April Awesomeness and Apathy

I was thinking of summing up my month in poem form since I've been in that kind of mood, but I think that would be long, especially since I'm into rhyming ones. But it's funny; when I have things to do, I manage to get on here and write a blog-post in an attempt to avoid doing them (the best times are on lab-report deadline days), but I've had four weeks of holiday, admittedly with one lab-report to write (which I don't plan to), and have had the chance to go on my *new* laptop and come on here, but just ended up doing more holiday-ish things, like paintballing!

After alot of umming and ahhing as to whether I should trek it all the way down to Upminster, early in the morning, with 25 of my brother's testosterone-pumped friends and spend a fortune on paintballs I'd be shooting at random "what am I doing here?" English kids, those "I finished Halo on legendary so I must be good at this" teenagers, gangsters who wear their hoods up even over their helmets, and those annoying "I brought in my own gun so I'm better than all of you put together" losers... did I want to go? No. I tried to get some of my friends to come but they were conveniently all busy, so in the end I said no, then I said yes. Those people needed to be taught a lesson, plus I thought it would be amusing to hurt some of those ultra-aggressive friends of my brother's who'd be in the other team. I'm glad I went, and after a dismal first round where some random team-mates at the back were using the old hide-behind-barrel-and-blindly-stick-out-gun-and-shoot technique towards us near the front, there had to be some harsh words exchanged (by me, surprising I know), and we got our act together. There was still some maniac shooting his own team, but we absolutely merked the others (we were the orange team :P). For some reason I was made a leader, and they all huddled around me like students waiting to hear wisdom from a guru on a mountain-top. I didn't come up with much of a plan, apart from 'kill their president' or 'capture their flag', doing what they don't expect, and not fearing getting shot. Some of my team took it literally and suicide-missioned it, which did help by providing a melodramatic "Chaaaarge!" decoy on the other side of the field. But I was quite chuffed that 3 of us managed to sneak to their side (behind the double-decker buses) and pump a few bullets into their fear-stricken president before their team knew anything... within a minute of the game starting! :D We were awesome mashaallah, but then our group were kinda kicked out (after a few warnings) because one of us brought their own paintballs and kept on using them. But we chilled outside the place for a while, climbing up scaffolding (and on the 'don't climb on this vehicle' tank) and throwing spare paintballs at each other... so it was a nice day in the end!


Getting my new laptop was a relief as my old one was starting to get annoying; I could've just re-installed Windows, but I wanted the touch screen so I could entertain myself in lectures next year by drawing cool pictures annotating lecture slides. It's already got a virus thanks to my impatient efforts trying to download a game that I didn't check beforehand, but I still love it, plus the new Windows 7 release candidate (a kind of final final test version) is out, so I can download that and start anew!

I also tried to organise football for Good Friday at Regent's Park like we'd been doing for a couple of years now, but out came the excuses from my friends; that there was a funeral prayer they had to attend (that takes 5 minutes max!), exam revision, or that it was raining (and to be fair it was pouring buckets, but still)... I can just feel my secondary-school friends and I slowly drifting apart, making our own friends, and not finding time to see each other. Sad, but for the few friends who did come, we went to Pizza Express and luckily I'd brought my Where's Wally books, so our spirits weren't that dampened, plus I had a chance to talk to a friend of my brother's (and mine I suppose) I hadn't seen since year 5... nearly 10 years!



There was also this Pokemon platinum publicity event thing going on around the country, and the one day that I was busy (chilling with friends probably), it came to Harrow, and this wasn't just a random get-together of sad geeks pokemon fans and 6 year-old children battling over wi-fi, they were giving out a new legendary pokemon called Shaymin! This was the kind of event I'd missed as a child (getting Mew); no regrets this time! So I got my little 7 year-old brother to take both of our DS's and get it (not alone, I obviously got my mum to take him!)... he'll thank me in the future. But it seems that the advertising I'd been bombarded with as an 11 year-old still has an impact on me; Gotta catch 'em all! Erm, yeah...


Another thing that made my month was a new episode of Doctor Who; the easter special! It wasn't particularly that good, but it's something the whole family relates to, and even though we're sitting in different rooms watching it sometimes, we all ask each other "Omg did you see Doctor Who?! That was wicked!" And Lee Evans was in this episode, with him being a scientist on the phone to the Doctor, who's stranded with passengers in a double-decker bus on a desert planet. It was alright. Anyway moving on... ¬_¬

And then there were my dear friends (well, the ones who actually turn up!). The weather wasn't too harsh on us as we had a picnic thing in Hyde Park, but finding their picnic spot at the beginning was another issue completely; the one friend who's phone number I did have didn't have reception, so I ended up scouring the whole park, doing a lap of the Serpentine, stopping to help "Can take you photo please?" tourists, until finally I get a call with vague instructions as to where they were. But once I turned up, out came the joke book and Where's Wally (again), and the frisbee, which I hastily abandoned in favour of climbing trees and playing with sticks. Oh and blind man's bluff and charades were quite funny too! But I do feel a bit bad about these holidays; not only did I come into uni quite often (no, not to really revise), but I may have disturbed my friends revising, as well as getting blocked by the Imperial network for downloading too much :S But I made some effort to compensate by letting my arm be drawn on to help with anatomy or something... yeah, they're medics.


