So during lecture I wrote a poem about Lonesome George (of the Galapagos Islands) who was the last surviving giant Pinta tortoise. (It eventually died in 2012 of a heart attack and old age since he was over 200 years old). They plied him with food in his enclosure and gave him a harem of female tortoises of a similar species but George was old and didn't want to get it on and eventually died without a genetic heir.

Lonesome George
Had a lodge
In which to gorge
was fine.
But Lonesome George,
Females he dodged,
And the breeding job
was botched.

I think I'm getting really good at rhymes hurhur. I wrote another rhyme-y poem during physics called "Heisenberg and the Classical Limit" but it's not very good even if it's an awesome title and I'm so screwed I don't understand physics at all. At least there's no maths. ugh. I'm totally dreading school- it's the "each morning I get up, I die a little" feeling. Anyway, I'm trying to take up cycling again hahaha but I have to clean the wheels each time I'm done which is a bit of a bummer cause just ewww so much dirt (and work) but I figured it'll be a start to exercise and possibly good for my personality in the long run haha. So far I've only cycled once this week but I fell down after hitting a wall. Now I have a tiny cut in the middle of my fourth finger which is funny cause I bet my fingerprints will look like convict fingerprints now. Also I haven't told my family about the misadventure because they seem to believe that I can't take care of myself. What I did to deserve all this mistrust I'll never know.

In other news, people have been telling me that I look like a year 2 student! I can't tell if I should be pleased or not. Cause it's either (a) I look old or (b) I'm very mature heh and carry myself like I know my stuff. My sister thought I was 22 \O/ which is crazy because I just turned 19 last month.

Also, the seminar thing is so awkward. Like there's no pressure to be outspoken but it just seems very unplanned. I'm the kind of person who likes to have some kind of structure to my learning 'cause then I can prepare and know where you're going with all this information. Also what does Little India really matter? I guess it's interesting in how we're looking at the CMIO categories that gloss over heterogeneity but I'm not really sure what the aim of all this is supposed to be.

I really like sentence structures. I absolutely loved drawing sentence structure trees last sem. It just feels like everything clicks into its proper category and all's right with the world when I draw a correct tree. And class is so chill. Are all grammarians always so chill?

Anyway I was praying the other day haha I've been trying out new methods of prayer off and on since last year but lectio is by far my favourite. Anyway, I learnt how to meditate or something like it at a catechist retreat. It's just sitting down with your feet grounded to the floor, and not leaning back on anything ('cause when you lean back there's a danger you fall asleep). I cheated of course haha cause I was in the Adoration chapel and the floor was cold so I was sitting cross-legged on the seat and it's very hard to cross your legs without leaning back on anything. Ok so the point is just to be grounded i.e. being very aware of your body/ physical state and your breathing, and with each deep breath you inhale, you think Je, and exhale Sus. So every breath you take becomes "Jesus".

It really helped to clear my head. I've got a head full of monkeying thoughts and worries and there comes a point when I refuse to think anymore about them because being so awfully self-conscious is damn tiring. I even tried saying my prayers in Chinese lah so I would cut down my thoughts to the bare minimum. So breathing "Jesus" helped because it's like my mind was able to cling on to a word, not just any word but the name of someone whom I knew knew everything about me-the "before a word is on my tongue, Lord, you have known is meaning through and through" Ps139 thing.

So there I was trying my darnedest to not be self-conscious and to focus and to be myself, but the more I tried to be something, the more distracted I got. Like Walter Lee says in Raisin in the Sun, "I want so many things, they're driving me kinda crazy." Eventually I realised it wasn't working. I was breathing "Je-sus" with a kind of desperation and using his name to censor all the unwelcome thoughts. So I opened my eyes and stared at the Blessed Sacrament instead.

And then a piece of advice from a long time ago, on what to do when you approach the Blessed Sacrament, came to me: "Let the Lord look upon you with love." So I did. I breathed "Je", I exhaled "sus", I stared at the Blessed Sacrament and repeated the words "let the Lord look upon you with love" inside. It was interspersed with thoughts about moments in my day/ week/ life when I felt like a horrible insecure person. But then I realised that in the moment, with me sitting down in front of Jesus, it didn't really matter what an awful person I was or felt I was. What mattered was living in that precise moment, the present, the now where it was just me and him looking at each other- me with pain, and he with love. And my heart beating and my every breath of mine, in sync with the simple sweet name of Jesus.

I have a thing for copula verbs eg. be, am, is, are. It seems like the whole of a person's existence can be encapsulated into these simple 2 or 3 lettered words and like us, these verbs take on many forms. I am, we are, my name is. But in that moment, I learnt what it meant not to have to be.