I bet you didn’t see that ending coming!  To be honest, I used a rhyming dictionary, which for whatever reason didn’t even have the word ‘farted’ in it, so it can’t be that good.

I know that I have written again and again why my posting has become so erratic, but at the same time I feel so guilty about it.  It is a weird thing, but I generally use writing to relieve stress.  I can type faster than you would think humanly possible (although I make quite a few mistakes on this 9″ keyboard) due to the fact that I live online, so writing is like therapy to me.  I type out my thoughts, my stress eases away, and I am left a happy, happy man.

Because of that, it seems ironic that as soon as my life becomes busy and stress filled, the first thing I stop doing is writing.  It would make more sense to prioritize it, but the thing is that for whatever reason the moment I sit down at the keyboard I draw a blank.  True.

I have been wanting to write about the Oxford comma, how Andy Warhol is responsible for everything bad that is happening in the world and my constant nagging doubts about the future. I also really want to put into words the amazing mixture of excitement and wonder that is tempered by the black pit of dread in my stomach when I think about the fact that I will have my own baby in just a couple of weeks.

But instead all I can think about when I sit at the computer is my Linguistics assignment (half complete), my Materials Evaluation assignment (draft has been handed in) and my new work responsibilities (pain in the neck).  Ugh!

Speaking of my assignment, I am doing a study on gender bias in the new Malaysian primary school year one and year two textbooks.  It is a pretty cool study because the books are very new and supposed to be wonderful and perfect in every way, but I am going to prove they are biased as all get out!  Well, I would prove that, but…

THERE ARE NO BOOKS!  Somehow, somewhere, someone screwed up and not enough textbooks were printed.  That means that many students haven’t received their books yet, none of the teachers have books, and yours truly…well, yours truly is truly boned.  No book means no study.  No study means no paper.  No paper means no masters degree.  Ugh! Ugh!

I was planning on wrapping the whole thing up by next week since I have the week off for Chinese New Year.  I even bought two bottles of makkuli to celebrate.  Yeah, it was going to be a party.  However, there is no chance for me to get the books by then, which means I can’t do anything.  It also means that the chance that I will get the paper finished before the baby comes is very slight.  Ugh!  Ugh!  Ugh!

In case you are taken aback by my multilingual abilities, the title says ‘Happy New Year 2012′ as far as I know.  I have seen it written all over posters around Melaka, and if it says something else, well then that’s ok.  For all I know it says ‘spay and neuter your pets or get a 2012 ringgit fine!’

Anyway, I missed Christmas and I will probably miss New Year’s Eve, so I hope you all had and will have a nice holiday.  For me, I plan on getting obscenely drunk tomorrow night and then I have a badminton match scheduled with my supervisor for New Year’s Day, with the hopes that I don’t actually vomit on his shoes.  Of course he is a decent guy so would probably understand and not get too upset, but let’s try to avoid vomiting at any rate.  No need to make things any more difficult than they already are, right?

Aside from that, well I have been incredibly diligent with my coursework.  Believe me, no one is as surprised as I am that I am putting this much effort into something.  I just finished up my draft of a Materials Development and Evaluation research paper.  It took me a solid three weeks of working every single day for at least four hours, and I seriously have never put that much effort into anything.  I sent it off to the professor today, who agreed to give it a once over due to the fact that this is my first research paper and I have no idea what I am doing.

Needless to say I am pretty nervous and keep rechecking my email under the misguided assumption that he will not only check his email the Friday before New Year’s, but also be willing to read my fifteen page paper in the same day and write a response.  Yes, I realize it is insane, but I have never worked that hard on anything before.  I am worried that he is going to message me back saying that he had to burn his computer because it was tainted with the worst work that he had ever seen, and that he is, in fact, on his way into the garage to shoot himself in the head in order to stop the pain that I have caused him. At the same time, I put a lot of work into it and I feel pretty good about it, so simultaneously I am hoping that he will write back that all’s well and with a bit of polish I will be good to go. Most likely his response will be somewhere in the middle, but even though I rationally know that, it is hard to accept in all my excitement.

Anyway, I took two courses this term, which means I have to write another paper for Applied Linguistics.  Since I don’t like working on two things at once, I don’t even really want a response on the first paper for a couple weeks so I can get started well and good on my next assignment before getting distracted.   Oh, and have I mentioned it is T minus five weeks until the parasite currently leeching off Jisun becomes a fully formed human being and pops out.  I’m assuming that the baby will emerge in the standard fashion, but I’d be lying if I wasn’t half hoping for it to spring fully formed from her chest like in Alien.

Oh is it the time when I have to stop making jokes about my wife and as yet unborn child or risk being called a ‘bad parent’?  Sorry, I must have missed that memo.  In any case, I have been thinking a ton about the nature of comedy over the past few months, and could have a very well thought out and reasonable response, but George Carlin said it so well (don’t click that link if you are sensitive in any way to anything).

But I’m off topic.  I don’t actually have a topic, to be honest.  I feel guilty for not writing anything due to spending so much time researching and writing for my classes that I come here, but my mind is blank.  I apologize.  There is good news, though.

