Trivial Pursuits

Having stoically put up with an intolerable seven- day itch in Beijing, i find myself facing a cluttered desk again but having no more inclination to do serious work than i did before i left for the trip.

But if serious work is out of reach, then maybe i can be contented with trivial ones, which really isn't as bad as it first seems. Triviality is the bane of people aspiring to have their names etched in history books or whatnots, but is otherwise a very reliable source of comfort for the average joe.

And i would like to contend that no matter how successful or great a man can be, he can never fully escape the grasp of trivialities. For while saints have effectively circumvented sex, no man, great or otherwise, have yet discovered how to abstain from feeding oneself, and other such trivial, but necessary pursuits.

on a personal note, I would rather have a man inclined to trivialities than one who struts around looking terribly impressive and doing important, serious stuff , my reasoning being that since no one can be doing important stuff all the time, one should at least stop pretending to be so.

Why are people so uptight and perpetually complaining about our present-day moral decadence? As far as i can remember, this has gone on since forever, so it can't be all true.

Plus we probably seem like sexual Puritans to the Greeks, who said something along the lines of ' A woman for necessity, a boy for pleasure and a goat for ecstacy'.

All these are not gonna make much difference to the dear moral uplifters who insist on being guardians of our immortal souls, i know, but at least now we know where kids come from.

I was chatting with one of my friends some twenty minutes ago, when, having changed the topic to that of a girl he alleges i am interested in, he very thoughtfully reminded me that she is taken by someone who 'looks a hell lot better than you.... and can probably challenge you intellectually too..'.

You could have guessed that i am not best pleased with this piece of intelligence, for, apart from restoring very slightly, my sagging confidence in mine, it really wasn't very reassuring at all. Not that what he said isn't exactly true, but still....

Ah well.

I had initially planned to do something useful today, but i somehow managed to idle the entire day away.

I tried unsuccessfully, for about two hours this morning, to work on the second draft of my TOK essay, although i ended up doing everything but the essay. I realized that the mere thought of working on the essay provokes a psychological reaction akin to mentally turning green and vomiting voluminously. And it doesn't help to know this essay isn't going to be graded, so it doesn't matter whether its well written or not, or that most people can't tell the difference anyway.

I'm really not working as hard as i should be this year, but then again, some things just don't matter as much as they used to. I guess i have gotten a bit sick of our education system, because at every stage you learn that what you have been doing previously is not exactly true, until you realize that all you are doing is trading one set of lies for another. Honestly though, it is possible to play along and give the teachers what they want and get away with it, but this ceases to be amusing after a while, and i can't seem to convince myself that it is worth the effort nowadays.

This is probably the worst time to start feeling drained, but hopefully i will scrape through this two years and come out fine.

Yesterday was an absolutely horrible day

The rugby match we lost was such a shock to my system that i actually was tempted to check if i was dreaming. It turns out that i wasn't, because, to be honest, i can't imagine why i would dream the team into such a mess in the first place. As if conceding two penalties in the first 5 minutes isn't enough, we had something like 4 more penalties awarded against us, after we took the lead at 7-6! As to how it is at all possible to award half a dozen penalties against a team in a Cup's final, i must confess to being as puzzled as you are.

Okay to be fair, we might not have played superbly well, but we definitely did not deserve to lose either, and it wasn't so much the loss, which, incidentally is the third one in a row i have witnessed - i have never seen the school lift the title in this particular division, although i was told that they did just fine before i came ( no hasty conclusions please..)- as the manner in which we lost i that really stung.

But philosophy is adversity's sweet milk, so we can retire to a corner and comfort ourselves that winning is not everything, until we can afford to discard that notion, sometime next year, if and when we win the title back.

Having whittled Chelsea's massive 15 point lead to a mere 7 points, man utd fans like myself and not to mention a certain mr bates would be following the final stretch of this season with a bated breathe, if you would excuse the pun....

So today's match between united and the arses might no longer be the top of the table match it used to be a couple a years back, although we have to win this match if we are to have any chance at all for a shot at the title.

And if we have another scintillating performance from saha, rooney and nistelrooy, that just might just be possible, although i won't be putting my money where my mouth is.

I have never understood why some adults insist on treating kids like they are retarded or something. I was at this church this morning, they were offering a programme for kids in the neighbouring estates and the idea was to make the kids speak and improve their English.At this point, alert readers would get the drift and anticipate what is going to happen next, well, because, basically, this is so bloody common, if you excuse the language.

Anyway, coming back. I was with this group of primary 4 kids and a droopy looking lady and she was going through this book with them, something about an angry kid who miraculously turned happy after he spoke to his parents, which just makes you wonder what in hell parents are doing nowadays. I mean, not even retarded primary 1 kids would fall for this crap, and everyone knows that... erm, well, at least most kids know that but i really don't know if adults have been let in on the secret. But the point is that the book is so staggeringly, inconceivably S-t-u-p-i-d, that you would have expected her to engage the kids in a discussion about the over simplification of thhe issues in the book and get them to respond to it.

But as expected, she didn't.

Which means i have to start looking for something else to fulfill my Cas hours. Sigh