Really digging my lectures on Darwin! I'm having so much fun learning about him and the weird things he found and the discoveries he made and the travels just ugh his life is epic. Also his momma was the daughter of the man who founded the Wedgwood company! How amazing is that? I've always wanted to own fine bone china hahaha and dreaming of the sheer extravagant elegance of Wedgwood is a happy thought.

Anyway it's by far the most enjoyable class of my first year. Like Anthro was heaps of fun but I was always anticipating the exams which made it hard to enjoy it that much. Whereas for this Darwin module, I can just sit back and listen and get excited and worry about everything later on. I even went to check out the Alfred Russell Wallace exhibition at the science centre todaay 'cause Wallace had quite an impact on Darwin and he came to Singapore and had many field days and stayed at St Joseph's church in Bukit Timah and you get to see loads of different specimens including an orang utan skin (which was mildly gross and I suspect that most of the specimens came from the ex-Raffles Museum of Biodiversity whilst waiting for the Lee Kong Chien Museum of Natural History to be built) and insects! especially beetles and gorgeous butterflies (some of them are fake) and my lecturer curated it. It's great.

The science centre is also having a dinosaur exhibition called "Titans of the Past" and like woaah, dinosaurs are awesome. The guides are really informative and helpful and they don't mind answering any question you have no matter how silly you think the question sounds. Also I lost my ticket halfway during the exhibition and I couldn't find it again but they were very nice about it and either tried to help me find it or suggested I ask for a replacement ticket so I could enter the main building.

But anyway, the first part of it shows this whole row of fossil casts of triceratops skulls from young to adult. The oldest biggest-ass adult was estimated to be 30 years of age. Basically they wanted to draw your attention to how the horns grew differently as they aged. Until they become juveniles, triceratops horns grow upwards but after that the tend to grow downwards.

The common assumption is that the horns are used for fighting and defense but the man who curated the exhibit, Jack Horner (legit name), theorises that the reason behind the different horn growths was for the animals themselves to differentiate between young and adult and therefore who a suitable mate would be. So once horns started growing downwards it meant that they were ready to mate, and since all animals breed, and whole herds of triceratops could go without seeing a fight or the need to defend themselves, the most important function of the horns would possibly for breeding purposes. And I thought this was really cool. Also, T-rexes like to eat triceratops, and they might not be the fearsome predators we think, but more scavengers since T-rexes had bad eyesight and couldn't move very fast 'cause of square joint sockets. And really tiny hands.

I'm just spitting information out here 'cause it was really eye-opening and maan that argentinosaurus was huge. I had a lot of fun wandering around the place. It does mean that I still have 2 physics lectures to catch up with though :///

RANT:
Also, I'm facing a huge lit crisis. I was sitting in the seminar, my second ever lesson for the module and I couldn't bring myself to analyse anything. I just wanted to sit back and appreciate poetry for all it's purely aesthetic qualities. Look at the evenness of the quatrains and the rima alternatas. There's this stanza from Auden's "As I walked out one evening" that we were looking at. It goes:

"O plunge your hands in water,
 Plunge them in up to the wrist;
 Stare, stare in the basin
 And wonder what you've missed."

And I felt exactly like that. I've plunged my hands into the metaphorical waters of literature and I stand there wondering what I've missed but I can't find it.

What's the point of analysing how the form of the poem contributes to its meaning?? Can't people rhyme because they like to rhyme? The grime of time, the prime of rhyme, scented like thyme, slipp'ry as slime. What does it matter that poets put arbitrary constraints on themselves to write sonnets? Maybe its a case of I wrote it in this manner because I felt like it and because I can. Maybe they just want to show off that they managed to squeeze so much info into 14 lines on death/life/love/other big events AND managed to find a rhyme for it. Like Walter Raleigh's hugely impressive dying words "This is a sharp Medicine, but it is a Physician for all diseases and miseries." "Medicine" and "Physician". Now that's what I call a great rhyme.

And Singaporean poets with the exception of Arthur Yap seem to be so caught up with nostalgia it just makes me want to spew. There's nothing wrong with nostalgia. It's a perfectly acceptable feeling to have. But once you start harping on it, it veers dangerously into the territory of self-pity: boohoo my flat got torn down, the sea is further away then ever before, I miss the OLD National Library. No, just no.

Just, is there a point to the study of literature? Or is it merely a discipline with an over-inflated sense of importance as to its usefulness. Yes I appreciate writing and poetry and ideas, but sometimes I feel like we're making too much out of nothing. It's not so much over-reading a work, but trying desperately to find a meaning/ interpretation that stabs at me. Does everything necessarily have an intellectual purpose? I like lit, it's useful insofar as it enables me to appreciate the way people write and there's a certain satisfaction to be had when so-called "reading between the lines". But sometimes I just wish we didn't have to take things below the literal level. Just be obvious about it people. I'm tired of searching for hidden meanings that might not even exist.