Romans 6:1-2

¹What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? ²By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?

Romans 7:14-25

¹⁴We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. ¹⁵I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. ¹⁶And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. ¹⁷As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. ¹⁸I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. ¹⁹For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. ²⁰Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.


 ²¹So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. ²²For in my inner being I delight in God's law; ²³but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. ²⁴What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? ²⁵Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!
      So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.

Clueless?

"It all boiled down to one inevitable conclusion: I was just totally clueless."

Nana's Reprise

I wanna tell you something,
Give you something,
Show you with so many ways;
'cause it will all mean nothing,
If I don't say something,
Before it all goes away;
Don't wanna wait to bring you flowers,
Waste another hour, let alone another day;
I wanna tell you something, give you something before it's all too late.

Finally

I'm brushing my teeth and typing at the same time. It's somewhat failing.

When I woke up this morning, I had another nosebleed. >< At least this one didn't interrupt my slumber in the middle of the night. My mom told me the Chinese cold medications that I had been taking makes your nose dry in order to counter nasal congestion, so that was probably why I kept getting nosebleeds randomly. I think the loss of blood affected me a lot in chem because I started feeling super dizzy throughout the entire class. By lunch I was fine, but it was a weird feeling of weakness.

Today was Christmas spirit day. I came in a green sheet and tinsel and tried to laud myself as a Christmas tree, but I gave up and instead passed for the "ghost of Christmas present." T_T

I went and talked to him about my essay today, particularly why my "language" criteria was so low this time around. Were my fob days returning? He said that he might've marked me too hard on language, but my essay's flaws were a lack of flow, vagueness in some of the things I said and repeating myself. He also mentioned that it wouldn't affect my predicted mark too badly because all the other important things I had done had been "good," including (surprisingly) my IOC. I guess I should stop worrying... Hopefully my next essay doesn't end up like that, too.

When I came home, I wasted time playing Sims, but I think some external force wants me to do more productive things and kept giving me problems. In the meantime, I cleaned out my drawer, and it was an intense experience. I always throw random things in there like pieces of paper and other small trinkets, so I ended up uncovering a lot of those today. I certainly keep a lot of... crap. Yes. It was dusty.

I then attempted to practice piano, but I feel asleep three times. The first time was I went to the couch to take a break, but I ended up falling asleep. After that, I'm pretty sure I fell asleep while playing a slow-tempo prelude. The final and most sounding time was the third, when I put my head down on the stand and completely fell asleep. When my mom woke me up 10 minutes later, I started playing again, but I had unknowingly drooled in my sleep (yes, I do that; my mouth hangs open). As I played, I noticed something wet on the keys, and... yeah. Ironically, I felt much more awake afterwards, although I still felt completely horrible for the rest of that piano practice. :( I hope I don't get owned in my lesson tomorrow. After that, 4 hour daily practice sessions, here I come.

I'm glad it's a work Christmas break now, though. :) Time to work on my EE for every possible moment sleep in and cherish familial time. Harhar.

I've added reaction labels now, so my blog stalkers readers can anonymously tell me about what they think of my lame posts on my mundane, IB-absorbed life, which is stuck in paralysis. So far, I have 3 for lame, 1 for interesting, and 0 for wow!. I guess that's to be expected when I all I blog about is nothing. Oh well.

Sleep, chief nourisher in life's great feast.

I am really, really mentally exhausted right now. I should probably be doing my TOK essay instead of blogging, but whatever. Yesterday, I changed my layout again - I'm swear I'm OCD with it or something. Now, it's a lot more basic and cleaner... In a way, I kind of like the whole "back to basics" approach, even though some people might think it's boring. Nonetheless, I didn't particularly like how so many other people had it too; it was time for a change. :P

Today was an okay day. At 4:45am, I woke up to discover that I had left the TV on. I closed it and fell asleep again, but at 5:45am I woke up and found myself having a nosebleed. I swear it was that "humidifier" my dad bought; I'm guessing my huge headache last night was from that too. In history, I ended up falling asleep and completely losing consciousness. Usually, if I fall asleep in class, I'll still be semi-awake and still know when he's talking or not. Today, I awoke to find him standing pretty close to me talking about the Russian counterattack on the American naval blockade during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but I was completely disorientated. It was weird, and I ended up falling asleep again afterwards.

Last night, I worked for 6 hours to finish all the English stuff, so now I have to do the same for my TOK essay tonight as well as practicing piano for 2-3 hours (sigh). Crunch time pretty much starts right around... now. Why am I blogging? Who knows. I guess it gets my brain waves active, so that's a plus.

I suppose I should do something now... sigh. This is why there's really no point in me blogging; all I ever do is talk about IB, as demonstrated by the label. IB, IB, IB, why?

