Disorganisation

You know, there's things to be done. And you can do them, and get everything all nicely ordered. The thing is, life being life, chaotic elements keep coming along at irregular intervals (they wouldn't be chaotic if they were predictable) and mess everything up again until it was before you had them all tidied up.

There's two things you can do here. You can order them up again, and fold up the socks according to colour, and archive all the papers by the alphabets, but you'll have to do that again and again, because Ol' Unpredictable will keep coming back, every time. Or you could leave them and leave them in a state of chaos, because no matter what keeps happening it will remain a mess, nothing more, nothing less.

So what do you choose, what is right or what is convenient?

I usually end up with what is convenient. Not always, of course. I do the right thing too, especially when the convenient choice has the potential to hurt someone else.

Then again, you can't always tell when you are hurting someone. Life's funny in that way, that we're always trying to discourage others from knowing our true selves, but we end up disadvantaging ourselves in the end.

There was probably supposed to be a point to this post, but it got lost along the way.

Rhetorical Question

So... How do you acknowledge a resentful comment, without hurting their feelings or implying you are better because you have no cause to be resentful?

Yeah, you're probably right. Don't acknowledge the comment.

Reverse Karma

So this morning, I was heading out towards the glass doors of the school administrative block, when I saw two people - a school attendant and a teacher - hanging around on the other side of it. By their attitude, it was plain they were locked out. My side of the door had one of those push-button things that automatically unlock the door, so I opened it and let them in.

I took the lift up to my classroom and took the usual detour to the toilet. I found it was getting washed (unusually early, I might add - normally they start about forty minutes later), so as I always do when the toilet is unreachable, I take the stairs to the next floor's toilet. (I think commissioning a lift to go down one floor is a bit too much.) I walked down and found the door was locked - another unusual occurrence. With a nasty suspicion in my mind, I headed back up, tried the door I had just come through, and found it too was locked.

No, no, I'm not writing this from the stairwell. There is a wonderful invention known as the mobile phone, and my school has not found fit to ban them (there would be an uproar if they did, anyway), so I called the right people and got out. What was counter-intuitive was that right after helping some people who were locked out, I got locked out myself.

I suppose life really is a series of independent events. It is up to you whether you want to connect them.

One Too Many

Sluggy Freelance, 19 January 2007.

You know, it occurs to me that, in spite of being a hateful little bunny who tries killing Santa Claus every year for reasons he can't even remember, Bun-Bun isn't entirely beyond redemption.

Also, the idea of the two of them going to a supermarket with their ill-gotten gains to splurge on a pizza dinner (half alfalfa, half shinygarbage!) cracks me up.

Oh, Be Sensible

You know if you're doing a scientific experiment, and you have a sample size of say, 200? And 170 out of them display some result? And you repeat the experiment twice more per custom, and get 171 and 173 for those trials? And you punch the numbers into a calculator to find the average?

Please, please, please do not record the average value as 171.3333333. You'll look utterly stupid. Round it down to 171 or something, but please do not imply a level of accuracy that was not present in the original results.

That goes for the people who came up with the autoclaving procedure too. Yes, I know what 250 degrees Fahrenheit converts to, but that is no excuse to specify 121 degrees Celsius as the optimal temperature for killing bacteria. I hope you're not suggesting 122 degrees C results in poorer sterilisation.

As for those of you who declare the skirt hem of the school uniform must be 3.75 cm above the knees, I have nothing to say to you. You are beyond redemption.

But I Don't Have a Little Brother!

Primary school was really a long time ago. Those were the days when I couldn't spell "neighborhood" or "police post", embarrassing as it is now. (On the other hand, "separate" tripped me up until recently.) Those were also the days when compositions had predictable - and highly personal - topics. "Write about your family." "Describe your favourite school teacher." "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

The intention was probably to create a topic which could easily be answered by a six-year old, since they presumably draw from everyday experiences and require little thought. I'm sure they were easy to answer for many students. The problem was the students who did not possess, in any form, the subject of the essay topic.

Take for instance, "Write about your pet." This would be easy enough for someone who owned several dogs, or someone with a little fish tank on their desk, or someone with a cat currently defacing the living-room couch. What about the children who, no matter how hard they begged, would not be allowed a pet on the grounds of commitment/smell/allergies?

There were numerous other topics which required the writer to have certain things in their life. "Describe your grandparents." Sorry, most of them passed away before I could know them, and the last one lives a third of a world away. "What is your favourite cartoon?" Actually, I watch documentaries about lions. Can I tell you about the Serengeti and wildebeest migration instead? "Write about your little brother or sister." Haven't got one.

Then there are the ones which aren't particularly fun to answer. When I get a question like "What is your favourite song?" am I supposed to confess it is the theme song from Jurassic Park? (Note: No, it isn't anymore. These days Jupiter from Gustav Holst's The Planets tops the list. ) Whenever I get, "What is the most embarrassing incident which ever happened to you?" I always give the fifth-most embarrassing. I hardly like to think of the first four, never mind describe them for the amusement of my teacher. As for the ever-popular "What will you be when you grow up?" I really should have responded with a decisive que sera, sera. I still don't know what I'm going to be, and I'm close to achieving grown-up status already.

The problem with such topics is that they try to be simple to answer, and the simplest essays to write are based on personal experience. As it happens, personal experience varies so much that it is impossible to cater to everyone with such pointed questions.

Which is why I always preferred writing fiction. Making up stuff for a fictitious theme grinds less upon the conscience than making up stuff to answer a personal question.

Why did this come up? Well, it had entirely to do with an essay theme I received today: "What extracurricular activities are you involved in or outside school?" Considering that the answer is "none"...

I really thought I was past this sort of thing.

It Takes a True Genius...

I recall an incident in primary school, which was really a long time ago. We were tasked to write a composition, and were given three themes to choose from. One dealt with a journey across the Sahara Desert (ultimately, the topic I chose). There were two others, but the one I remember had something to do with a unicorn landing in the writer's backyard.

One of my classmates at the time wrote about the quest to send the unicorn back to whatever fantasy realm it came from. Apparently, the way home was across a bridge which did not cross water and went nowhere.

The characters in the story did eventually send the unicorn home. The exit? A partially-constructed overhead bridge.

I wish I had thought of that.