picked up jane austen's mansfield park a few days ago and now i am a little addicted to it..... bought it for my r and c class but i dropped it in the end and the book has been lying on my bookshelf ever since. decided to engage in some self improvement activities so started reading the intro last weekend for fun.... and i rediscovered my liking for jane austen's books! remb that i really loved pride and prejudice when i first read it...maybe like 3, 4 years ago... and at that point in time i guess i was like one of those more idealistic 'romantic' secondary sch girl and i really thought elizabeth and mr darcy were very sweet.... act i cannot really remb much of the storyline at all but just that i really liked it at that point in time. many ppl can't stand classics but i feel that jane austen though she writes in proper eng and all but yet she manages to be pretty amusing in her descriptions, which then makes her writing lighter.... well but i guess there will still be people who dun agree with me..... feel rueful that i have kind of given up reading as a hobby for some time.... i used to read so much alst time, and even in JC i still read at least 5 novels a year... but ever since i came to berkeley i kinda stopped.... glad i am 1/4 through mansfield park but with midterms right around the corner i seriously doubt i will be able to finish it though.
had a nice conversation with joyce yest about the books we've read! haha... and we were both lamenting how we dun read now... and we also brought up the topic of lonliness.... and how both of us felt lonely in some way or another.. and she was wondering if that was what many people our age would tend to feel? ya sometimes i think i feel really lonely; i dunno if it's because i go for all my classes alone, go around sch alone... and i hardly talk much to classmates nor do i meet up with many people to do things at all.... and just now when i came home i just felt kinda lonely and xian and yet didn't' want to do any work on a fri night either....
but baked a cake just now!! haha though it was using betty cocker's french vanilla cake mix.... but still....oops but right after it was ready i ate like 1/8 of the cake... tsk tsk... no wonder i am expanding sideways =P
it's bingying's party now and i am stoning at home.... i am 'supposed' to go... and poor zy spent at least 30 min persuading me to go, and nicely offering to come home in an hour but yet i refused to move... feel quite bad but i also dunno why this time round i am actually so staunch about not going... maybe it's just that i can foresee myself feeling uneasy and out among people dancing and drinking away... such that high costs outweigh benefit... even at the expense of offending ppl..... dunno lah. if dun go really 'dun give face' meh?? i mean if they understand my reasons i dont think they would mind...

realised that gsis wun know everything either.... and studying and understanding concepts eventually still 'boils' down to ur own effort and perseverance...went to my econ 182 gsi to ask him how to do probs on the prob set and he ended up concluding that he was confused too and frankly admitted that he didn't know but would figure out. was quite surprised by his honesty and frankness, yet can't help but feel an impending sense of doom haha... what with midterms in bout 2 weeks' time... and i guess it doens't help that he doen'st quite approve of my econ 182 prof either.... who demands they write a prob set every week which i guess meant a lot of work for them and for us poor students too.... same goes for my PEIS 101 GSI who tried to explain some stuff to me but not very effectively and apparently he hadn't done his readings very thoroughly either.... oh well. i kinda miss my IAS 45 GSI last sem, who was veyr much more organized and prepared... =) guess on prob with GSIs is that they aren't very experienced, and for some of them ti's the first time teaching the class, and as such many a time, what they tell us is also based very much on their own interpretations as well..... so in a way i miss the times when i had teachers who were really clear about concepts and could accurately point out what i didn't understand and correct my mistakes.... ok... but of course there are times when i dind't understand what my teachers were trying to point out either haha. oh well... think there will always be things i dun understand as i come across new material... and sometimes it's really hard to get someone to clarify ur concepts...and as long as i maintain a keen learning attitude and not lapse in to the 'i dunno but i cna't be bothered to find out anyway' attitude it isn't that bad even if i dun manage to clear all my doubts? that seems bad..... but sometiems i feel that i am guilty of just letting it go to the back of my brain and i end up not knowing the ans...

watched leo dicap's THE BEACH on tv yest night... and though haunting it was surprisingly thought provoking and i wondered what made me think previously that it was a lousy movie? (even though i've never watched it before) hmmm ya but it was much better than i thought and i also liked how leo narrates events througout the movie. somehow i get attracted to movies with this narrator in the background.... i also liked the ending, which concluded that paradise is perhaps not any place u can actually find, but more of a state, that perhaps u find within urself or 'derived' from the precious relationships with others... well though not exactly profound and we've prob thought about it before but yet i still thought it really true and nice.. =P

received an ominous letter in our mail just now, from a previous tenant or something, saying how she fell seriously ill when he/she lived in our apartment and so did her daughter and now this person thinks he/she sufferes from permannet health damages.. and according to him, past tenants had serious health problems too and that if we are falling ill too we should probably talk.... how freaky.... made me really paranoid... my housemates are half convinced and i guess i shoudldn't think too much about it too but when i first read it i just coulnd't help but feel eerie.... well guess on one hand it might be someone else's good intentions... but then we also wondered if someone wrote it to scare us into moving out??