But seriously, who's going to violate a dead person's right to life? ._. I say it's just out of respect that we don't plunder their organs or whatever.

And then Mr Lim referenced some Chinese thing, which both the juniors nodded intelligently at, and I grimaced because evidently I am the most unread one in PEP, but he mistook it for being grossed out at necrophilia. Which is pretty gross, come to think of it. HA blog readers are you grossed out? Necrophilia, necrophilia, TWILIGHT.

Bleh medicine messes with my brain, so apologies if this post is not very coherent. I didn't feel very coherent today; and so I basically went about my day letting my subconscious take over and enabling the oozing out of my brains by watching Crystal play Wedding Dash.

When I am well, I will read. And read. And read. Until I am so well-read that I shall someday drop a name of an obscure book in a random conversation and people shall just gape. For example,

Person: "Hi Vic! Weather's good today, isn't it?"

Vic: "Why yes indeed. Exactly like in Ex Libris! Lovely book."

Okay I have no idea what I'm talking about and I think I really should go sleep soon. But I have miles to go before I sleep. Or wake. Or something.

Yeah anyway existentialism is pretty depressing, but I like it. None of the words they use actually mean the same thing as it does in common use. No wonder existentialists are so depressed all the time. Life is pointless, faith is absurd, and if we aren't in existential angst and anxiety we are INAUTHENTIC.

Pretty exciting really.

Yeah anyway today during Shame Mr Lim revealed rather unabashedly that he was playing Devil's Advocate. And since DAs generally like spouting rather weird arguments which sometimes involve 6 dimensions and the possible existence of flesh-eating zombie poodles (incidentally, I had a discussion with someone about multiple dimensions today. Or rather he spoke and I nodded furtively like I actually understood. Thankfully no zombie poodles were invoked) I decided to spout weird arguments back.

So I said that shaming attacks a person's character, while the law seeks to punish guilty people for their acts. That was to prove that shame is a bad substitute for other punishments like, uh, hanging. ._. Or jail time, which isn't as drastic.

And then Mr Lim spoke the dreaded word: "Elaborate."

Now I hate elaborating because if I leave myself to elaborate unchecked, I will inevitably wade off into the murky regions of my mind and dredge up odd things which happen to catch my fancy at any particular moment. And since I've been reading copious amounts of SSHG fanfic and watching Potter Puppet Pals lately, an Elaboration might have lead me into an epic exposition of how sweet Snape and Hermione are together. Despite all the black.

So then I was forced to think of a way to prove that acts do not reflect character, without making references to Snape being a sensitive guy who acts like a greasy git because of his unrequited love for Lily Potter nee Evans, and has to protect her son without-

Ahem.

But then I remembered the example brought up by Yvonne of second-degree murder. Although actually no one was really sure what "second-degree" meant, so we just redefined it to mean provoked killing, ie one that was not premeditated. (Turns out we were right; at least according to Wiki) And then I set about trying to prove my case that sometimes, murderers are not really all bad; sometimes they merely have bad days or sad childhoods with unrequited love...

So I appealed to the pity in everyone to imagine a sad guy, who just had a Really Bad Day, and recalled his Unhappy Childhood, and got Royally Pissed Off at someone, and you know, it was just coincidence, really, that there happened to be this nice sharpened dagger RIGHT within his reach, and seriously, if he had to listen to one more annoying snark he'd just...

Then I made a violent gesture.

I felt sorry for my imaginary second degree murderer. And even Mr Lim had to grudgingly concede the point. At least until Leevoon said: "Speaking from experience, Vic?"

):

I am NOT a mass murderer! ): Unlike what Crystal thinks. I seem to recall she once compared me to Kevin of "We Need to Talk About Kevin" infamy. And then she laughed at my fragile mental state.

Sigh. If this carries on, it might just devolve into a Really Bad Day, and then I would be forced to recall my childhood where I was shamed by my mum because she didn't give me a bottle on time when I was hungry, and my sense of narcissism was so shattered that I actually cried and wailed (Google Martha Nussbaum on primitive shame if you are so inclined), and I might get Really Pissed Off at someone who snarks at me about being a mass murderer and... ooh. That's a nice shiny dagger on the cover of Macbeth.

