The year in hindsight

It's New Year's Eve today. With the new year looming in less than 24 hours, I think now is a good time as any to look over the year that has passed me by.

At the stroke of midnight, I rang in the new year with "Here's to another year of academic underachivement!" How true that would be.

At the beginning of the year, the big highlight was going to Saigon, Vietnam, in late January and staying until just before Chinese (Vietnamese!) New Year. Saigon is a truly interesting place. Although it is rather dirty - the river Torrens has nothing on the pool water they use there - it is a big place. The people, the places, the shops, the food, the nightlife, I enjoyed most my time in Saigon, going around with children of my dad's friends, whom were mostly around my age, give or take a few years. By contrast, however, when my parents signed us up for and took us on a tour of central Vietnam. Since my command of vietnamese is a little limited (I can hold a conversation, but longer words are beyond my reach - maybe at something like a 10-13 year old's level), most of the history stuff that the tourguide was telling us about the sites we saw went right through one ear and out the other. I much prefer Saigon - I'll never forget those memorable days when we went shopping and those nights when I went out with children of my dad's friends - they were about my age, give or take a few years - and that night we went out for Japanese at this really nice restaurant.

Another highlight was getting my iRiver in late February - it has served me ever so faithfully since.
My friend predicted that something good would happen to me on March 3rd, and sadly nothing did - not that that stopped the wink wink nudge nudge SMS's I got from my other friends.

Semester one came and went from March to June, and it was just horrible - lessons packed together, long marathons of pracs and lectures, and so forth. I won't bore you with the details, just that I was glad to see the end of semester one. However, the exams were equally unkind to me as the timetable - I failed all but one subject this semester, meaning I'll have to repeat. Leading to a low point this year - my parents, when they discovered that I had virtually failed semester one, overreacted - took away my laptop, and imposed huge restrictions on my funtime. Not to mention not ever letting me forget that I failed and using it as justification for trying to confiscate more stuff from me.
But I digress, and I think I've ranted enough about parents.

Near the end of semester one, I ran into an old friend of mine at Shin Tokyo - my one-stop anime goods store - and we got together again, to find that we're still just as good friends as we were when we parted ways in primary school. He still is a friend who is dear to my heart.
I also managed to pick up a PSP over the break, and I have not once regretted getting it. That machine has given me so much entertainment that I would be loathe to part with it now. Now if only I could find a way to just dump anime eps onto my PSP memorystick without having to re-encode it for PSP.

Semester two was much nicer - only one or two days starting at 9am, meaning I can sleep in and then go to my first lesson at 10am, and I can have relatively late nights without it affecting my performance. On the other hand, pracs took forever to do (3 to 5 hours!), but they were in the afternoon and evening, so it didn't affect me too much.
I made my first couple of forays into the dating scene - I asked one girl out at the beginning of the semester, she said yes, but later seemed to reconsider, never giving me a day when she was free so we could go somewhere. The other girl I asked, claimed that she was too busy that mid-semester break. I'm hoping that the CD filled with self-help stuff my friend gave me will help rectify this problem in 2006.

Exams came and went - I did much better this semester, scoring my first HD - even if it was in bioethics - although the other results were rather average. I now am on track for a supplementary exam in February, so fingers crossed I can pass it so I have six months off to do whatever the hell I want.

I started working after exams at the West Lakes pharmacy during the week, and honestly, after almost a month of working there, I am really getting disillusioned with working in a community pharmacy after I leave university. It seems so boring - you fill out forms all day and hand medicine to people. The pharmacy students wearing the "I Sell Drugs" and Colombian drug lord t-shirts are a pale attempt to push some humour into their dry profession. Plus working with the staff, it seems like some of them are absolute assholes - I wouldn't want to work with them longer than I have to.

Well, that appears to be my year summed up in several paragraphs.

Plans for next year to follow in a New Year's Blog!

Christmas Rush

Ugh ... damn I'm tired. I've been working an extremely busy shop for the last four days, two of them from 9am to 9pm. And as I work retail, I begin more and more to grow disillusioned with it. You can't sit down, you have to stand and work uncomfortably, if your boss is an asshole, you're usually bored out of your mind between customers (especially if they decide to wait 10-20 minutes before coming in), and the customers can be VERY annoying. Since I work lottery, as you know, lots of people come in and ask for the winning numbers/ticket. This is EXTREMELY annoying, as it demonstrates the depth of stupidity some go to. Of course, they probably know that I don't, but honestly, if I did know, would I be there? I usually have to respond as such - if I did know what they were, I wouldn't be there. Next time someone asks for one, I'll ask for the maximum winning prize. Something like this:

Customer: Easipick for tonight please.
Me: Just an easpick for tonight?
Customer: Winning numbers, please.
Me: That'll be $x million dollars, thank you.
Customer: I don't have that sort of money.
Me: Well, then, I'm sorry, but you'll have to settle for a ticket with about as much chance of winning as the Intelligent Design people have of proving God exists.
Customer: ... *holds out money*
Me: Here is your non-winner easipick. Thank you, come again for your weekly gambling fixes.

