about 5 more days to freedom (or doom)

i totally could not have predicted what i am actually doing with my thesis this last week, the way i am trying to thread everything together to make a cohesive argument... seriously, i should have done this a long time ago... i feel so panicky now since i dun even know if i have the time to tweak everything to fit into the argument i want to make, much less (lest?) tighten it or make revisions to the complete draft... and mind is processing info extremely slowly. i'm doing my last min get-everything-together act for thesis really, like i usually do for my smaller papers, just over a much longer timeframe and so last week= last day for normal papers....
and when you own a disorganized, cannot-link-everything together-till-the-eleventh-hour brain like mine, you unfortunately end up doing a lot more work than you really need to. and so i'm looking at these Excel-ed tables and data, which i put into my previous submission, which i spent whole afternoons looking up in the library, that totally add nothing to my argument if i insert them this time round. you can't help but feel like slapping yourself. you feel like just inserting them even into the appendix or something... but alas! though it was hard work doing that would really be hua4 she2 tian1 zu2-ing.

It was a mistake...
(frivolous entry about great (?) leaders' regrets after reading about two in a row)

just discovered (online) and added this Deng Xiaoping quote into my thesis cos i was somehow awed by his admitting his mistake (though it probably wasn't that serious a mistake anyways) but so anyway in his famous South China tour in 1992, Deng apparently said,

"Shanghai has apparent economic advantages in terms of personnel, technology, and management. Looking back, one of my mistakes is that when I began the special economic zone program, I missed out Shanghai [emphasis mine]. If I had included the city, development in the Yangtze River Delta, the entire Yangtze River Valley, or even the entire country would be different."

dun ask me why i (instinctively) felt so strongly for this statement... haha. perhaps when i first read it i put myself in his shoes and tried to really imagine how he must have felt...

along the same lines, but perhaps not even 1/100 as significant, (i read on the Straits Times somewhere) that Lee Kuan Yew apparently said it was a mistake that he rejected Formula One's bid to hold the event in Singapore in the 1960s or something....

alright. haha i'm not trying to make any point here. just taking a break. better get back to typing.

i've been seeing a lot of weather-related news these couple of days; the recent (unwelcome) wet weather in Berkeley has also made me think more about the weather--it appears that while we humans have been able to pretty much tame (or should i say meddle with?) many 'forces of nature'... (i guess i'm thinking more along lines of medical advances, like cloning, organ reproduction and such) we still aren't that successful with the weather. i dun even mean natural disasters like earthquakes and volcano eruptions and such... just normal weather conditions... we still pretty much have to live with whatever happens every single day... it certainly isn't fun to wake up one day to find your house/car/whatever covered with sand! (like Beijing residents did yesterday?) or to have floods destroy your entire home... but then again, i guess i would still very much prefer to have no control over the weather, but instead live with it (at least we're lucky enough to have pretty reliable weather forecasts these days!) life would be increasingly unexciting if we manage to have everything at our beck and call? i would feel cheated if say every sunny day were due to human requests for sunny days (if that is ever possible...) or if we know for sure that there will be snow every Christmas....