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!