Of course, the above will be edited a little, to stop customer complaints of me being rude to customers. I've had to be extra vigilant this last week, since the Sunday before, the shop got robbed. Someone snuck into the back and stole about $10,000. Needless to say, the boss was very angry, and we had the cops come in and everything. It seems that the law can't do much, and I dunno what's happening with insurance. I came in later in the week, and got told to be extra careful because someone in a santa suit robbed the lottery agent at Hollywood Plaza, and another place on the other side of town. Of course, nothing interesting happened, but we still had to be wary.

I celebrated my 20th birthday on the 20th, and it was a nice occassion - I met my high school friends again (some of whom I had not seen all year), and we got together over a barbecue. Good food, good friends, good times. Today a Christmas party was held at my place, resulting in a big mess, and two very drunk people - my dad and my uncle. They drank a whole bottle of cognac, and then started drunkenly dancing to french music. They then tried to rope my cousin's Yank relatives (come all the way from California with a group of other relatives from the US to visit my uncle), into drinking some with them. The Yanks didn't do too much, but simply sat back and laughed at my dad and uncle's antics. It was quite funny watching them get up and do a ballroom dance by themselves.

I feel sleepy now, maybe I'll wander off, drink a glass of butterscotch schapps before I hit the hay.

The 9-5 grind

Yes, I've gotten myself a summer job. Selling lotto tickets. What joy. I suppose I should consider myself lucky, landing a nice retail job instead of being out in Virginia picking fruit and veg. Same as my Sunday job, except now I work 9-5 and have every other day off instead of the whole week. On the upside, I get paid more! So more money to burn (and boy have I been burning cash) and to put towards the Move Out fund. However, this means that I have to get accustomed to getting up earlier instead of later, as my days of getting up at 9-11am are gone. I miss those days. Staying up late, knowing I can have a lazy morning of doing nothing but sleeping.

Still, I can't complain, but I do have some gripes. For one thing, the clientele. I wish that there were more pretty girls and less ... middle age prunes and pensioners. And they seem to be the ones that complain the most, order things in a weird way, or have the most complicated orders. Hormones talking, I know.

Since it's getting close to Christmas, the shopgirls are all wearing hot pink shirts, and since I obviously am not a Pharmacist (it seems only the Pharmacist, the one with a pretty uni degree displayed, therefore making he/she automatically intellectually superior, and therefore below themselves to have to wear some daggy celebration of an over-commercialised holiday, I have to join in the festive cheer as well. So, searching around, one of the girls dig up a reindeer horns headband for me to wear.

Watch me cosplay Chopper from One Piece!


My face is real handsome, isn't it? Gaze upon a close-up of the visage that could turn even Medusa to stone!


I now sort of know how a first-time cosplayer feels like. For the first half-hour or so after I put the horns on and started serving customers, I feel really stupid. I look stupid. And then, it sort of doesn't bother me anymore. Some of the customers come and joke about my horns (the aforementioned middle-aged prunes), and I joke back that I'm one of Santa's reindeer - Dasher. Interestingly enough, my dad is working as the Pharmacist that day, and he tries to get me to wear a Christmas cap instead (you know the one, red, white furry band around where the hat ends and your head is supposed to begin, furry ball on the end), and I decide to stick with the reindeer horns. I reason that it's because my head'll get hot under that cap (indeed, one of the shopgirls actually complains of that the next day), but I don't know, maybe on an unconscious level it's the otaku in me rejoicing in the fact that I'm cosplaying (this is slightly disturbing, since cosplay is the one otaku activity that I swore I'd never do).

Well, my results are in, and I pass half and fail half. Good thing that qualifies me for supplementary exams. However, on further inquiry, it turns out for one of the subjects that I passed the exam (barely) and failed the subject because I supposedly didn't hand in one of my practicals. Bullshit. It was handed in, had my name on it, I don't know what the hell the prac marker was doing. So I speak to the head lecturer for that subject, and then I have to contact my partner to get her to give me the prac for the lecturer to look at.

I do, arrange to meet her after work at uni, only to find out that she forgot to bring it with her. Now, here comes the funny part. She mentioned that she was working in the area of Marion that day (that's about 20-45 minutes drive from the city centre for you non-Adelaidians), so I assumed she lived around there. Lo and behold, I drive her towards Marion for about three minutes, before I find out she actually lives opposite the road to the uni campus, where I had picked her up! I am forced to drive around to get back to pretty much where I had parked to wait for her, and then park in the carpark and follow her up to her room.

I feel this is the interesting part. I come up with her to her room, and she asks me to wait a bit while she tidies up inside. I don't understand what is up with that. I don't think that she likes me, so trying to impress me or anything is out. And it's not like her room is actually that messy to start with (well, it was pretty clean when I came in, so it's not like a minute of cleaning will make anything majorly different). Maybe it's just one of those girl things. Or I'm overthinking things and

*Sigh* I definitely need to get out more.