so I thought I may as well share the occasion with everyone else. We didn't get dressed up this year though; there is a special outfit for women for Onam - it's a two piece Sari called a Set Munde, but I haven't worn one in years.

On a side note, Kerala is being marketed to tourists as "God's Own Country"! Don't get me wrong, it's a BEAUTIFUL place, lush and green and wunderbar and all that, but it's just a bit odd to think that I come from God's Own Country by way of Bombay. :D

I saw Hero, this chinese movie directed by Zhang Yimou, starring Jet Li and Zhang Ziyi; totally cool, but I think I prefer the physicality of films like Kill Bill (ie - you stab people, they actually bleed) to the ethereal-ness of this one. This is more of an intellectual film than an action one, IMO, and I'm about as intellectual as Homer Simpson, so all the Rashomon-esque flashbacks are wasted on me.

And now, I'm off!

Ciao!

Of Cute Guys and Commenting.

To Haloscan or Not To Haloscan, that is indeed the question. What is Haloscan, you ask? Well, if you visit Hem's Blog (the link for Ennui on the right) and comment on any of her posts, you'll notice that the comments show up in a nifty pop-up window that allows the use of smileys. So why don't you get a Haloscan account, you ask? Well, if I do shift to a Haloscan account, I lose all my existing comments, and while there aren't that many of them (hint, hint!), I'd still be sorry to lose 'em.

So the MCAT was this Saturday; after it was done, I stumbled towards Queen's Park station, mulling over the absurdity of some of the questions they seemed to think could gauge a person's aptitude to practice Medicine. With MCAT-induced toxicity swirling through my veins, I got on the subway and was confronted with that most annoying of modern-day specimens - the insouciant teenager. This particular female had decided that in light of the rush hour madness (it was just past five at the time) the best course of action would be for her to put her feet up and occupy THREE seats. Too tired to let myself get annoyed, I walked away to the other side of the compartment, and before I knew it, I was at St George.

At St George, I had to change trains, but with my wunderbar luck, I missed the train, and so had to wait another ten minutes on the platform, where I was faced with a wide cross-section of the diversity that makes the TTC suuuch a pleasure to ride. There was Herr NosePicker, who was engrossed in conducting an excavation into the depths of his nasal cavity; Monsieur CrazyMan, who put his hands over his ears everytime a train passed by on the other line (it's loud, but nowhere near that loud!); and finally Mrs WailingBaby, who obviously thought the addition of her darling infant's caterwauling to the cacophony that is a TTC platform at around half past five made the whole thing bearable. Why didn't I move? Cause that's where I usually wait for easy access to escalators at my destination. Am I normally this cranky? No, this was stress-induced (I hope!).

I was so close, Mesdames et Messieurs, to becoming That-Crazy-Lady-On-The-Subway-Who-Screams-At-Random-People, but THEN - salvation arrived, and he wore a suit. An expensively tailored suit of the sort you usually see only in advertisements for Italian Suit Commercials, and a haircut that cost more that some people make in a week, and a face that started En Vogue's "Whatta Man" playing in my head. You know, the song that goes, "whatta man, whatta man, what a mighty good man... yes he is!" As music doth soothe the savage beast, the sight of the Cute Guy did soothe the Cranky Sharon. And so Sharon did alight on the Subway that would take her towards her home, without verbally abusing her fellow TTC'ers, as much as they did deserve it. And she saw the Cute Guy nevermore.

Tragic, innit? :grin:

Think that's about it for today; I shall leave y'all with a Videogame quiz this time. Whoa - Anime, Harry Potter, and Video Games? Do I run the gamut of geekiness or what? :D

theOtaku.com: What Metal Gear Solid Character Are You?

The Sorting Hat says...

be sorted @ nimbo.net

With my abysmal luck though, in the real thing, I'd probably be a Hufflepuff. *shudder*

Not really in the mood to sit down and write... maybe later?