Wednesday, 10th April 2002
9:32 a.m.

It's nice and snuggly under my blanket on a cold rainy morning like this, but I made myself wake up to study. :)

Sorry for the lack of updates, but I've been busy and will be for the next few weeks. Exams are coming. And I haven't been feeling up for any reflection of myself or my life of late.

So don't miss me if you don't see me. :P

(Fly me to the moon)

Tuesday, 2nd April 2002
3:13 p.m.

Was reading Naipaul’s non-fictional novel on racial segregation in South American “A turn in the South”, and he wrote of Forsyth County, forty miles or so north of Atlanta, where in 1912 a white girl was brutally raped and beaten up so badly she died 2-3 days later. A black man confessed to his crime and implicated others. One was lynched in jail, two others tried and publicly hanged. In the end, all the blacks were driven away from the county and lost ownership of their land. Since then it has been a source of pride for the people that no blacks are living there. Today, I checked up on the Internet, 99% of the population at Forsyth are whites.

But the thing that struck me most was the lack of records there seem to be, because Naipaul didn’t mention any names in the novel (as he usually would with other accounts) and I couldn’t find the name of the girl online as well. The victim’s always simply labelled as the white girl. I guess it doesn’t matter who she was, but the fact that she was a white and the accused a black.

Someone said in the book that down south, the poor white’s only source of identity came from their race, having no wealth, status or any other causes for their self-esteem. “Without race he would lose his idea of who he was.” And that was supposed to explain why race is everything in the South, and it seems as if the society would not be able to function properly if not for the rooted racial segregation and hierarchy.

I also remember a Sociology guest lecturer telling us that tolerance is such a dirty word in a “multi-racial” country (although in actual fact most countries are multi-racial, a lot of them even more varied and mixed than us but ours is one of the few in the world to go official with the label), because tolerance would imply that there was something wrong with the other race that we need to endure with.

Sure, we’re supposedly a homogenous society, but how much do we really know about the other races? Maybe it’s just me, but it seems most people would feel more comfortable with their own race and don’t really take the effort to know and understand another culture (save for Hari-wannabes and Anglophiles)?

Never mind me, I’m just musing.

Staying home today because I’m having a terrible sore throat, and eating Strepsils and drinking water doesn’t seem to help at all! I still can talk but I would rather not. Good for everybody else huh? =P

Yesterday’s outing with YW, Boy and Zhao turned out great. We had such a great time, just walking, eating and laughing, even took a photo in the midst of a shopping mall at peak hour (but it left me utterly embarrassed). ;) I’ll see Boy for the last time at Sports Club tomorrow.

Oh, and I got my American Studies term paper yesterday, the one I thought I wrote too much for (stupid me forgot to double-space) and I got an A-, praise the Lord! Been getting dismal B-s for almost everything this semester and this comes as a surprise and encouragement. =) Before you all think I’m some stupendous geek, in Arts, C is a probational pass so B- really isn’t that good a deal.

(Fly me to the moon)

Monday, 1st April 2002
10:44 a.m.

Cognito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) - inargubly the most constipated essay I've ever written, taking a ridiculous four hours to write a little over a thousand words!

But I really am just glad it is over and I’ll never have to write another Philosophy essay in my life again, hopefully.

Yesterday I chatted with Boy on the phone from 1 to 3 in the morning… wasn’t really expecting to talk for long because I thought he would be tired and I had an essay to write. But somehow we just never got down to hanging up. In the end I had to be self-disciplined to quit procrastinating working on my paper, so I told him to “go to sleep”, hahah!

Our conversation was… different. He seemed to take more interest in the different people in my life (not that he didn’t before) and asked a lot of questions.

“Really feel sad thinking about it… I’m going to miss you all (the YF) once I’m gone. It’s just like a family to me.”

I could have replied with something more sensible like “Don’t worry, we’ll miss you too”, and that would have been the truth. But instead I asked him why he wasn’t gonna miss his real blood family, oh well.

Am gonna meet him and Zhao for a drink after school with YW. I better go bath and change now.

(Fly me to the moon)