I just watched a good portion of MTV's Best Promos. It's really quite amusing and pretty damn funny too, despite the inevitable self-references and the fairly irritating veejay (I dislike most, if not all of them). The only promo I didn't like was the one about him.

Today has been a thoroughly lazy day. I should have done some work, because I have three papers due for my masters' class in the first week of November --- a 4/5-pager, a 8/9-pager, and an extensive 15-pager which has to be a comparative review of three journal articles on international relations. But after I launched Word, opened a new document, typed in the assignment topic and a couple of desultory sentences from my notes, and saved the document with an appropriate filename, I felt I had done enough for one day. It's the 15-pager that is most on my mind, because I really enjoy that class and want to do well in it. It's the class I had to prepare a book review for two weeks ago (I got an A on the review and a B+ on the presentation; the latter is no surprise since I always talk too fast and am no good at answering off-the-cuff questions), and no matter what the rest of my classmates say about it being too much reading, I really like it. Can I help it if I get excited about academic issues? Although I am admittedly very unexcited about my international economics class.

I took a nap at 5 pm, but was summoned forth peremptorily at 6:40 pm because it's Terz's brother's birthday and we had to take him out to dinner with the family. I don't mind that; it's just that his brother decided at the last that he wanted a birthday dinner after all, despite protests to the contrary last weekend, so we were in a bit of a rush. We had Japanese food, which was fine. What was not fine was that while we were waiting for our food, I suddenly felt faint and queasy and broke out into a cold sweat. Every other time that's happened, I promptly fainted for a few seconds. Fortunately, I was sitting down, so I put my head on the table and dabbed myself with a cold towel till the spell passed. I have no idea what brought it on, though. Terz's mom suggested it was the poor ventilation in the crowded restaurant, which might well have done me in since once I fainted in a crowded room too. But that was also due to my not eating all day, and I had reheated pizza at 2 pm today, so there's really no explicable reason for my fainting. Ideas, anyone?

I took about ten minutes to recover from the queasy-cold sweat spell, and then I was fine. Eating some pickled ginger helped to settle me, and once the food arrived, I was fine --- fine enough that after dinner, we went and bought new cellphones. All Terz's brother wanted was a spare battery for his, but once we got in the store and found out what the weekend deals were, Terz and I decided to get (the same) new phones. For those of you that care, we got the Nokia 3330. We are aware that it's a WAP-able phone and neither of us have WAP service because it's too damn expensive still, but with the offer price, the 3330 was cheaper than it's WAPless counterpart, the 3310, so we took it. Plus it's all of 20 grams lighter. Now I have to go shopping for a cool Powerpuff Girls cover for it and I can get my friend to send me a picture message of the Powerpuff Girls. Ah --- life is good when you can personalise your phone to such ridiculous extents.

And you thought I was a serious grad student, from what I said in the earlier paragraphs.

I denied my mother access to this website today. Well, not in so many words, but I politely declined to reveal the URL to her. My brother (you big mouth!) told her about it. It's not that anything I write here is tip-top secret, only for my friends, but I write for a specific audience (friends living outside Singapore whom I don't get to see/talk to on a regular basis) and it would be too weird to work the parental units into that equation. I told Mom that I talk to her all the time (okay, at least once a week) so she doesn't need to read my journal. I hope I wasn't too curt when I said that. I suppose I will tell her in time --- once I get over the odd wiggins I still feel from keeping such a public record of an ostensibly private life.

It struck me, on our way to dinner, that I should write a parody of all the horrible General Paper (translation: current affairs, writing and reading comprehension class that I teach) essays, as a swan song to my teaching sojourn. Perhaps that's what I'll spend December doing once I'm done with all my real work.