Never have I ever seen something quite as the essay above.

Going to verydemotivational for the first time in a very long while DOES have its benefits after all; would never have discovered this gem otherwise.

To look at it more closely (I realise the picture will probably be tiny, any if past experiences are to be trusted) click on this link: Essay troll Give it a minute of your time, even if all of you are mugging hard for Chinese. You definitely definitely definitely won't regret this, I swear.

Up this goes on my blog, then-- I've kept this pleasure to myself in a draft post for too long.

But yes. I have passed, and got a certificate. Which is admittedly just a piece of paper with the RGS crest on it, and my name, with a pretty description of the PEP.

Anyway Mr Lim says there probably won't be any assignment for this year, because he doesn't have time to mark. He says he'll base it on our attendance, which has caused Lydia to worry because "I've only attended 5 minutes of PEP!"

I have more Philo quotes:

"The deviant ones are just these little punks. I mean, they're just BORED. So they... uh, smash things. They didn't have arcades back then you know..."

"Hmm. An example of penal law is like... if I put a carpark lot for the handicapped in the middle of this room. And I tell you that if you park there, I will fine you $500. No, actually, I will fine you $1000. And cut off your hands."

"Eh then you can rightfully park in the handicapped lot already."

Yvonne has a pink frog, which waved vigorously at Mr Lim via Yvonne. He had a rather bemused expression on his face. Something bordering on surprise with a little bit of shock with a little bit of a snark with a little bit of amusement. Very complex emotions. I suppose this is only a natural reaction when a bright pink frog waves happily at you.

Oh oh oh but my dream has finally come true! We are finally doing CHINESE PHILO OMGGGG. Mr Lim gave us some readings from the Analects on Shame, AND THEY WERE IN CHINESE!!!!

Okay no not really Chinese, but fantizi with translations. It's still quite awesome, even if the translations are a little screwed. I quote: "The Master said: 'From fifteen, my heart-and-mind was set upon learning; from thirty I took my stance; from forty I was no longer doubtful; from fifty I realised the propensities of tian; from sixty my ear was attuned; from seventy I could give my heart-and-mind free rein without overstepping the boundaries."

Translation doesn't do justice to the real musicality and loveliness of wenyanwen. And Mr Lim was getting rather frustrated trying to translate everything into English, and it sounded really awkward. "Exemplary people... like, JUN ZI." Haha I think I kind of understand his pain at trying not to spout Chinese every 5 minutes, because it's horribly frustrating to translate back and forth.

He wanted to use my old handphone for a night, and so I gave it to him. But when he tried calling the handphone from the house phone, he was rather perplexed when he discovered it didn't ring. I quickly set him straight about that-- since it is taboo to have your phone ring in school, my phone has almost perpetually been on silent-- and changed it for him.

He excitedly called again, eager to check if it worked again.

Sadly I forgot that in a major meme chase last year, I changed my handphone ringtone to "Never Gonna Give You Up", so that I could rickroll everyone within listening range whenever it rang.

And rang it did. Rickrolled, and foiled by my own devious cunningness!

--

Crystal worries that Mr Lee is not well.

I assured her that he is very fine, and has taken to wearing a very awesome jacket around lately.

In fact, he spoke to me this very morning: "Hi Vic. Catch!" before flicking an empty Strepsils packet at me.

With my awesome hand-eye coordination I fumbled with all my stuff, tried to cover my head, ducked, and then stretched out and caught it just before it touched the ground. I am awesome.

But sadly there were no more Strepsils, and when I asked Mr Lim for one he just squeaked "EEK! Sore throat!" and tried to chase me out with a snail.

"Heavens, no. My pumpkin simply has chest pains. In fact, I'll leave a note WARNING them not to smash it."

BHG YOU AND YOUR PUMPKIN HAVE MY HEART!!!

--

I have crashed Crystal's Philo option much in the same way I wormed myself into Friday PEP. It is pretty cool. And I enjoy listening to the rather fail arguments that people have come up with to explain the existence of god.

