ole!

ok ... my legs are officially numb. left ankle's been twisted 5 times this week. hamstrings are tight. thighs are sore. and all these for what? for the obscene amount of soccer and running this week. i'm really glad i embarked on this marshall plan thing actually. if i never registered for the marathon, and the shame of finishing it after everyone is gone, i would never have had the motivation to train up my running. (BTW, Chunyang if you happen to read this, i know you want to run the chicago marathon too, so sign up!! and we can be running mates) However, i've had so many offers to play soccer this week that i've been playing every night for one whole week. sch work hasn't really picked up yet, but it will soon, and this insane amount of playing has got to stop. can't risk injuring myself and hence not be able to train up.

my textbooks have not arrived yet!! jeezz.... just when you think that the postal system here in the states is pretty advanced, along come the late arrival of THREE of my textbooks to utterly shatterly my confidence in it. The textbooks have been late for TWELVE days! geez, with that amount of time, Israel could have won TWO wars, W. Bush could have made five speeches, a girl could have lost a guy (in ten days nonetheless), and i'd have received my pay for mindef ( theoretically, if today is the first). sigh. i'm desperate now; i need two of the textbooks to complete my homeworks due on fri. not a very good time to be without them. guess i'd buy them tomm from the bookstores, and return them when i am done. sigh wat luck...

chopped off my beloved long hair today. (all the ladies out there, let me hear you say 'aaawwwwwwwwww') k kidding. its all an accident actually. i made a 10 am appointment at aveda this morning, and i guess my instructions weren't very clear, because even though they did try to leave my hair long, and just trim the sides, i walked out of the saloon looking very much like a china doll with a $12 haircut. naturally, i cried my heart out in the school washroom, wore a cap for the whole day, and proceeded back to aveda after my classes to request for a retouch (they were pretty kind about it actually, and did it for free). hence this back to army, short and spiky look. (yo brother koh, you should be very happy now, i've failed in my F4 odyssey.)

i've decided to not apply for the washington program (with a huge amount of regret of course). aside from the pretty expensive accomodation costs involved, i realised that i need to take some programming classes and finance classes in order to qualify for either the M.S. IOE or M.S. FE program here at the U of M. and they seem infinitely more appealing than the applied economics program that i've been eyeing all these while. of course, if my g.p.a stays at it is now, i will barely qualify for ANY masters program at all. i need a 3.7 to qualify for a magma cum laude, and i'm desperately working towards it now.

ok, i may seem like i've a lot of time on my hand for the past few weeks, but i've told myself that this week is the start of the intensive amount of studying i need to do for this semester in order to score a higher gpa. and i'm pretty fortunate to be taking 4 very interesting classes. i really took my results from the first semester for granted, and haven't really been working as hard as i should have for the past two semesters. what could have been As resulted in A-s, and A-s into B+s, simply because i haven't been as dilligent in attending lectures and completing homework. so i guess this semester its all back to keeping my head on the grinestone, if you know what i mean. no other distractions, although the shadow of the midwestern games loom luminously ahead.

i've been burying my head in the book "in the time of cholera" for the past few days, trying to finish it before i have no more time to read it. i first came across this book in, yes, the movie 'serendipity', in which kate beckingsale writes her phone number in the book and john cusack has to search through new york's second hand bookstores in order to find it. its really a facinating book actually, with the love between the male and female protagonists very much similar to the one in 'brokeback mountain', another one of my fave movies. some people scoff at this sort of love; can love really be sustained without physical closeness, without the assurance of seeing each other often? can this sort of love really endure the torments of time, and the cruelty of age? how can it avoid the pitfalls of succumb to the convenience of marrying someone just to last through old age? can we really have such a perfect vision of the loved one that we cannot bear to be even within the vicinity of the presence of the individual, for fear of dispelling the myth of the beauty, or the beauty of the myth? i have not completed the book, but with what i've read thus far, i can only envy florentino ariza and femina daz, because i fear this sort of love is beyond me.

how many of us are actually in relationship of conveniences? be it boyfriend and girlfriend, man and wife, or just an innocuous friendship? man wakes up beside the wife with no love in his heart, but does not say a thing for fear of losing the sole caretaker of his children and home. girlfriend goes out for a date with her man, with no love in her heart, but does not mention anything resembling the notion of breaking up, because its convenient for the girl to have the guy around, and that no other viable options seem within reach. friends are friends only because they share an unwanted proximity day-to-day, and making friends seem certainly a better option than making enemies? when is it a lie, and when do we admit to ourselves that its only a lie? strive toward being florentino, i say, however the decades he has wasted in a unrequited love, than become femina, who substituted true love for convenience, only to realise her folly in old age. strive toward jack, who carried on seeking his true love, than annis del mar, who compromised his beliefs for social norms and prejudice.