Indian? Canadian? Thai?

No, we're not talking food, it's just one more random quiz...

You're Thailand!

Calmer and more staunchly independent than almost all those around you,
you have a long history of rising above adversity. Recent adversity has led to questions
about your sexual promiscuity and the threat of disease, but you still manage to attract a
number of tourists and admirers. And despite any setbacks, you can really cook a good
meal whenever it's called for. Good enough to make people cry.
Take the Country
Quiz at the Blue Pyramid

Sexual Promiscuity? Cooking skills? threat of DISEASE? they've got it wrong, i tells you!

more substantial posts later. genetics is evil.

BOW DOWN AND WORSHIP!!!

or not. tee-hee!

Sharon was a Sneaky Greek God in a past life. http://quizme.stvlive.com/pastlife/quiz.php

Sharon spins tunes as DJ Crazy God http://quizme.stvlive.com/djname/quiz.php

Sneaky, crazy and divine? Sounds like me alright! :D And now, back to the grindstone. *sob*

c'est fini, le MCAT!!!

The title says it ALL, amigos. The MCAT is done with, and my score was better than I could have ever expected, so I have that small happiness to keep me warm as the days grow inexorably colder.

I am totally saddened though, by the blog's sudden drop in readership. It went from, like, 5 people, to 1 ( Hem!) Of course, this was probably materially affected by the fact that I only post around once a month. *sheepish grin* In any case, I'm not sure that I'm doing this blog for the feedback - though comments are always appreciated - it's more a venting space for me. Of course, by that logic, if you look at the long gaps between posts - i must be a horribly repressed person (and I am, actually!) I've been told by people that my blog should have more of the "what-i-did-today" stuff - but, you know, I can't do that. The details of my life are petty and mundane - and I've always felt that day-to-day routines are almost interchangeable, while it is one's thoughts, rants, weird mental processes that make one unique. So that's what I try (emphasis on try) to bring out in my blog. Me, as I tend to sound in my own head, weird dialogue and all. I'm not for disclosing everything that goes on in my head, though - joys, addictions, dislikes, fears, insecurities - (though there are plenty of those to go around) - I don't tell anyone about those - but I will give you too much of my insane opinions.

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE BOOK SALE! (How's that for an abrupt change of topic? :D)

Had to wait 10 minutes to get in, but was cheered by the fact that, earlier, the wait time was around 30 minutes (eep!). I was totally spoilt for choice - I mean, two HALLS full of books!!! c'mon!!! total kid-in-a-candy-store syndrome. anyway, here's a list of books i bought - for only $20, too! :D

• To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee - book you HAVE to own. If you haven't read it, go buy/ obtain a copy NOW.
• Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - book that should make you look intellectual just sitting on your bookshelf (teehee!)
• Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - Repressed English People. Fuuun. :D
• The Hippopotamus - Stephen Fry - I (heart) Stephen Fry. The man was Jeeves, for crying out loud!!! :D I've read ALL of his books, and the man is a joy to read. Just funny, and... did i mention funny? I'd recommend "Moab is my washpot" to start with, it's his autobiography.
• The Fourth Man - a book about the Philby, Burgess, Blunt and Maclean scandal - they were Soviet spies - and i think they were the inspiration for John Le Carre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which was made into an awesome BBC miniseries in the '80's with Alec Guiness as George Smiley.
• The Seven Pillars of Wisdom - TE Lawrence - yup. THE T.E. Lawrence - as in Lawrence of Arabia. All I know of the guy is what I learnt from the movie (Peter O'Toole was gorgeous when he was younger!) and from a National Geographic profile. Hopefully it should be an interesting read.
• The Titus Novels - Mervyn Peake - you may know these novels better as the Gormenghast novels - they're supposed to be landmarks of fantasy literature, and I watched a A&E adaptation of the first two that was pretty entertaining (and yet, weirdly disquieting) - so for $1 (i kid you not!) it seemed a steal.
• Daily Life in Ancient Rome - Florence Dupont - course-related reading, but entertaining all the same. Apparently Pompey (he whose head was presented to Caesar by Ptolemy) was quite the romantic. Whodathunkit?

I plan to go back on Tuesday - last year, they slashed the prices by half on the last day *evil grin* I plan to pick up some poetry - maybe a collected Edna St Vincent Millay, if I can find one.

After I left the booksale, I ran into Purva and Sabina, and prattled on without remembering it was P's birthday. *sad face* Of course, now I'm going to have bad birthday karma. Weird to think in less than a month I will be twenty - that feels so OLD! I mean, TWENTY!!! GAH!

"We interrupt your regular programming to bring you a spazzfit by the author. (Insert unintelligible noices here) We now return you to the marginally more coherent ramblings of the author when not gibbering insanely."

blahhhh... :D

what else, what else? I'm learning to play Russian Poker! As with all card games though, my luck is abysmal - though it may have less to do with luck and more to do with me being stuuupid. If my life was a seventies hindi movie, this would be the part where my police officer father berated me for wasting my life playing cards - lucky for me, my Dad's an accountant, eh? :D

think that's it for now. I leave you now with one of my favourite scenes from one of my favourite episodes of one of my favourite anime - it's a clip from Session 5 - "Ballad of Fallen Angels" and the anime is (for those of you philistines who don't yet know :P) Cowboy Bebop. Enjoy!

Lefties and Left-wingers

Mon pauvre abandoned blog! Fear not, I have not forsaken thee! *huggles*

What have I been doing (or not doing, in some cases) in these last 20-something days? Here's a sampler -

• went out for Japanese food, ate it with chopsticks without having a serious accident/injuring the other diners (for me, this is progress, so don't laugh!)
• bought a BUNCH of posters from the latest Imaginus sale - go gawk at them below.
• bravely resisted the urge to go on mad shopping urges - again, this is progress for me.

With all this talk about progress, I must seriously be on the road to nirvana or something, wot? :D

What I need in my life at the moment - is passion! No, get your mind out of the gutters (and stop reading period bodice-rippers) - what I mean, is that i need to find something I really care about. I'm at the point in my life where I need to seriously figure out what it is I want to do - and nothing at all interests me. To make matters worse, the professors I see every day of the week clearly love what they do. When my classics professors says he'd give a limb to sit in on a conversation between Caesar and Cicero, I believe him. The problem is - there's nothing I care about enough to break a nail over - let alone a limb. So how does the queen of "meh"-"who cares" find something she cares about enough to spend the rest of her life doing it?

Feedback on this issue would be much appreciated - serious stuff though. What can y'all see me doing?

Apparently they had a lecture/speech thing at St Mike's this past week (read about it at thevarsity.ca) , where the speaker (Stephanie Gray) argued that abortion was an act of genocide against the unborn - and I had had had to rant about it - so where better to do it than here?

Is the woman insane? Abortion is not some giant conspiracy by women against the massive ranks of the unborn! Granted - casual abortion isn't something i'd endorse, but that doesn't mean you should deny a woman's right to choose! The speaker in question didn't even think abortion was permissible in cases of rape! Fine, not everyone thinks abortion is right - I totally understand that. But even worse, she thinks birth control devices are acts of killing!In my opinion, her views on abortion aren't the subversive ones - it's her views on birth control. I mean, this is denying women the right to take steps to prevent a pregnancy which may be unwanted/inopportune! *grinds teeth*

Here endeth the rant - and here are the posters I'd bought at the sale. Let me know what you think!

Alright, the Star Wars one is really Geeky, but then I am an uber-geek, so it's to be expected - right?

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!