Some arguments can be summed up (in fact, most arguments) into this statement: God exists, therefore god exists. Yay!

Life is good (:

I have never been nearly quite as religious as this; and it is kind of sad that I need something like this as an impetus to suddenly embrace religion.

I suddenly feel all dirty and disgusted with myself for being so grade-obsessed.

Anyway Mrs Lim is going to explain our Chem PT marks to us after Philo exam tomorrow, so perhaps I will finally get some closure. Please please please let me have the good grace to accept logical explanations, and have the humility to believe that I too can err, and err pretty often.

Besides, looking back upon the Chem PT I do believe that I really didn't address the question for some parts, and wholly deserved the lowest marks for "linking concepts" and the details part. Still a bit undecided over whether I deserved the lowest for explanation though; I thought (and still think) it was quite a good explanation.

--

Enough with the annoying moroseness! I don't think people come to my blog because they want to listen to me moan. Because they can do that in real life. And I want my blog to be a happy place filled with airheadedness. Everytime I read a serious blogpost I want to cry and cry and cry, because it makes me feel so inadequate in comparison.

But that aside, Mr Lim told us a "funny story" during Philo options last Friday. It wasn't ha ha funny, but more like oh lol that's odd funny. It was told to him by Mr Tee.

So anyway Mr Tee apparently saw this Caucasian parent with a little kid in the shopping centre, and the little kid was throwing a tantrum. But instead of beating the kid up, like most parents would, the Caucasian guy just let his kid go on and on and on (and at this point, he interjected with a little bit of awe: "And you know how kids can go on for, like, forever")

When the kid had finally run his course (And gotten HOARSE) the parent took the kid aside, and asked him: "Do you think what you did just now was right?"

And then Mr Lim started expounding about public shaming blah blah, and I suddenly remembered Zhenghao's super awesome method of dealing with loud kids.

I quote:

"If the kid is screaming in public, then I glare at the parents, if present, to make the kid shut up. Most parents will get paiseh after awhile and stop the screaming. If the screaming doesn't stop, it means that the parents aren't around or just don't care, and I can destroy the kid in peace."

It doesn't sound very awesome typed out, but "destroy a kid" has this ring of awesomeness when spoken out loud.

--

My arm hurts like crazy because I screwed up my release today. So the string of my bow hit my arm like, 5 times, and drew blood ._. I am kind of glad I wasn't using the 30lbs one.

Sigh, this is the kind of thing that eventually results in one of those injuries. You know, those that remain dormant and then suddenly emerge as a tumour when you've just fallen madly in love with your soulmate.

Ahaha I have apparently been watching too many Korean dramas. Must remember that life rarely ever imitates art; I will never ever fall madly in love.

It makes me want to don a viking helmet and declare war on the SexyGirls and Cutie3289 of the world and shove their bad spelling "hye im lkie blgowalking yea can u lnik me back" back where they came from.

But sadly this is obviously a war that I will lose; for I know enough to understand that these are not actual people that I can destroy, but rather spam bots who are virtually indestructible. And they are attacking my cbox.

So it is with great anger and pent up rage that I slowly delete every single one of these spambot posts, and waste my youth reading messages penned by a bot pretending to be a sexy girl. Which I look down upon anyway! Sexy is such a disgusting word. Imagine myself introducing myself as SexyVic. I think I would just die.

Anyway. I was considering requiring a CAPTCHA for people who want to tag, but that would make no sense at all because it would totally drive down tags. -glares at people who don't tag even without CAPTCHAs-

So instead I've just done a pretty blanket ban on most non-Singaporean IPs. Some of you may be affected; if you are let me know through MSN or sms me or something. It's still a rather hit and miss system. I'm banning most overseas IPs so you might be banned if you use a proxy (for that matter if you aren't doing anything bad like downloading porn or introducing spambots to other people's sites, WHY??) or an iPhone, which sometimes generates pretty random IP addresses.

I'll keep monitoring the situation :/

Will blog more after Chinese/Math!

I have been trying to console myself that grades don't matter, and that a 3.6 isn't great but it's OKAY, and I've been trying to seek solace in philosophy.

