today i baked..... a french apple tart, choc chip cookies and decorated a gingerbread house... had a rich but delicious dinner and strawberry jello cream cheese dessert.... AND... am gonna have a piece of tart and pumpkin pie and ice cream for dessert in a while.... how many calories!!!

Happy Thanksgiving

this shall be my first (but also last) truly American Thanksgiving here, cos i'm gonna head down to LA tmr morning to stay with my UCDC roommate (and her family... and her cats!) till Saturday =) and am going to go to Disneyland for the first time ever (so suaku right haha) and of course, will get to see Courtney again. kinda miss her actually, though i'm also reminded of the occasional 'harrassment' i received throughout the semester... =P sigh, it's actually a break i can ill afford, but perhaps really do deserve and really need. i shall toss away everything's that bothering me for 3 days... hopefully.

though i've tried quite hard this sem to not get upset too easily, i sometimes feel like my self-comforting mechanism gets overused... and breaks down from time to time. and sometimes at the most untimely moments, too. yet i prob only have myself to blame that i also wun want to cry on any available shoulder kind souls might be willing to offer...

"You visit illegal websites"

sitting in VLSB and just finished most of my history response paper. and just got this seemingly intimidating email with the above title. it's obviously some kinda virus email, but perhaps i'm exceptionally wacky after 2.5 hrs of writing or so and decided to look more closely at this virus email...
ok so the sender is "Department@fbi.gov" and so just these two bits of info made me 10% scared when i first got it. but as i thought a little more about it, it seems almost laughable that they think their recipients would fall for their ploy. Firstly, if i really committed some crime visiting "more than 30 illegal websites" why would FBI care about such petty crimes and why would i be so 'easily let off' by answering the questionnaire they attached with the email? Secondly, Department@fbi.gov actually makes little sense.... so vague, so many depts... highly unlikely that any or every dept's gonna give a damn (i dun usually use such phrases, but just for the sake of flow for this sentence =P) whether you surf illegal websites? What's interesting though is that they included a Washington DC address and phone number... i wonder how authentic that is. but aiyah what i mean to say is that if you invest so much energy creating some lethal virus, at least invest more time in making it sound authentic right? else waste so much energy and no one gets the virus cos it seems like a horrible joke....

alright i'm officially bo liao. i should take a break and go for lunch..... =P

i just spent most of the weekend trying to learn about 2 decades of Chinese history in order to piece together yet another history response paper... though eyes feel extremely strained, i feel extremely happy and def less ignorant about 2 of the most interesting decades in twentieth-century China... and if anything, it also made me realize the havoc bad government policies can wreak... though consequences were mostly unintended. and i dunno, i think i really have a 'soft spot' for good English... i also liked the book partially because the writer writes really well... =P hopefully one day i can unabashedly say that about myself...
i'm really spending a disproportionate amount of time on my history class... but i also feel like in history i learn a lot more on my own. these days lectures have somehwhat deteriorated into watching documentaries in class and everything i've learnt recently about the Mao era i picked up from the readings assigned... whereas for things like Econ, i really do learn most of the stuff in class; somehow i cannot imagine myself spending hours and hours reading up on free trade agreements etc haha. i dunno, for history i really process a lot of things on my own whereas for Econ it's more passive; i'm told a lot of things but haven't spent that much time thinking over deeper stuff on my own.... i'm such a bad Econ student =P

my previous post led me to think randomly about religion; it seems like ppl who are religious set the percentage for 'fate' (or in this case, their faith?) at a pretty high level? not to be offensive to anyone, but i just don't see how one can live thinking your whole live is planned out by some 'higher being'... well maybe i have some fundamental misconception about religions cos i don't really care much for it at this point and consequently never bothered to really delve into it; but you know, it really beats me how some ppl can be SO religious.... it becomes kinda freaky.

on the other hand, even though i believe that perhaps 5-10% of stuff you attribute to fate, isn't it so sad that you just can't change that 5-10% of the things you wish you could change and you're just powerless to influence... but i guess it's a really bad idea to get really sore and upset over that 5% of stuff though it's so tempting to. such is life. =( and then there are things lurking out there, out of that 5-10% that you don't know exist that will one day turn your life upside down... and cos we don't constantly think about that we think it doesn't exist.... alright, i'm getting carried away.