i am feeling extremely ambivalent about this exam period.

on the one hand, i enjoy a stint away from the high life.

away from the most exclusive shopping centers, the most expensive restaurants, the poshest clubs, the trendiest bars. quiet and alone in my room, with the occassional eurodance or retro music, alone with my books.

on the other hand, the incorpotation of a challenging conceptual body of information into my brain can have its frustrations. a temporary lapse of memory, or a failure to grasp a concept can really annoy me.

i havent gotten into the full swing of working yet. i have come to the tentative conclusion that i had peaked in my academic performance in TEE; i am now a mere vestige of my intellectual past. i also feel damn cheated. whenever i work my guts out, i usually aspire to the best performance one can get. say for TEE, i aimed to attain the top percentile in the state, which (fortunately) i did manage. however now i am settling for a mere 4 2:2s. this is predominantly due to my lack of consistent work all year, hence it can be said to be a pit of my own digging, but i still feel cheated.

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i have decided that come the next academic year, there would be a realignment of my priorities. i shall spend less on clothes, restaurants and clubs. after all, i daresay ive seen most of what London has to offer in those regards. i shall travel more. baby, you still gotta think about what destinations in Europe you wanna visit when ure here okie? we'll go anywhere you like. contrary to what conventional perception, travelling is a far more afforadable hobby than haute couture and the high life. having said that, i plan to live the high life in other countries too. merely a change in spatial and temporal dimension =)

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i think it is extremely important for someone to be aware of their abilities and the limit of it. to the pedant, or perhaps lawyer, the second criterion might seem superfluous - one cannot accurately know his abilities without knowing the limit of it. but i have elevated it to a seperate condition in itself as i believe it needs to be brought to people's attention.

i daresay i know very few who fulfil both conditions. in fact, my realisation is that the majority of my friends in singapore are aware of the former, but not the latter. of course, i shant name-names. this is linked with the argument of unfulfilled potential, an argument which you all know i disdain with a passion. "oh i didnt study hard enough", "i played too hard". fuck off dickhead. what is to say that if you had studied hard enough, you still couldnt cut it.

conversely, most of my friends in london seem to be aware of the latter but not the former. this sign of humility can be taken to be something positive, but i disagree. one has to be aware of what he is capable of, and not merely what he is NOT capable of. the positive criterion is the general criterion, the negative is a refinement or amplification which requires cognisance. it is the awareness of both that brings about a genuine appreciation of one's capability

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i have become aware of the fact that judges and academics in the legal and philosophical field tend to enjoy indulging in pleonasms. this means (loosely) to use more words than is necessary to express an idea. simple examples of this are "i saw it with my own eyes" or "could you repeat that again?".i got it the first time dimwit. of course the pleonasms i have come encountered over the last few days are far more sophisticated and convoluted than this. but its still annoying.

i dreamt...

I spent 45 some minutes in Hakkasan talking to pretty twenty something sorority type who i think is a hooker until we get back up to her room and i ask how much she's going to cost and she throws me out. Turns out she just wanted to screw me for nothing. Go figure.

I head back to Hakkasan, sexually frustrated and more than a little bit confused by the strange turn of events and bizarre cultural moment we find ourselves in where confessing to a woman that you're so attracted to her you're willing to pay her for sexual contact is in fact insulting.

Spent the next few hours drinking bourbon and beer and wondering half aloud "What would E.L. Borgnine do?"

Concluded that what E.L. Borgnine would do would be to start writing sexually explicit and solicitous haiku on cocktail napkins and slipping them to the pretty bartender in heavy blue eyeliner, who was cute and wearing pinstriped charcoal grey slacks which are a weakness for which I am very very weak.

As i grabbed my pen and requested for a napkin, I thought of you.

And I woke up crying profound tears of guilt

boo

I have been inspired to a quick entry by J saying she misses me and the tedium of legal texts.

The law of excluded middle, as I understand it, states that for any proposition P, it is true that P is P, or it is not P.

For example, if P is

I love Shijia (and her new hair)

then the inclusive disjunction

I love Shijia or I DO NOT love Shijia

is true.

It does not state that P must be either true or false. The law of excluded middle only says that the total (P or not P) is true, but does not comment on what truth values P itself may take.

This MAY lead to a logical fallacy, but it need not necessarily do so.

