this is just a quick post for memory keepsake, which i hope will be useful decades down the road. i was made to do additional homework in English class (damnit, I can't get exempted from it because of the ECTS credits that I have to earn in order to graduate) because i'm anglophone, and was thus assigned to study Robert Frost's poems. Gosh.. the last time i touched english literature was 10 years ago. boy am i an old man now..

anyway, here's one of which i particularly like:


The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth; 5

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, 10

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back. 15

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. 20


nice right.. yea, i think so too. so, reading it brings to mind the fact that, upon hindsight, i'm sure i'll look back on these 6 years here in time to come, at times with jaundice, at times with rose..

sadly that's nothing more i can say about it. at least not until i do some wiki-ing or googling on how the metric pattern works. i can't believe that in prepa i had to churn out rubbish in french philo, only to do the same now in english.. 2 weeks ago, i had to study excerpts of famous American speeches (think JFK, abraham lincoln and dr. matin luther king) and i had to research on it for about 2 hours. grr 2 hrs gone like that!! the time could have been better spent catching up on my american series =P

anyway, just a quick update about moi. school's fun, though really tiring. lessons are lighter than in prepa but it isn't as slack as i fantasised it to be. come end of this week, i'll have taken 6 exams already! and next week, a programming project is due, following which we have a projet d'électronique. outside of sch, im drinking a lot (whee!!!), which makes me very happy. and friends are fantabulously nice (yes!! a bit of redeeming grace for the french after all!), and i've gone out quite a bit with them and crashed at their places after having a red too many.

money gets frittered away really quickly now that im in paris. i told myself that i'll be good and save money by preparing sandwiches for lunch. eating in sch ain't that cheap, let alone those stupid bistros and cafés outside. sadly, i surrendered on the 3rd day. why? because i couldn't stomach another piece of ham anymore. just looking at it makes me retch. and worse, i was dumb enough to put it in wet tupperware once, so when i opened it, the sandwich laid there in its full soggy glory, with a few paltry ham strips lying amongst limp lettuce leaves in a sick shade of green that droop out like... nvm. anyway im eating 2 bananas a day for lunch now, i'm gonna be so slim soon lol.

activity-wise, i've joined the junior entreprise, yacht club and salsa. german lessons take up 3hrs each week, add to that the 1 or 2 dinner outings with friends on weekdays, soirées(parties) and cinema outings, and i can safely say i dun have much time left. but i just wanna say that i'm much happier now than before. and for that im really grateful. you may think it silly that all of the above makes me happy so easily. but it was as if prepa robbed me two years of my rightful happiness. to be meaningfully occupied and enjoy doing things with friends in and outside of school, that's happiness as i once knew it. it is smth that some people take for granted. some find it in the company of friends and/or loved ones, some find it in their work. some find it in shopping, and some in solitude. for me, i think im most content when im kept busy. sure, im happy whenever i have some free time at hand too, but all too quickly i'll find something else to do so i wun waste time.

i wish i can go on rambling, but my statistics assignment's beckoning. à la prochaine.