Word of the day: "antiscian". Dedicated to my Significant Other.

I have a 1930s copy of Bierce's Devil's Dictionary. *insert bragging rights tag* Liberated(stole) it from the uni library, among with several other choice texts just before I came back home. I justify my actions on the grounds that I never saw student travel concession rates as was my due during my tenure in Australia. It's a plenty good book though - so it was well worth the karmic cost.

Egotist: "A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me."

Today is a rather scrappy day - I finally persuaded myself to fork out the few dollars needed to wash my mud-encrusted car. The surface now possesses a noticeably higher albedo than previously when the coloration was a muted brown. Work proceeded slightly smoother than usual, thanks to my stint on Sunday spent pre-emptively clearing out a lot of the trivia that would have inundated me today. Am of course, still suffering from a lack of sleep - currently half way through second chapter of Neverwinter Nights. They say that if you deprive yourself enough sleep, you start seeing things.

"I try not to take too much reality; it gets in the way of the hallucinations."

I would have been onto the third chapter had it not been for Friday night's exertions and Saturday night's convalescence, but that's an acceptable trade-off. On a related note, will probably stop by some roadside stall on my way home to replenish my entertainment stock in the form of DVDs (Full Metal Jacket, Wall Street, possibly Road to Perdition). These days I get about half a dozen free movie passes a month, but there's a highly irritating lack of content in the local theaters, and what we do get often has irksome censored bits (like the uruk-hai decapitation by Aragorn in Lord of the Rings)

Payday is coming soon - my first since changing jobs. Has it been a month already? Unfortunately, payday is a fairly meaningless experience to me this time round, as about 90% of it going to be ploughed into credit card bills, phone bills, and the customary tithe to my family. The current shortage of funds is an unpleasant thought, particularly as my Significant Other is coming down in late August - which entails more monstrous expenditure. Gak. Am I going to live my life in permanent penury?

Thus far, not a lot to talk about, save the rather unpleasant look one of my colleagues gave me when I was assigned to help her with some system back-testing. She promptly remarked that my ignorance of the system will entail substantial time spent on the learning curve, and hence slow the whole process down. Nevertheless, my supervisor insisted, and I tried to keep quiet, looking as meekly inoffensive as possible. Being the junior fish in any organisation is always an unpleasant experience; and it seems most of my life I've always been a junior fish in one way or another. Oh well. There are worse things than a lifetime of studied mediocrity.

Last night my family went out to my aunt's newly opened Vietnamese-noodles stall to provide moral support. A few years back, I was working for her in another stall, living the happyhappy life of a hay mee hawker during the holidays. This new stall is located at a far more upbeat, late-night hawker center rather far from my house, and much larger than the previous one. It's also elaborately renovated, in some kind of Balinese resort style - with palm fronds everywhere and drinks stall waiters in Hawaiian shirts and straw hats. There was a huge projector screen at one corner; fortuitously just near where my aunt's stall was located. I promptly planted myself at a table in front of it to watch the German Grand Prix all night while my parents nattered to my aunt and uncle. Just before we left, I bestirred myself to help out a little; taking orders and serving meals. Fond memories of the good old hawkering days, but not fond enough to make me want to take it up as a career again.

I can do about 50 sit-ups a day now. Slowly my body is being reshaped from a scrawny twig into a.. erm.. a.. a slightly stronger but still somewhat brittle twig. Perhaps I should go back to the nerd ascetic life.

Hopefully I'll be able to buy a book soon - haven't purchased one in two weeks; the longest period since coming home, and the dearth of new reading material (save the Economist's weekly updates) is wearing me down. Unfortunately I just realised that the purchases of the last four months were facilitated mainly by close proximity to an MPH near my old workplace; these days the nearest one is about 15 minutes' drive away. Thankfuly, it's the city Kinokuniya - and as a stand of dissent against sloth and apathy I shall force myself to drive there through the traffic bottlenecks after work today. Of course, then will come the two hour dither about just what book to buy, but I think Robin Hobb's new Fitz novel should be in paperback by now.

A sort of old friend was remonstrating with me for my moral degeneration over the past couple of years. It segued into a conversation about free will, social constraints, and a lot of didactic moralising (on his Christian part). In the end, however, he took a surprising tack by pulling out one of my favourite quotes:

"It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad, perhaps, in some way, better than a man who has the good imposed upon him? Deep and hard questions, little 6655321"
-Anthony Burgess, Clockwork Orange

In honour, I am now playing the William Tell Overture on mp3.