1. first two driving lessons of my life. They were terrifying but I'm alive after having driven slowly through a business park and made a couple of U-turns and gone round and round and round and round a roundabout. My instructor speaks fluent Chinese and I've been using this opportunity to brush up my very rusty Chinese... 28 more to go. There's always so much going on that it's mildly confusing and while it is fun, it is also very nerve-wracking ahahahha.
2. finally finishing Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol. Goodness, that book took me forever. It was rather dreary in the Russian style and had a decided element of being both grotesque and absurd. I guess it was wickedly satirical but far too draggy for me... I think I am getting impatient with too many works of literature. Anyway, I think Gogol is talented and slightly maniacal but it's going to be a long while before I read his work again.
3. speedily rushing through Richard Russo's short story collection: The Whore's Child and Other Stories. It was light and easy enough reading for me to get through without much of a struggle, such a contrast to Gogol before it! and I was suitable emotionally affected in parts, but I guess it didn't have a huge driving impact on me. I think that is one of the things about short stories, especially when read quickly in succession as part of a collection - they have so many individual little buildups, climaxes and resolutions one after another that it all kind of blurs and you get desensitized to the emotional flux. Novels on the other hand are longer, more laborious and drawn-out and therefore they sting more, they demand and leech more thought and consideration out of the reader. I still like short stories though, they're generally reliable especially when you've a trustworthy author on the cover.
4. reading Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince at a moderate speed and getting quite puzzled, emotion-wise, by it. I've a lot of mixed feelings and it's all very confusing because she does the postmodernist thing of questioning the reliability of not just the narrator but every other of the "dramatis personae" in the novel. One thing I agree with the critics with is that it is a novel about being in love, and all the wretchedness and joys that comes with that state! It was a little melodramatic for me but simultaneously believable and I suppose that is Murdoch's talent. The philosophizing, especially about the nature of art, got too much for me at some points but I guess the whole thing was a good piece of work, in literary terms, just not quite to my taste.
Very few things are perfectly to my taste these days :/
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life has been very... carefree, and that's in a good and bad sense - on one hand I get to see Z anytime I want (but always with the sense that we have limited time before he goes into the army :(), I can arrange driving lessons anytime, I'm free to do all my reading, but on the other hand I find myself wondering what I have planned and realizing - not much. I've not reached the stage of boredom yet so I'm warding it off by trying to find things to do. I'm going to take a conversational Malay course and try to find some volunteer work and keep up with my driving, and then in April internship proper starts. I hope I don't end up loafing around.
In any case, today I came across this in my devotional book and I wanted to put it down here as a reminder for me not to compare my life with others' and to not try and do everything that everyone else is doing and to just trust and be secure in the plans God has for me -
"[paralleling Nehemiah from Neh 2 and Peter from Acts 12]... The lesson of these radically different experiences is one that we must learn again and again: God’s servants do not have the same gifts, the same tasks, the same success, or the same degree of divine intervention. It is partly a matter of gifts and calling; it is partly a matter of where we fit into God’s unfolding redemptive purposes. Has he placed us in times of declension, for example, or of revival; of persecution, or of major advance? Let God be God; let all his servants be faithful.”
- For The Love of God (Vol 2), D.A. Carson
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