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!