That is why I've embraced existentialism. Because existentialism says (or at least I think it says; I've lost all my PEP notes :/) that we, being humans, are more than the sum of our constituent parts.

Therefore, I am more than the sum of my subject GPAs.

Sadly philosophical concepts have never been particularly easy to swallow. So I had to do a little bit more than that.

So far I've been slowly running down the list of what girls do when they are sad/depressed. Generally, it is all the stuff that girls do when they have been dumped or have just broken up with their boyfriend. Not that I have a boyfriend to break up with, but you know, sadness is sadness is sadness. And I feel totally rejected by Chem. So I figured it was worth a try.

I shipped myself over to my mum's and begged to be fed. Being cognizant of my fragile mental and emotional state she treated me to food and bubble tea. But there is only so much one can eat, and despite finishing off a whole bowl of porridge and prawns and minced pork and tofu, I still couldn't get rid of the Black Cloud of Depression.

I was nearly home when I thought of this. Girls, when dumped, always go out and come back toting large bags of clothes and wearing a huge grin on their faces. But sadly, the nearest shopping centre to my house is Hougang Point, which boasts of a huge FairPrice Xtra, a Kopitiam, and really little much else.

I figured Fairprice Xtra was better than nothing, so I went in and came out with a huge bag of... uh, white chocolate, Kit-kat, Dove Amicelli chocolate, and lime toothpaste. Seriously! Who can resist flavoured toothpaste???

But anyway it didn't really make me feel any better. Maybe shopping at FairPrice wasn't a good choice, and neither was buying toothpaste, but whatever.

Then I tried drowning my sorrows in the large amounts of chocolate that I bought. But then I started worrying about getting fat :/

Ahhh Chem is ruining my life. I can't even delight about Bio and SS (OMG THANKYOU MR LEE YOU ARE THE BEST!)

I am most definitely not looking forward to paper checking tomorrow.

And ahhh I still haven't gotten around to finishing juniors' farewell gifts! ): It's just a little bit more though.

And oh no, there's still handover presents for Karmun. I have no idea what to get her because I totally expanded all my creative juices and whatever on Cheryl's present. Do you suppose she'll mind too much if I reuse the idea :/

Oh dear, and there's Math on Friday.

Ahh I just had another I-love-piano moment and I want to play piano all day long :/

Which is why Rachel and I immediately turned to each other and gave each other a Look.

It is never really quite clear what one should do when one sees a Suspicious Black Bag. You could be vigilant, and tell the bus uncle, who might stop the bus and order an evacuation and call the bomb squad, who would then arrive and blow up the bag only to discover clothes. Or you could keep quiet, while the bomb that the bag could be housing blows everyone to smithereens.

You could be wasting the time of the special forces police officers if you called it out, or you could die in an explosion and forever become the postergirls for constant vigilance.

Neither of these choices are very pretty.

So Rachel and I spent 2 bus stops discussing the issue at hand. Indeed not a very wise decision, but I spent the whole of those two bus stops fretting about whether the bag was going to blow as we went past the American Club, and whether or not I would die in a bomb blast. For all of you who have never been trapped in a situation where you have to contemplate possible death by Suspicious Black Bag, I shall try to summarise it into a word for you:

"AAAAAAAAHWE'REGOINGTODIEWE'REGOINGTODIEAAAAAAH"

It is not a fun experience.

Then Rachel noticed a guy sitting with his girlfriend. They both looked like foreigners, and were carrying a backpack-- the kind that backpackers use when they travel around in other countries. So we figured, could the Suspicious Black Bag belong to him?

Since shame is practically death to teenagers, we spent another bus stop arguing over whether we should ask him whether the bag was his. And since she was so unwilling/nonchalant about getting blown up, I was forced to ask him...

...and thank heavens, he claimed the Suspicious Black Bag.

And then I promptly went back to school after getting chided by Rachel for being paranoid, to retell my story in semi-hysterical tones to Crystal, who replied with a particularly vapid comment: "If I were to bomb a bus, I'd put it in a PINK bag."