Inadequacy

Right now, I'm sitting here coughing away in front of my computer while listening to the gurgling of the humidifier and thinking about when dinner is. This humidifier somewhat fails; while my room does feel a little less dry, the air that comes out is cold. :( Brr; I'm freezing now. Being cold is definitely not a good condition to be in during an illness, if this can even be counted as one. I don't necessarily feel horrible, but sometimes that "sick feeling" washes over me at completely random times, and I feel absolutely exhausted. In addition to those fun things, my eyes are sore, my sinuses are constantly clogged, my ear feels really stuffy, my voice is dying, and I keep having random coughs of varying severity. X_X Ugh. I read in a useless biology case study that stress reduces the amount of white blood cells in your body. Obviously, I wouldn't be surprised if that were happening to me.

Well, now it's time to complain about (academic) life, which is all I do on here anyways. A while ago, I blogged about how I felt incompetent. Going through the past few months, that feeling slowly ebbed away. Unfortunately, it came back today in English class, when I got one of my lowest essay marks ever. Okay, so it's better than that life-shattering 12/25 I got last year, but only slightly. And that's the thing: such a mark decided to impose itself on me at a highly inconvenient time, since it's the middle of Year 2, and predicted marks are coming up pretty darn soon. I don't even know if I deserved the mark or not; he seemed to mark me down mainly for being a bit vague on some things. I overheard him mentioning grammatical issues to other people, but he didn't even say anything extremely significant to me... He then proceeded to round it off by saying that on some days with some topics, I may not be able to succeed. Still, I don't see how in the world I could go from 6s and 7s to... this. I thought everybody's supposed to be moving forwards, not taking steps backwards. I honestly feel like giving back my IB English 11 award and giving it to somebody who actually deserves it, not some loner fob of a failure.

Nevertheless, I'll have to admit that something's up with my English and language skills. It seems like I can't connect ideas and make them flow as well anymore. I'm guessing it's a combined factor of how I always thought in French for the latter part of the last schooling year, the fact that I spend most of my time at home during weekends simply sitting in my room and not communicating with anybody and my concentration on other subjects besides English.

On top of all that, I'm completely hopeless for piano now. I may have memorized all of my pieces at some point in time, but I'll have random splurges where I'll just forget what to play next. Also, there are some works that I can't even play that well in the first place. I know I need more time to practice, but how am I supposed to fit that in with schooling? Four hours of practice each weekday would simply be impossible unless I subjected myself to even later sleeping times...

Yes, it's sad how school and academics seem to affect me so much. What's the reason? Why can't I just let go and live? Is it a desire to live up to the expectations of my parents? Is it a worry for my future? Is it just my personality?

As melodramatic as it sounds, sometimes I wish I could just shake the shackles off and live: to feel the wind on my face as I forget about it all... If only.

The Hopelessly Mundane

According to Anne, I don't blog enough. Of course, nobody that I personally know blogs as much as she does on her her blog. Perhaps I'm justified in that way. Oh well, I guess at least a small portion of people will be pleased if I were to start wtiing about every hopelessly mundane detail of my life, like I used to in grade 8 or 9.
Today was an alright day; it wasn't too bad on 4.5 hours of sleep, I suppose. I realized that I may suffer from mood swings: sometimes, I'll be feeling totally depressed and thinking FML to myself, but other times, I'm all cheery and giddy. Maybe it's just a natural human process, but I don't really notice it myself. Could it be bipolar disorder? No.

Hm, what else is there to talk about... I killed a forest today in biology by printing out about 100 pages of Clegg and case studies. I'm sure the environment won't mind too much; after all, I can just recycle all the paper. :)

 Gloria's daughter on the Sims, LOL!

I suppose I should do some work now, but I have this big urge to go play Sims. I don't know what's wrong with me, but lately I've been becoming re-addicted to that silly game. There's something addictive about it that I just can't explain, but I can't let it get in the way of my schoolwork, especially since I have yet to start my E, and I should probably apply for UBC and UT soon. Applying to university is such a cool moment: everything I've worked for throughout my grade school career has ultimately culminated to this. It seems like a daunting thing right now, but I try not to think about the distant future until it starts to come a little closer than now.

When my internet died

My internet was down yesterday. I was really mad and tired the entire day, so out of desperation, I looked at the old pictures that were on my computer. Looking back on my Cuba photos, I realized that most of them involved me in some way, either with friends, scenery or the people we worked with. I considered this revelation for the first time and felt as if I had been in paralysis (sigh) for the past two years or so, but I quickly got over it. Surprisingly, it reminded me of a certain short story I had studied before.

In the meantime, I made this picture:

I kind of wanted to see if I had changed at all throughout high school. Such contemplations had been nonexistant to me for the past several years in favour of other tasks. As I near graduation, I remain undecided as to the answer of my own question. Maybe I should find the time to do otherwise.