And finally, we had an unofficial Woodhouse reunion which was quite cool, held at a dutch pancake shop in Holborn. I opted for smoked salmon with mushrooms in a pancake (I obviously picked out the mushrooms!), and I won't be having that again! But it was nice seeing old buddies, and at the end the waitress handed out leaflets to a Holland day at Trafalgar square that saturday coming, which I obviously went to (alone), and to my delight, everything was orange! :D They had lots of stalls including a clog stall, some random dutch food, ALOT of holland-shirted people sitting in the sun drinking listening to the people on-stage. So all I really did was tiptoe around everyone, clutching the orange tulips I'd bought, exploring a bit before going into the National Gallery and receiving strange looks just because I was wearing a raincoat, army trousers and trainers, cradling some flowers... peesh! People never seem to appreciate my artistic expression!



Oh and on that note, I just discovered that Van Gogh actually didn't cut his own ear off; someone (probably with phenomenal accuracy, if he was aiming for it) sliced it off with a sword!

March Merriment and Malady

Again comes that time of month where I feel I have to fulfil my OCD-istic tendencies and title a blog-post with the month name and then two opposite-ish words beginning with the same letter that the month begins with. Not excellent planning, as I only initially intended to write about January because it was a particularly different month to all the others, but now I feel having written about February (and its frivolities and failures), March might feel a bit 'left out' if I didn't write about it too. I'm always critical of people not planning ahead, like with Imperial and it's board of all the heads of faculties or presidents or whatever over the years; what happens when they run out of space? Or the Fulham branch of Sports World, where they felt they had to display all the winners of the football league on a board since it started about a hundred years ago; they too are running out of space! Or asians people sending more wedding invitations than the hall has oxygen atoms. Poor planning. I'm trying to think of another example that doesn't involve space...

March began with Islam Awareness Week, which resulted in me, a first-year guy with practically no experience in this kind of stuff, knee-deep in random tasks to carry out... actually more like head-deep! My inability to say "no" to people's requests to carry this table there, or organise this event, or check if all those chairs are comfortable enough for these sisters, ended up in me kind of re-evaluating my whole personality; are people sometimes just too lazy to do things themselves and see me as an easy tool to get it done, do I actually enjoy helping out? Yes, yes and yes :) Not only because I get some sort of 'buzz' after helping people, but because I would hope people do the same for me when it comes to my hour of need.

There was a point where I hadn't seen my mum for two days, even though we were living in the same house! Leaving home early and arriving late was a recurring theme this month, even after IAW was over, and it may (according to my parents who have long been campaigning for midnight bedtimes) have contributed to the illness I suffered from over the two weeks. I was coughing and sneezing so much, even the viruses were starting to get annoyed. I think if the flow of content from your nostrils depends on the angle your head is in, you need time off... which I didn't exactly have; changing people's lab results just by putting my forehead too near someone's test-tube (actually the results are nonsense anyway :P), and eating ice cream almost every day didn't help either!


Other rather eventful things that happened, apart from doing an all-nighter in the empty library cafe starting my essay, hearing the echoes of the facebook chat 'pop' reverberate against the large windows, through which the dawn light begins to shine through with the occasional Chinese student peeking (Peking, get it?? ah forget it) in to see if there were any study-buddies about, I made loads of friends from again just sitting in the library cafe getting into random conversations... I also ate a raw tomato (and hated every second of it), and watched 'A Beautiful Mind' again after many years... what a film! It's just the caring and patient nature of his wife that really gets to you, dealing with a husband who's convinced that he hasn't got a mental illness. A similar film I also watched is a Korean one called 'A Moment To Remember'... absolutely perfect in every way; it starts off quite slow, but then we learn of the girl's suffering from Alzheimer's disease, and how her husband sticks by her despite her not even remembering who he is... an amazing film, perfect delivering of lines (even though it's all subtitled), photography... everything. The best films are probably those that access basic human feelings, like care and attachment, ambition and survival, or just Gladiator :)


Oh, another example of poor planning (which must have happened, by probability), is the building of a hospital without disabled access... I think that you couldn't find more irony in a hospital that hasn't got disabled access!