incoherent entry
written: 6:26 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2004

There's quite a lot I could say on the proliferation of consumerism, commercialism and the disturbingly rapid rate at which they are encroaching into not just our lives, but our sense of culture as well, I could go on about how irritating it is that an old song regains its popularity as a result of some insipid advertisement, I could even go on another rant on the sheer stupidity of the sickening philistines at my school, but I shan't do any of those things. Why? Because I'm damn tired, my brains aren't working right and I need to preserve my energy to tackle integration tonight.

And I just found out that 'philistine' is both a noun and an adjective. How cool is that?

The thing is, the more I go for GP classes, the more I'm convinced that I am stuck with the wrong teacher, the more I want to stab myself in the eyeball and let my corpse rot away, slowly, in my GP classroom. I've always despised General Pointlessness, thought it an absolute bore, a pain in the arse. But it wasn't until I got that old hag of a moron for my tutor that I realised how painfully boring and excruciatingly mindless that stupid subject can be. Before it was okay, as my previous teacher bothered to stimulate intellectual discussions in class, but not my present one. She is ineffective, she is obsolete and she is out-dated, and hence she cannot connect with us or even relate to us on the most superficial level, and we all know that which is why we completely switch off during her lessons.

What the hell did we do yesterday? Went to the computer lab and took some stupid poverty quiz on www.worldbank.com, if memory serves. We used one whole period doing that when we could've done it at home. And what happened today? I have absolutely no idea as I was busy copying my Maths lecture notes. (My notes are quite blank as I've been skipping a lot of lectures nowadays. Not that you could blame me, as I see no point in going for lecture when I could go for lunch and sitting in LT1 listening to some stupid sycophant lecture Integration in his atrociously-bad English, and not even paying the slightest sliver of attention to the shit that he has to say, isn't exactly my idea of rounding up the before-lunch portion of my Tuesdays. In fact, it's downright fucked up.)

I mean, if we look at General Pointlessness in its pure form, if we don't take into consideration the quality of the teacher that one is unfortunately stuck with, we can also see that General Pointlessness is truly pointless. Even if one gets someone as diao and awesome as Feather for one's GP tutor, one would still have to do mind-numbingly retarded exercises. Example: Identify thesis statements in every paragraph of a given essay.

WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT FOR? So fucking what if you can identify the stupid thesis statement? Conversely, so fucking what if you can't? Thesis statements are something so obvious that they don't even need to be identified. As long as you know what the writer is talking about, who cares whether you can tell the teacher that the second sentence of the third paragraph is his topic sentence of said paragraph?

I mean, I realise that some people are just too stupid to know the different between the topic sentence and the elaboration points or whatever, and others are equally stupid in the sense that they haven't the slightest inclination as to how to express themselves coherently and thus such stupid exercises need to be put in place, but fuck me, I thought my class was an A-bander class. Don't subject us to such bullshit, please. Okay, so I happen to be the only true A-bander if you want to judge by promo results, but still, my classmates wouldn't be in our class if they weren't good enough.

But identifying thesis statements aren't as inane as memorising facts during lesson time. I'm not kidding. I have lost track of the number of periods my GP tutor have wasted on making us memorise facts. I can see her good intentions and all but come on, this isn't how GP should be taught!

Actually, I don't know how GP should be taught either. If you ask me, I think GP lessons should be abolished, along with PE. I waste seven periods a week on GP. That's 310 minutes a week. I could do so much more in those 310 minutes than I do in GP classes.

Why am I even talking about GP? But seriously, it's getting worse and worse. I think about having to attend such uninspired and uninspiring GP classes for the rest of the year and I want to cry. I could just kill to be in Mel's GP class but nope, not possible.

Why, dammit, why? Don't I deserve much better than that?

Don't get me wrong. My GP tutor is a genuinely nice person. I can see that she has good intentions, but seriously, she should teach Science classes. To borrow a film lingo, she's terribly miscast.

Okay, I have just made myself more frustrated than I was when I started this entry, so I'm gonna go off this subject now.

Anyway. I have recently discovered Catatonia. Sure, only one song, "Dead From the Waistdown", but it's been playing over and over in my head the entire day. Yesterday my Lit teacher was talking about the word 'catatonic' (which is my favourite word currently) and he mentioned the band Catatonia. Unsurprisingly, I was the only one in class to have heard of them, and the only reason I've heard of them is because I bought this compilation of alternative rock songs released by MTV a few years ago, bought it for Orgy's "Blue Monday" but I ended up buying "Candyass" anyway.

Yes, anyway, I listened to "Dead From the Waistdown" last night and I totally loved it. It has awesome lyrics as well: "Make hay not war." How intriguing is that? If only I'd discovered it earlier; I could've analysed it for my Lit holiday homework instead of Silverchair's "Emotion Sickness", which was totally an easy way out for me, if you want my honest opinion.

Life has been sickeningly dull the past few days. I have decided that it's time I start studying for my 'A' Levels but it's difficult when you're enervated every single day of the week. And yes, I'm making excuses again, but I can't help it. My existence has always been languid, I procrastinate way too much for my own good, I take things way too easily, believe in myself too much, and unreasonably so as well. I'm flawed in all the wrong places and I need to overcome these flaws, but it just so happens that my biggest flaw is my inherent laziness, and how does one overcome something that is inherent, right?

Utopian writing has a danger of becoming too didactic, too cerebral, too intellectual. Words like 'ration' and 'government issues' don't collocate with the rest of the sentence; they are incongruous. You believe Margaret Atwood's first person narrator despite the fact that her story is filtered through a fallible consciousness because she acknowledges the incoherency of her story, and thus her integrity shines through.

George Eliot addresses the theme of Nature vs. Nurture in the last few chapters of "Silas Marner". She challenges the conventional system of 'family'; blood is not always thicker than water.

And I was just trying to remember what I learnt in Literature classes today. Other than that, there wasn't a profound point to the previous two paragraphs.

Don't steal the words 'didactic' and 'cerebral' and 'collocate' and 'incongruous' from me, though.

Okay, my leg is falling asleep. Time to get off the chair.

before sunrise // before sunset

Previously:
- - Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2017
I'm moving. - Sunday, Jul. 11, 2010
In all honesty - Tuesday, Jul. 06, 2010
What I want for my birthday... - Sunday, Jul. 04, 2010
On Roger's behalf. - Friday, Jul. 02, 2010