A logical fallacy (simply) is an error in logical argument which is independent of the truth of the premises. It is a flaw in the structure of an argument as opposed to an error in its premises. When there is a fallacy in an argument it is said to be invalid. An argument can have a logical fallacy even if the argument is not a purely logical one; for instance an argument that incorrectly applies principles of probability or causality can be said to have a logical fallacy.

For example
1. Sometimes I love Shijia
2. Sometimes I love Joyce
3. Therefore at all times I love either Shijia or Joyce

This is logically fallacious. Indeed, there is no logical principle which states

For some x, P is a subset of X.
For some y, Q is a subset of Y.
Then for some Z, P+Q is a subset of Z, or P is a subset of Z, or that Q is a subset Z.

I’ve been thinking –does the law of the excluded middle apply in law? I started out with the opinion that it shouldn’t – it couldn’t, since there are so many cases right on the borderline between say, offer or no offer (invitation to treat), property and contract, tort and contract, human rights and unwritten principles etc.

But after much ruminating, I am convinced that the law does, in fact, apply.

Ive been told that the law of the excluded middle professes to be a law which denies the existence of any grey areas. I disagree. The law of the excluded middle states that P must either be P or not P, it doesn’t state that it cannot be P1 or P2. strictly, however minor the difference with P is, it is still not P

Therefore, when a court finds that there hasn’t been a contract(X), or that someone has an equitable as opposed to legal(Y) right, it is still stating that it is not X and not Y respectively. The conclusion doesn’t matter – so long as it is excluded from being X or Y. I do not think that the issue of a logical fallacy needs to be examined – judges are far too intelligent to be victimised by that law.

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A couple of nice lines from my man Phaze I have come across recently

“If you can talk, you can sing. If you can walk, you can dance”

“My notepad is my third hand; my pen, my eleventh finger”

And a teaser of my own:

My name in pencil,
Stencilled,
5 inches from the left breast of failure.
It is almost crunch time-
Time to erase all the fun and laughter
And move up to the heart of success
Out of the neighbourhood with mothers who have to sell sex.

my final entry for now

A kiss undoubtedly has varying connotations. A kiss on the forehead can mean respect, cheek – affection; lips – more complicated.

I submit that kissing on the lips, or even French kissing, need not mean that you have to romatically like that person, or as a prelude to sex, or anything of that nature.

Of course an argument like this has problems. If anyone is free to kiss anyone else on the lips, society itself would degenerate. Therefore behaviour like this should be confined between very limited individuals, a friend which you have a special understanding with; friends whom you know won’t misinterpret the action.

Also, there are problems with drawing the line. If I support the notion of French kissing as completely acceptable behaviour, what is to say that I wouldn’t support 3rd-base behaviour or having sex as an equally harmless indulgence. I submit that indeed, there could be a point where I would argue that they are just that –harmless indulgences- but that is too extreme a view to take as of now.

I am attached now. Say if I wanted to French this close girlfriend of mine – there’s nothing wrong with that. It is plainly a sign of affection, of wanting to feel closer to someone.

So what insinuates against an attached guy kissing someone else as a social taboo?
It is precisely that – social conditioning. We are all victims of the ambient morality. Morality has been defined over centuries by religion, by people. We are all trapped in this enclosure of morality and not many of us would dare or deign to breach the fortress.

My girlfriend would not accept it – no girlfriend will. I wouldn’t accept it if she Frenched a purely platonic friend on the lips either. But the fact is if you are put in that situation, which I have been in the past, you would see things differently. What is required, as aforementioned, is an understanding that it is a mere sign of affection – that is all. We are constrained from thinking so because physical intimacy with another member of the opposite sex should be kept exclusively to one’s partner. So it all boils down to a definition of degree – what is defined as intimate and hence morally unacceptable? Hugging probably isn’t, a peck on the cheeks isn’t, so why is a French kiss?

Is it because it’s a sensual act? Indeed, 3rd-base and sex are sensual (indeed, sexual) I think that is why they are disallowed. But why should morality be governed by sensuality/ intimacy? It seems to me that History has taken the wrong path and linked these ideas together and used one to define the other, at least in this context.

I can’t be bothered to write anymore, just a lil food for thought.

I am going to close this blog down for the moment. Im also gonna delete msn come Friday. Exams are approaching. I need to rid myself of any distractions.

So ladies and gents, thank you for taking the time to read my entries, I know not all of them are of a high quality. Ill catchya guys in a coupla months. Adieus!