The good news is that I got a six pack of the 8% in the fridge and have every intention of buying a little flask of whiskey tomorrow.  I haven’t been on the sauce in a long time, but I promised myself the weekend off if I could finish the first paper (or at least the draft) by Friday and I did.  That’s how I know I’m an adult, I set goals and I attain them.  And now, I am going to go read a book for pleasure for the first time in weeks and mentally prepare myself for some of this:

The glass is tiny, but it was free.

Yesterday I decided to take a short break from my studying to help Jisun with her kimchi making.  We have been in Malaysia for about a year now (wow), but haven’t really made any kimchi for a variety of reasons.

Laziness probably played the biggest role in it, with the availability of proper ingredients coming in a close second.  However, since moving to Melaka, there is a nearby supermarket with a fairly decent selection of Korean food, as well as a large variety of east Asian vegetables which made it possible to make kimchi.  At the same time, they sold prepackaged kimchi in the store, so laziness, again came into play.

However, with the baby coming in a few short weeks (wow again), we decided it would probably be a good time to get our ducks in a row, so to speak.  With that motivation, we decided to have a kimjang party yesterday.  So, you aren’t from Korea and you wonder what kimjang is, huh?  I’ll tell you!  Kimjang is the big process of making a lot of kimchi all at once, and is a kind of big event in Korean culture.

The women of the house go out and buy like fifty heads of cabbage and spend all day (or sometimes two or three days) making tons and tons of kimchi.  These days it isn’t such a big deal, but historically it was a time when whole villages got together for a common cause and it was something of a bonding experience.  Interestingly enough, North Korea has a big holiday where everything shuts down and the entire country works together on kimjang in order to make kimchi for the upcoming year.

Of course we didn’t make a year’s worth of kimchi, simply due to the fact that we don’t have a kimchi refrigerator and just don’t have the room for it.  Oh, and also because neither of us have a lot of experience kimchi making and didn’t want to end up saddled with sixty kilograms of inedible garbage.

Anyway, with that said, I am going to get back to studying.  Merry Christmas everyone, and stay in trouble.

In case you haven’t been following my Twitter feed over there on the right side menu, I have posted my Twitter feed over there on the right side menu.  Terribly anti-climactic, isn’t it?  Truth be told, I was horribly against everything Twitter stands for and felt that way for a long time.

I like to write in full sentences with punctuation and (mostly) correct grammar, so the idea of tweeting made me feel nauseous and caused heart palpitations.  Things change, though, and I realized that by not accepting Twitter I was allowing technology to leave me behind.  Since I am growing more and more aware of my own mortality these days, embracing Twitter is a way that can allow me to feel young again.

Well, if not young, at least not old and codgerish, refusing to accept anything newfangled that comes along because I am afraid of change and instead of admitting that life has passed me by just sitting on the porch and yelling at kids to get off my lawn while muttering things about MTVs and Facebooks that are ruining the youth of today.  No, I will not let that be me, at least not yet.

Besides, Twitter actually does fulfill a need in my life right at this particular moment in time.  I am on a long holiday from work, and because of that you would expect that I would have lots of time to write about this and that, but unfortunately that isn’t the case.  As I mentioned before, I recently started my MA TESOL program, and to be honest, I am freaking out!

I don’t actually think that the coursework is too difficult for me, really.  To be honest, I sat through about forty hours of lecture over the past two weeks and felt that I knew what was going on, mostly, and that I intelligently and intelligibly contributed to class discussions.  But, and there is always a but, I was never academically inclined prior to this point in my life.  I got through high school and my undergraduate years by the skin of my teeth, and I don’t have any idea of how to actually study.

So we are tasked with doing all these research papers, but I don’t know how to do research.  I don’t know how to find materials, I don’t know how to make a citation, I don’t know proper research paper structure, tone, etc.  Because of that, I am kind of behind the eight ball at this point.  I am doing fine with the work that needs to be done, but it is taking me about nineteen times as long as it should because I am constantly stopping to Google (or ask my exasperated classmates) how to do something very simple that any normal person would know how to do.

To tie it all together, I barely have time to write anything these days.  I am sure it will get worse before it gets better, as I have a special delivery in the form of a daughter coming in less than two months.  That means my time available for leisurely writing about books, movies, and anything else that comes to mind just doesn’t exist at this present moment.  But, with Twitter ever present, I can always manage to find time to crank out a sentence or two on some issue that I am thinking about, so that is another reason why I currently decided to embrace Twitter.

But don’t get the wrong idea, I would never abandon you.  I have been blogging for nearly a decade now, and I don’t think that anything short of death would manage to get me to stop at this point.  Don’t be surprised, though, if the regularity of my updates slows down quite a bit over the next few months or so.  I am sure that after these first assignments I will have a better grasp of my MA work and will be able to complete them more quickly and confidently. I am also sure that a new daughter, while a huge responsibility, will fit into my life as well, and before you know it I will be able to blog in a very regular fashion as I have in the past.  Until then, though, please be patient with me.  Over and out.