I just spilled limeade on my desk, and I really should be sleeping right now. (If I was sleeping, then I probably wouldn’t have this mess to clean up, would I? But then I wouldn’t have cool, refreshing limeade in my stomach either. Ohh life is so unfair sometimes.) What is perhaps of greater concern is that the limeade that made it into my stomach came with a hit of mint; I made the tragic mistake of opening the bottle after I brushed my teeth. What was I thinking? Perhaps all I need to do is to wash it down with more limeade.

Anyhow, on with my ramblings.  I have been catching up on some blogs and I have decided that I have lost my flair with words. Many moons ago, back when I was in high school, I felt that I could articulate anything using any combination of flowery words, blunt sarcasm, simple prose, poignant wit, and dry humour (among others). I will shamefully admit, however, that the preceding sentence took some four minutes to construct, and that I had to look up the definition of “poignant” to make sure that I was using the correct word.

Perhaps my lack of reading has effected a regression in my English. (The reality is that most of my reading has something to do with finance or computers. So that basically means that all I read nowadays are Greek letters, 1s, and 0s.) I used to read quite feverishly. Granted, my hand was often forced by school assignments, but at least I was soaking in classics by Shakespeare, Roberton Davies, S.E. Hinton, John Steinbeck, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, and so many others. I was known to have read recreationally, too.

I imagine that the precipitous decline in my reading is related to the rather tragic decline in the amount of free time on my hands. Let’s be honest here – high school was not that hard and I could afford to bum around on weekends to do whatever young, maladjusted teens did. Since I hadn’t reached the age of majority, I couldn’t get into too much trouble too often so picking up a book that was lying around seemed like a good idea. Right?

Now with my CFA studying picking up steam (and with my every intention of keeping this momentum going), I find myself with less and less time to read casually. Indeed, the reading that I actually do is extremely boring and leaves me wanting to liberate my eyes from their sockets. Hopefully this experience won’t dull my interest in literature further.

Alas, I have to add reading on my rapidly-growing list of things to do once I have more time on my hands. Maybe writing more to this blog will help rejuvenate my command of the English language but that remains to be seen; I have been pretty piss-poor with writing, too, so I am not holding out too much hope for this. There mere fact that I still have this site, however, provides me with an easy venue to stand on a soap box and spout out inane ramblings from anywhere. So maybe there’s a glimmer of hope afterall.

But I am done for tonight; the alarm will sound in some 7 hours and there are plenty of things to be done tomorrow. And in case you were wondering, the solution to having a minty taste to your limeade is not to wash it down with more limeade.

me: My word! Are you still awake?
Hmm
Maybe not
But if I continue to type, perhaps Gmail will make enough noises to wake you and then I could get an answer about whether or not you were awake
But that would be awfully insensitive of me
Okay, you win. You’re also probably sleeping. I’m also probably talking to myself. That’s sad 🙁

Sent at 11:36 PM on Thursday

One-sided conversations are always a little disheartening.

1. Happy (belated) birthday to the Apple Macintosh; this icon of computing turned 25 yesterday and I can finally say that I am a happy owner of one! Apparently it was almost called Bicycle?

2. Happy year of the ox! Tomorrow is the Chinese New Year, something that I only used to celebrate by accepting red packets with money in them and eating delicious food. This year, however, I read up on some of the customs and superstitions surrounding the holiday and actually somewhat participated in it 🙂 It turns out that this is one of the most demanding holidays that I have ever celebrated. According to the wiki entry, I am to clean the apartment thoroughly (which I did somewhat resentfully; most of the mess wasn’t mine to clean), leave lights on overnight (sorry, environmentalists), eat sweets (sorry, body), open doors and windows (kind of unavoidable, don’t you think?), wear red (umm okay), and wear something new (woop I like new things!). And this is only a subset of the things that I should be doing. There’s also a ton of things that I should be avoiding too. Thank goodness holidays in Canada aren’t this crazy!

3. It’s Australia day tomorrow. Apparently they want to commemorate the day that British colonialism started to pillage/exploit/kill the aboriginals. They’ll cheers to anything down there, those crazy Australians!