i miss each and every one of you...

i woke up at the unearthly hour -- 4am, to attempt to complete my essay. instead i spent the entire time blog surfing.

there's something very satisfying about knowing that my classmates are all doing well. somehow i wish i figured more in each of your lives right now, but being who i am, being where i am, i do not, and i can only make sure all of you are fine by reading your blogs. what a poor and pathetic substitute. it's sometimes very hard to show that i care -- why that affection all of a sudden girl? especially since i hardly spoke to some of you while in hwachong.

will it be weird if i started all of a sudden?

even for my friends in oxford, in uk, i hardly make the effort to keep in contact. i'm quite ashamed to admit it, but save for a few, i just send the rest the odd invitation to a gathering. why this indifference? it doesn't make sense. i know i care, even if sometimes there's not much in common between the 2 of us. but still, knowing that all of you are all right, not overly stressed, not overly homesick, just generally happy, that is important to me. i don't just want to sense it from reading your blogs, i want to know it, i want to see it, i want to hear it.

will that be weird?

having to confront the truth that i am a really lousy friend just sucks. it seems like the only thing i know how to do well is to take people for granted.

to prove a point

since i was bored with economics, and since coincidentally i was talking to someone deeply interested in the topic, i looked up what being in the air force involved.

i realised that i can still be a pilot, since the cut-off age is 27, which leaves me just enough time to join the air force immediately after my bond ends. now before anyone tries to strangle me (wth are u doing in the airforce with an oxford degree dammit?!) i'm quite sure physically i will survive the training. and more importantly, i think this is very "me" isn't it? sounds like something lixin would do. i go for adrenaline/endorphin rushes, and other than being a stuntwoman or an acrobat, i doubt anything could be more physically demanding.

i wanted to join the armed forces because i want something both physically and mentally challenging. ok i admit i will hardly be able to exercise the grey matter in my head if i were really in the army (definitely not as much as now), but the mental strain comes in a different form. and i suppose it's also to prove a point. like girls can be as good as guys, even if it takes more effort to get there. it's also to push myself to my limits -- i honestly am not hard enough on myself when it comes to physical stuff, especially the running bit. i always always run at a comfortable pace, and that hardly is the way to improve. i hope this doesn't come off as being sadistic, but i really want to see how much strain my body can take (ideally without breaking down).

having said that i could push myself to the limits without making it my career. i can start training now, winter nonewithstanding, for a marathon at the end of this year. and possibly join taekwondo or boxing. throw in a few bungee jumps, and some rides on a rollercoaster and i should get my endorphin/adrenaline fix for the year, right?

hmmmmmmm...

murphy's law

or should i title this entry "me the jinx"? i did so spectacularly badly during my logic collections that my tutor emailed me to have "additional practise simulating exam conditions". naturally being the kiasu and sadistic me, i agreed to go through the tortuous practice, but not before whining to my friends that i hate logic and that i may possibly do worse than i did before.

well i just completed the practice, just making the time limit of two and a half hours. guess whether i will do better or not.

i conclude that i am hopeless, at least at logic. if not my tutor gave me a harder paper. whatever it is, i am almost positive i will do worse. the only iota of chance i have of doing better is my tutor's mercy. it's reached a point in which i can still laugh at how badly i will do, because i know the odds are so great against me that there's no use resisting. abit like how all humans are mortal and since i am human, i am mortal. (that, by the way, is logic in action.) being mortal i will die, so there is no point in resisting death.

which brings me to another point, quite unrelated to logic. i was watching scrubs last night, and the very cynical doctor cox's response to modern day medicine is that "it's kept people alive who should have been dead a long time ago." quoted out of context naturally. but it makes me wonder if there is more to modern medicine than we think there is? afterall it seems that our conception of it is that it is purely good.

look at euthanasia. people are opting to die, and if we go by the hippocratic oath, then these people aren't allowed to exercise their free will. modern medicine increases the ability with which doctors can keep their patients alive, and, if we keep our fingers and toes crossed, increases their quality of life. is there a sense in which one should be allowed to die in dignity, and not be put on life support and have one's relatives squabbling over whether you should be kept on life support or not?

having said that, i think that even though most of us agree that we have natural rights, do we then have a right to take away our lives? i know the theological argument is no, because God gave us life, and we cannot take away what we did not ourselves bestow. but when we examine our rights further, it seems to me that all natural rights, like the right to be protected, the right of self defence etc etc, all lead back to one aim -- the right of survival. now doesn't the right to kill oneself contradict entirely the right to survive? it doesn't make sense that for 50, 60 years of one's life one has adhered so strongly to the right to survive, only to eat back those very words when one is faced with a debilitating illness. or maybe it's my mistaken interpretation that it is not merely a right to survive, it is a right to survive,, given a basic quality of life.

i'm no opponent to cloning, but i think that embroynic cloning is really a gray area. should we value an embroyo's life less than an adult's, or think that the game of numbers might play in our favour? if we want to maximise the happiness of the greatest number, then maybe it might make sense to consider embroynic cloning, but is that our golden rule in managing society? i think modern medicine is struggling, struggling to find solutions to the ever increasing number of problems that mankind is facing. while watching the island, i was wondering if there should a point where we surrender to death. when we can construct a mass of cells in our living, breathing shape, and call it our clone, disregard whatever feelings he/she/it could possibly have, is that still modern medicine, or is that playing God?

i used to think the world was made up of black and white, but now i realise there're gray areas everywhere. i'm afraid i must confess i have no conclusion, or no answers to the questions i've raised (quite a poor reflection of me, i'm really sorry), i am still wondering about them myself. for my part, i am wondering if i will really be able to let go when it's time to die, and not just cling on to medicine to live.