--

Anyway, Philo was interesting, and I gathered a good many number of quotes.

Selene: "Mr Lim, we were thinking maybe for next year's Options, instead of the origins of shame, you could do the origins of love!"

Mr Lim: "Uh huh... and you want ME to teach it??" -mildly incredulous look-

Yvonne: -Brackvoice- "Who knows? This time next year, you could well be an authority on it! >D"

And this is actually from last week, but,

Mr Lim: "Satre would claim that a husband who steals the last cookie can feel shame even though his wife isn't present. What would that tell you?"

Atiqah: "That he's an awesome husband."

Mr Lim: "If you accept Nussbaum's assertions, it means you either raise a child shamed, or a child narcissistic. This has serious implications for all of you, as possible future mothers. You'd better start reading parenting books now."

Anyway quotes aside, I am pretty excited for the next few lessons. Existentialism sounds interesting :D But I really ought to go dig up my old PEP notes.

He's FINE. If you don't believe me, hear it from the horse's mouth (crap is that the idiom? Or is it never look a gift horse in the mouth or something?)

This public service announcement was brought to you by, uh, msn. Heh.

Our juniors, being still somewhat fresh to the ideas of Mr Lee's sicknesses (The Sec 4s are quite used to it by now, so everytime he talks about being sick we just sigh. We pity him, we do, but it is tiring to get driven into a tizzy like the juniors do and we once did. And having a panic attack helps nothing.) told us with little frightened faces about how Mr Lee told them that he'd "escaped from hospital" to come teach their class, and how he "wasn't supposed to be here". Which is basically what he does everyday while he's on MC. But this hospital escape thing was a relatively new development, and of course this made us wonder how exactly he did it.

I thought he'd have just picked a fight with the doctor, and either 1. Turn on the charm that Crystal fangirls over, or 2. Lost on purpose, and then cried so pitifully and thus guilttripped the doctor into letting him out.

Mr Lim suggested that he used the spoons that came with his hospital meals to dig an escape tunnel.

Ningxin was a lot more dramatic: he tied the bedsheets together and escaped by rappelling down the side of the building. (At this point Xinyuan interjected: Or made a huge parachute and flew out!)

Or maybe he lured the doctors close to him with a shiny purse like the one Denise gave him last year for Teachers' Day, and when the doctor came over to look and say condescendinly "That's nice," he promptly knocked the poor unsuspecting soul out cold and ran like crazy.

Or he could have strangled the guards on the way out with his IV. Loop and pull, hard.

And when they tried to sedate him, he probably dodged the sedatives they fired at him. He must have bent over with a loud "wooooooaaaaaaahhhhh" like in the Matrix, and the syringes would soar over his shoulders and hit the nurses running after him from behind.

So now we need an escape vehicle. Wheelchairs! They're in pretty abundant supply. Or, if you prefer, he could skate/surfboard out on a gurney. If you prefer to think that he used a wheelchair to make his swift getaway, let's add a little road rage and have him run over people in his speedy wheelchair, all the while whipping people out of the way with his IV (like those cowboy lassos: flick, wrap around ankle, remove from path of speeding wheelchair)

And I think I've heard before that people in prison sometimes fashion guns from inhalers (another common medical supply which shall now play a part in Mr Lee's Great Hospital Escape). So he might have fashioned tiny pistols out of a couple of inhalers, and use pills for bullets, making a makeshift but probably effective pistol, depending on the workmanship. And then he and his doctor would have a huge Western movie shootout in the foyer, with potted plants instead of cacti in the background.

To clear up the mess, he probably mixed up a cocktail of chemicals. Like methanal, which is used in preserving dead bodies and is also highly flammable. Or those alcohol swab thingies. And then he throws the flaming cocktail into the radiation rooms they use to treat cancer patients, dousing the hospital and all living beings within a 2 mile radius in life threatening ionizing radiation.

The scenarios all end with him showing up in school, wearing an ugly green sweater (says Crystal) over a suspicious pale green shirt that looks vaguely hospital-like, and a huge grin that only appears on the faces of those who have singlehandedly taken down an entire hospital and all its staff.