Nyctea

Ok, quick update. =)

My rashy decomposing legs are healing. I guess the marks might be there for some time though.

Went for the lit welcome tea. Met our j1 gp teacher as mentioned, who was, as he was in the past, very nice and refined and polite. haha. Anyway, my mentor has 2 mentees, and the other mentee is this introverted, very soft-spoken nus guy who is studying philo. He's so introverted he doesn't like looking pple in the eye when conversing, and somehow i think he looks rather other-worldly. haha. i like the fellow though, because i have an instant feeling of affinity with anyone who is introverted, plus i like his writing style. Hope to be able to gain a friend in him. And I have actually met him before. He was actually the 3rd prize winner for the competition that i got the kino vouchers in, so we've been to the same prize-giving ceremony. But when i met him again i had no recollection of him being there, and only found out when he sent me one of his short stories, which happened to be the one which won the prize then. The excerpt that he read out at that time left a lasting impression on me, so we compared memories and realized we had met before without remembering that we had done so.

And he actually said that i gave him the impression of being an extroverted and stable person. wahaha. I was so happy becos, well, i had been determined to put up an act of appearing stable and it seems like the act fooled at least one person. =D"

Recently was also struck by this spiritual insight-ish moment. haha. I was feeling depressed and suicidal again, as usual, then i was enviously wondering how life was like for those "normal" pple out there whose default mood was to be ok/happy? then my thoughts drifted to: how does a monk feel? And suddenly i just felt this sense of calm and peace. Yes i know this sounds absolutely cheesy, but that's really just what happened. =S And at the same time, it suddenly dawned on me that, when i'm feeling depressed and what not, my attention/awareness is very much narrowed and focused only upon myself, my feelings, experiences, sense of suffering, loneliness, injustice and what not. But life beyond my life, in general, aka the universe of all lives, is something really beautiful and awe-inspiring indeed. So much is going on in the world at any point in time, and my life is just one thread blending into all these separate colorful threads spinning and interweaving on and on. And so it is the natural order of the universe out of its seeming chaos, that things are born, then bloom, decay, and die, only to be overlapped by other things that are born, then bloom etc and etc. And my life is a part of this order. Surveying my life from this perspective, all the feelings of depression and suicidalness just vanished at that moment. And even though I find that i am still essentially the same person, still not the smartest in social etiquette, still impatient and what not--in sum though all the personality characteristics that i have to work on at changing are still there--the weight and dreariness of depression has disappeared. haha yes i know this may sound rather cheesy, and the eyeballs of some of my readers may already be rolling on the ground from excessive rolling in their sockets, but this was just what struck me in the form of a feeling, which i have taken like one whole long philosophical paragraph to elucidate. lol at any rate i hope i will not forget this feeling, that i will not again be swept up in my own personal drudgeries so much that i gradually lose this perspective of life.